“Two: get the hips going, get the hands going.
“Three: snap everything forward, bring the hands around into the zone, snap everything forward.”
Three time zones and half an ocean east of Hawaii, almost 3,000 miles away, the all-stars from the Rancho Buena Vista Little League took a drastically different approach to training.
The Californians don’t believe in doing a lot of infield drills. They prefer to spend as much time as possible in batting cages, swinging away while oldies music plays on a boom box. Marty Miller, the team’s manager, says infield and running drills would wear down his team. Because they have played together for years on travel teams, they already work well together on the field. Miller prefers his players to work on hitting.
A native of southern Idaho, Miller moved to southern California a quarter-century ago because that’s where he found customers for his construction business. He speaks with a slight drawl, like the cartoon character Huckleberry Hound. Miller has worn a mustache for thirty years, and the last three years he’s sported a wide, white handlebar mustache. It’s so big you’d think you could steer it. That mustache has become an emblem of the team.
Sports have always dominated Miller’s life. Until recently, he played in men’s softball leagues all summer—usually sixty games a year. Miller built his summer days around the softball team’s travel schedule. Miller’s kids also play sports. His son Brad plays at Oklahoma Baptist. His daughter Kerri also played sports through high school and college.
And Miller knows what works—at least for his bunch of players, most of whom have played on the same teams and practiced together, from January to December, for the past three years.
When the all-star team from Rancho Buena Vista gathered for its first meeting—with all the players and their parents—Miller told them that success depended more on their hitting than pitching or fielding.
“My experience in all-star tournaments told me that if we didn’t put up five, six runs, we got beat,” Miller says. “Pitching is important but who you have is pretty much already set. If you don’t have good fielders on an all-star team, someone screwed up. So we had to make the goal to score five or six runs every game. I told them that if we did that we had a chance to win every game.”
Miller sees little need to practice fielding. His players all play on elite travel teams and have worked together for years. If they can’t field yet, they don’t have much chance of winning. But hitting is such a difficult and complex skill. Even the best players develop bad habits, so Miller pushes his players to work hard in the batting cages. “I want them getting as much hitting as they can stand,” he says. “So we use the cage a lot. It’s a good way for them to get a lot of swings, and work on specific problems that they have—things that can be fixed.”
Joe Pimentel is the man that Marty Miller told to fix whatever doesn’t work with the R.B.V. bats.
Throughout the Little League World Series, the Californians worked in the batting cages with a strange laid-back intensity. As the bats made their clanking sounds, hour after hour, a boom box played “Light My Fire” by the Doors, “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin, “When I’m Sixty-Four” by the Beatles, “Born to Run” by Springsteen. Song after song, an oldies station played the stuff Marty Miller and Joe Pimintel grew up with.
In one cage, a pitching machine delivered the pitches. Miller or coach Randy Rezniecek held the ball up to the hitter—get ready to swing—and then put it on the wheel that snaps the ball forward. The machine is a tool of efficiency. Hitter after hitter steps up to the plate and takes cuts. But the balls sometimes wobble. And the machine can’t mix up fastballs, curveballs, and changeups. And hitters can’t see different pitches coming out of the pitcher’s hand with a machine—the most important split-second moment for the hitter, when he has to decide what kind of pitch is coming from what angle. Only live pitching can really teach hitting and prepare players for game situations.
For live pitching, California uses Joe Pimentel, a former minor-league pitcher who threw batting practice for the San Diego Padres in 1985, 1986, and 1992. Pimentel is the junior-varsity coach at Rancho Buena Vista High and the founder and coach of the travel team called Team Easton. Pimentel also runs a small hitting school at Miller’s construction company. One of his former students is Troy Glaus, now a major league star, whom he coached during his tour as Carlsbad High School’s coach from 1987 to 1991.
