29 thoughts on “Everything I need to know I learned in Little League”

1. Nice! Good advice. Great photo too.

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2. I came across a team photo from my baseball team when I was about 7 or 8 or 9 years old a few years ago (or something like that). It was a strange experience to see myself at that age for some reason, but also to see some of my team mates which I hadn’t thought about since I don’t know when. I tried to name them, and couldn’t recognize a few, but most I remembered. I played from the age of 7 to about 16 years old or so, and overall had a great time playing baseball. I ended up being a pitcher, but played shortstop (wich I liked) as well, and likely some other positions.

   One of the things I thought of when looking at the list depicted here is “thinking, at least one step, ahead”. When playing defence you have to keep track of where the runners are on the bases for instance, to know what to keep an eye on if there’s a hit and you have to chose where to throw to. I think that’s what really necessary being shortstop which was a position I played, but in the game it applies to many situations I think. Also being on base, or as a hitter you have to often be aware of other things and options present at that time.

   Baseball, good times!

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   • Also:

     “Dad repeated this advice regularly, (…)”

     “I put the most important advice first—keep your eye on the ball.”

     “No editor, so I included keeping your eye on the ball twice. ”

     I think you may have even included it three times (see Dad on fielding). Anyway, perhaps sometimes things you learn are taught more implicitly. Maybe you repeating the “keep your eye on the ball” more than once can be seen as being in line with your Dad repeating advise regularly. So, in that light perhaps the list contains even more things you may have learned from your Dad!

     Oh, and what you wrote about sportmanship reminded me of what we did, which was not shaking hands but low-fiving as we walked as a team in a row, and the opponents walked as a team in a row next to us but in the opposite direction (I am sure I can phrase this better but I don’t know how to). I think we also had a, partly improvisational (?), little speech or chant just before that that included shouting the letters of our team name or something like that. Damn, it’s been a while since I thought about that.

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     • I recently took up tennis, rather late in life (I’m 60), having played other sports for pretty much my whole life…and “keep your eye on the ball” is still one of the hardest things for me… and for every newbie. There’s a reason it’s a standard piece of advice.

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       • Indeed, as with many pieces of good advice, the most interesting question is why it’s so hard to follow.

       • Yes, but for example in batting I think it’s understood that the brain doesn’t process more than a couple “frames worth” of video data in the time from the pitch to the swing. It’s literally *impossible* to “keep your eye on the ball” and what is needed is both luck and very good educated guessing on what the ball is going to do.

         Similarly, you can’t keep your eye on the ball as its being served in tennis, it moves too fast.

         Of course, if you don’t even get what little trajectory information you can from the few bits you could see… you’ll be much worse off than if you did. So the advice to pay attention to what’s going on and try to gather as much info as possible is still good. I mostly mention this because some kids who have extremely literal minds get stuck on this advice to do a literally impossible task.

       • Quote from above: “I mostly mention this because some kids who have extremely literal minds get stuck on this advice to do a literally impossible task.”

         Sometimes what seems impossible might actually be possible!

         https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DbgI25CLR_E

       • Just need to get really-really literal minded.

       • In golf, they say to keep your eye on the ball. But then some advice is to not keep your eye on the ball. Keep your head down. Don’t keep your head down. Virtually every piece of golf advice I’ve read is contradicted in other pieces if you read enough. It’s even worse than looking for agreement in statistical studies!

         Regarding Little League, it makes me think of T-ball (the predecessor to LL for the very young – not the same thing). My son hated it, spending his time standing around in the outfield swatting mosquitos. Advice to the players was simple: just keep running around the bases, since the odds that you could actually get thrown our were so small that you were likely to score every time. The Little League advice is much richer, so I guess selection plays a big part in the difference from T-ball.

       • Daniel (or anyone else), see if you can find a photo of Roger Federer hitting the ball in which he is not looking at the ball as it hits his racket.

       • Phil, oh absolutely if the ball is not moving at 100MPH you should be watching it. And as i say, you should try to gain what little info you can even when its moving fast. But getting upset at a major league hitter because they dont keep their eye on the ball during the entire pitch for a 99MPH fastball would be pointless and stupid. the hitter can no more do that than they could unfold their wings and fly to first base.

         the advice might still be useful to some, it keeps them watching the pitch leave the pitchers hand, but take say an autistic 13 year old (or other very literal minded person) and tell them to do that and they might well try so hard to watch the ball come towards them that they fail to attempt any swing at all. Be explicit about them needing to try to glean a tiny bit of info from watching the pitch though they wont literally be able to watch it all the way to the bat, and it could be better for them. thats all im saying.

