for Spring training!

Working on the Little Things

By Rick Horowitz

It was a soggy Saturday in Sarasota, not nearly the kind of day you'd put on a brochure if you were a Chamber of Commerce. But if you were a baseball fan on a business trip, and this particular Saturday morning was your only chance to see what you'd never seen before -- bats and balls in preseason motion -- well, you'll ignore the drizzle. Let's find us a ballpark!

Ah, spring training: The very words conjure up a land of enchantment, a miracle land where hackneyed phrases float in on every warming breeze. Rebirth and renewal. Callow rookies and grizzled vets. Fighting to make the big club, fighting to hang on. Dozens of bodies stretching and sweating, hundreds of fans shouting encouragement -- they're all out there having fun, in the warm Florizona sun.

It wasn't like that at all.

There's the rain, for starters. And it's chilly. The sun will make one feeble attempt to turn things around at mid-morning, think better of it, go back to bed. The jackets that had been briefly shed in the stands -- a triumph of optimism over observation -- go back on, and stay on.

In the stands, no more than a half-dozen people: a man with his young son, eager for autographs; an older couple, visitors from up north who follow the team in good years and bad; a stray between appointments. And the field is even emptier; the sun isn't the only one who stayed in bed today.

A few hardy souls are in uniform, though. There's one with a bat in his hands; he's got one knee on the ground, the other leg extended. From alongside and less than ten feet away, a coach is lobbing tennis balls at him. He smashes each of them into a screen just beyond the sweep of his bat. Kneeling that way, his arms -- only his front arm, really -- are all he's got to whip the bat around.

That's the idea; the "front-arm pull" is the reigning theory among batting coaches. Here, with one underhand toss after another, they're trying to turn theory into muscle memory, and save it for a sunny day, or a pennant race.

Now the coach climbs into catcher's gear and squats behind a sideline plate. The object of his latest attentions -- sixty feet, six inches away -- is a pitcher, a strong young thing with a live arm and a mediocre career. The coach, a former big-league pitcher himself, is trying to change that. From the stands, you can hear the conversation. They're working on the little things.

"Your release point is off," the coach somehow notices while snatching fastballs out of the air. "You'll get better movement on the ball if you let go of it from here" -- and he trots out to show him exactly where "here" is. "Lift your chin a bit earlier in your windup," the coach suggests. "Your eyes will come up, too, and you'll lock onto the target sooner."

"Keep your front shoulder tucked in a little longer," the coach suggests. "You're opening up too much." The coach draws a line in the practice-mound dirt. "Come down on this side of it," he says, "so you're properly aligned when you throw the ball."

Later, after he's sent his pitcher back inside, the coach will stop for a chat. The boy's got such a strong arm, he'll explain, that he's in danger of overthrowing if he keeps his body wide open. "We'll sacrifice a bit of speed," he says, "to keep the talent from destroying itself."

But chatting is later. For now, the fine-tuning continues. "How's that feel?" the coach asks as each suggestion is tried out. "Good," the pitcher says.

"Feel the difference?" the coach asks. "Uh-huh," the pitcher says. They keep at it.

A game of inches, baseball. These are the inches of springtime -- a knee here, a chin there, a shoulder, a leg. Come September, they could make all the difference.