Pimentel is a tanned, strong man with an inexhaustible arm. He wears a Padres hat and a tuft of whiskers below his lower lip. He throws forty or fifty pitches to all twelve California players, each one, every batting practice. Every pitch is a purpose pitch. No lobs. Only hard pitches that challenge the hitters to develop and maintain good mechanics. With every pitch, Pimentel teaches fundamentals—plant the feet, keep the head steady, watch the ball come out of the hand, power the swing from the ground up, keep the swing compact, follow through smoothly.
When he teaches kids to hit, Pimentel breaks his lessons into catch phrases that players with a kid’s attention span can understand and remember.
Remember Mom’s cooked spaghetti—Relax the arms and shoulders. Make them loose, like limp pasta.
Holding a baby bird—Grip the bat loosely, so that you can maintain a free and easy swing and avoid hitches that slow down the bat.
The dog wagging his tail—Snap the bat when you bring it across the plate. Hitting a ball far requires getting good bat speed, and that requires bringing all the force possible to the end of the bat. As the bat moves through the zone, all of the energy moves to the end of the bat.
Sway like a dancer—Wave the bat over the plate, pushing foot to foot, swaying a little and working off the balls of the feet. The only time a player should be on his heels is when he’s backing up on a deep fly ball to the outfield.
Pimentel throws behind a L-shaped screen. On a day when I watched, Johnny Dee stood at the plate. Pimentel threw perfect instructional pitches. They were all near the plate—some right over, most on the corners, some a little high and inside, all pitches that an aggressive batter has to be ready to hack. After every pitch, after every swing, Pimentel had something to say—words of encouragement, reminders of past lessons, challenges and questions, exhortations to stay focused. It’s baseball poetry:
Step into the ball. Shift your hips.
You’re looking at your girlfriend? You gotta look here.
Roll over. Excellent, Johnny! Roll over those hands!
That’s your old swing. Flush it down the toilet!
You’re late. Come up with that left hand. That’s better!
What pitch was that? Where was it coming from?
That’s it! Way to pick it up out of the hand!
That was a foul ball.
Where’s the ball going off your bat? It’s going off that way.
Make the adjustment!
Way to recognize it!
That ball’s gone!
That’s right! Way to pick it up out of the hand!
Let it get to you. Stay compacted.
It’s all about quickness and speed.
Come on, get extension!
What do you feel?
After pitching batting practice, Pimentel feels physically wasted. Every day in Williamsport, he threw more than 400 pitches. He then went straight to the trainer’s room for treatments.
During his time with the Padres, Pimentel sought out the best players, past and present, and quizzed them about the mechanics of hitting and pitching. He talked with Tony Gwynn, the best singles hitter of the last two decades. He sought out Galen Cisco, the veteran pitching coach. But Pimentel learned the most from Merv Rettenmund, a 1970s star with the Baltimore Orioles and Cincinnati Reds. Rettenmund helped Greg Vaughn and Reggie Sanders have their best years when he was the Padres’ hitting coach.
In their conversations, Rettenmund emphasized the need to keep the hands close to the body during the swing. “He started by noticing how Tony Gwynn could move his body and
yet hold his hands back,” Pimentel says. “That was key for me because I realized the kids don’t have the strength to do that. They have to do something else to drive the ball.”
A familiar sight throughout the long summer of baseball: California’s Kalen Pimentel rounding the bases after a home run. The team was tutored by Kalen’s father Joe, a former prospect in the San Francisco Giants chain.
Pimentel turned hitting mechanics upside-down. The classic hitting theory of Ted Williams holds that the batter creates energy from the ground up. But that’s not always easy for young hitters. Few kids have the strength—like Tony Gwynn or Barry Bonds—to drive the body forward but also hold the bat back to gain a split-second more of time.
So Pimentel has his hitters throw their bats out at the ball, like snapping a whip—or, in his terms, a dog wagging his tail.
“In my way of teaching the kids, the hands and arms set up my body. I want to get hands and arms and throw them at the ball. Then I add my pivot, which allows me to drive any pitch that is thrown. If you spin [drive the hitting process from the ground up], you’re predetermining which way your hands are going to go.
“It gives any kid a chance to drive the ball, even little guys. It starts with the arms, not letting the body [determine too soon] where the hands are going.”
Travel eastward another 3,000 miles and a continent, another three time zones, to a suburb of Orlando, Florida. Head to the house owned by Dante Bichette. Stop by almost any day and head for his garage.
That’s where Bichette, a big power hitter for thirteen years in the major leagues, conducts his own lessons on hitting and life.
Bichette hit 274 home runs for five major league teams from 1988 to 2001. In the summer of 2002, he was in spring training with the Los Angeles Dodgers when he got word that his son and namesake hit a home run in his first Little League game. That’s when he decided to stop playing. Bichette could still hit—in 2001, his final season, he hit twentythree home runs, batted in ninety runs, and had a .294 batting average— but he had had enough of the itinerant life in the major leagues. He had already made more than $35 million in baseball and never needed to work another day in his life. Now it was time to come home.
And time to teach Dante Junior to hit like his old man.
On the Maitland all-star team—the first Florida team to advance to Williamsport in forty-one years—Bichette was one of two former majorleaguers to serve as coach. Mike Stanley, who played for five teams from 1986 to 2000, helped at the batting cages but focused on teaching fielding and baserunning. The team’s manager, Sid Cash, a bank executive who has coached Little League teams for twenty years, taught pitching.
The real signature of the Florida team was hitting. Everybody on the team hit like Dante Bichette Sr.
Throughout his career—which included stints with the California Angels, Milwaukee Brewers, Colorado Rockies, Cincinnati Reds, and Boston Red Sox—Bichette hit with a distinctive toe step. As the pitcher goes into his motion, Bichette would lift his front foot like a ballerina, touch the dirt with his toe, and then land back on his back foot and launch into a swing.
Toe touch, lean back, and whack the ball.
Dante Junior is a rosy-cheeked kid who sometimes wears a scowl to look the way pitchers are supposed to look these days. He is Florida’s best pitcher and best hitter. Young Bichette has his father’s athletic genes, and those genes are trained by playing baseball all year long. He is probably one of only two or three players in the Little League World Series who absolutely expects to be a major-league player some day.
Before they can refine their stance and swing, the players have to learn how to hit a seventy-mile-an-hour fastball from forty-six feet away. It’s all about repetition. Swing and miss. Swing and miss. Swing and come a little closer. Swing and get closer still. Swing and finally hit the ball.
Step two is teaching them how to hit curveballs. That requires getting away from the pitching machines and using live arms for batting practice.
“A curveball comes into the plate like a fastball comes to the plate,” Bichette says. “It’s just coming in slower, at an angle, and you can learn how to hit that. You have to learn to pick it up out of the pitcher’s hand. So we spend all kinds of time working on that.”
Maitland’s appearance in the Little League World Series was a small miracle. Against other travel teams, the Maitland Pride can be competitive. But other teams around Florida are much better. Mike Bono, one of the pioneers of travel baseball in Florida, calls Maitland’s ride a “one-year wonder.”
Maitland got past a passel of better teams, not only in Florida but in the baseball-rich Southeast regional tournament as well. With some of the best teachers around, the Maitland team managed to hit and pitch just well enough to succeed.
Sid Cash, a veteran of forty summers of Little League coaching, is still amazed at how much the team learned in a short period.
“I don’t think ten years ago you could do that,” he says. “I’m still amazed, and I’ve been doing this a long time. You can teach kids to do things that they don’t think they can do. It’s all repetition. And even though other teams might be more athletic and savvier, you can get them to make adjustments too. You just tell them, and they do it. That was our strength—the adults calling pitches and telling the hitters what’s coming. I never knew how much you could do before.”
One team—Canada’s representative from Surrey, British Columbia— places fun over winning in its workouts.
I wandered over to Canada’s practice not long after watching Japan’s team work out like a bunch of soldiers. The contrast was huge.
Some players ambled around the infield and outfield. Others clustered behind the backstop. One player kneeled on the mound, next to the manager, delivering balls from the fielders to the pitcher. Manager Glenn Morache and his coaches moved around from the mound to the infield to the outfield to the bench.
The only player who got any real practice or instruction was the batter.
The team from Canada took a loose approach to training, but was all business on the field.
None of the players moved much in the field. More than once, I looked out and saw the second baseman sitting on the bag while two coaches played catch. The outfielders kneeled for a while, and then just sat—until a fly ball came their way. And then they trudged after the ball as if it were an awful chore, like taking out the garbage.
Fielders let the balls fall. Only Nathan de la Feraude chased after any hits. “Hey, only Nathan’s getting any fly balls out there!” Morcahe yelled. But even de la Feraude got tired. On one fly, he threw his glove at the ball. Morache cried: “Hey, how come you guys can’t shag balls out there?”
Morache did most of the BP pitching.
The batters shuffled to the plate, took their cuts, and shuffled away.
At one point, a batter asked what pitch the coach was going to throw. “What, you think a pitcher’s going to tell you what he’s throwing? You have to be ready for everything.”
“But you were saying what pitch you were throwing before.”
Point, counterpoint.
Kristopher Robazza stepped in, alternating his attention between the balls wobbling into the plate and the catcher chattering about pin trading. “Get in a rhythm. Get in a rhythm, Kristopher,” Morache said.
But Matt Catano had the hitters’ attention as he crouched behind the plate. “I’m going to get all the ring pins,” Catonio told Justin Atkinson. “There’s a great Tony the Tiger pin.” Atkinson nods.
One of the more enthusiastic pin traders was Mitch Burns, a utility player with a mop of blond hair. After getting hit in the ribs with a pitch, he walked slowly over to the bench and nursed his bruise. And talked, at length, about pin trading.
Three or four players sat on a wooden box behind the backstop. They took turns chasing after foul balls. In between, they talked about pins, uniforms, hitting, and life on the road. “The coaches are always mad at us because we keep asking them questio
ns,” one tells me. They ask all kinds of questions about the book I’m writing. Finally, I move away. I don’t want to get them in trouble.
Later, John Atkinson came over by the fence and talked about the weeks he’s spent living with the kids. He rolled his eyes. “One of them says, ‘When are we going to eat?’” Atkinson says. “Ten minutes later, everyone is asking, ‘When are we going to eat? When we gonna eat?’” Atkinson sighs and wanders off.
One hitter hesitated to get into the batter’s box. “Hey you gonna hit or…” Morache shouts.
“I’m going to play with my batting glove all day,” the kid mutters.
After a while, Morache tired of the player who’s been helping him retrieve balls. “Go! I don’t need you!”
Coach Joe Burns played third base when a pop fly came his way. “I got it!” he shouts. He grabbed the ball and flipped it to the mound. Then: “Hah! I think I farted! Sorry!”
A couple pitches later, Glenn Morache let a lazy pop fly fall behind first base. “In your younger days, Coach Glenn?” a player shouts out. “You would have had that in your younger days?”
After everyone’s taken BP, Atkinson told Matt Catonio to block some balls in the dirt at the plate. But the drill didn’t really work. Some balls dribbled in, some didn’t get near the plate. Catonio was too tired to pounce at the balls.
It was hot—in the nineties, hotter and more humid than they’re accustomed to in Canada—and everyone was tired.
“Yeah, we’re tired from the travel but so is everyone else,” John Atkinson said. I told him that the Japanese team practiced at 8:30 in the morning after arriving in Williamsport late the previous night. “Yeah, see, but they want to play and work out the rust.”
Kalen Pimentel hit two grand slams in two games to lead the all stars from Vista, California.
Little League, Big Dreams Page 14