       • We’re talking Little League, here, not 100 mph, 3000 rpm, Major League fastballs. A huge failure mode for kids under 10 is to swing their head and shoulder out way too soon and/or close their eyes because they’re afraid of the ball, so they’r just swatting wildly (and again, not at a Gerrit Cole breaking ball here). Forget pitching even, you see this in t-ball and you see it all the time in golf.

         Same thing for fielding—the ball coming at kids would cause them to close their eyes way too soon, for some reason especially in the outfield (maybe that’s where the weaker fielders went in young Little League). As I said, this is how my dad broke a kid’s nose during fielding practice—put the glove up, close your eyes, and hope for the best is not an evolutionarily sound fielding strategy.

       • Daniel, OK, see if you can find a video of Roger Federer hitting a ball that is going over 100 mph in which he is not looking at the ball when it strikes his racquet.

         Here’s a video of slow-motion returns of serves. Probably every one of these is going well over 100mph, that is not a fast serve for a player who would be facing Federer in a tournament. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU_MFbUAIik You can’t always see where he’s looking at the moment of contact, but…well, you’ll see.

         I’m not claiming Federer tracks the ball continuously — it’s a sequence of saccades — but it is not the case that he gives up when the ball is 3 feet away. What happens, I think, is that he tracks the ball pretty much continuously as far as he can, then whips his head and eyes around to focus on the contact point so that he’s watching when the ball gets there. I don’t know why he does it that way, maybe it’s a form of continuous process improvement in which he gets feedback on each swing about whether he’s hitting the ball the way he wants it to. Or maybe that’s nonsense and there’s some other reason. But my points are 1/ he watches the ball pretty much as far as it is humanly possible to do so, and 2/ he watches the ball hit the strings.

       • Phil, I appreciate you looking into this actually. I’ll watch some youtube clips. If what you say is true, then I suggest our advice to kids should be something like:

         “You’ll never be able to watch the ball the whole time it’s coming at you, so your goal is figure out where the ball is going and be able to watch it while it contacts the racket”

         I also wonder if what you’re attributing to Federer is specific to him, and what other great players did… Agassi, or McEnroe or whoever. If you can estimate where the ball will be to get your eyes on its position ahead of time, it seems like you could also get your racket there… that is, the data collection before contact is what matters, but perhaps watching the contact is what gives you the feedback as to how far off your estimates were… this is all very interesting in terms of human performance and the inference we’re doing

         My phrasing is nowhere near as pithy as “keep your eye on the ball” but coaching has plenty of time to explain that this is what “keep your eye on the ball means” and if you never explain it, the super literal kids (like that one in the linked video above who literally places his face in contact with the the tee-ball) are just not going to “get it”. I literally never understood what “keep your eye on the ball” meant. Quite literally obviously impossible to watch the ball during the whole travel, so it seemed to be something just stupid that coaches say because they heard it from their coach. So explaining what it *really* means would be a valuable lesson that coaches uniformly never did explain to me. Probably most coaches don’t even really know enough to explain it to me, or to 12 year old me.

       • Dale,

         The advice I’ve heard in golf is to look at a spot a few inches in *front* of the ball, at least for iron shots. What you want to do is hit through the ball and have the bottom of your stroke occur shallow in the dirt just in front of the ball. By looking at the spot where you want the divot to be, you focus on sending the club through that point, which will result in the ball doing the right thing. It seems like it works for me at least. On the other hand, I’m not really sure where I should be looking for a driver shot, and my decent iron swing just doesn’t do it for driver shots. I need more time at the driving range I guess.

3. I learned from you that it’s often more efficient to QR decompose the design matrix and fit the product of R and the target coefficients, and I needed to know that. Did you learn that in little league?

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   • Quote from above: “I learned from you that it’s often more efficient to QR decompose the design matrix and fit the product of R and the target coefficients, and I needed to know that. Did you learn that in little league?”

     I don’t know what that all means (I suck at all things statistics), but perhaps it might relate to what I thought about after reading the following in the blog post: “I might rephrase “throw overhand” as “take the straight ahead approach” rather than “trying to get fancy.””.

     I was reminded after reading that of a paper by J. Cohen (1990) titled “Things I have learned (so far)” where the following is written: “I’ve also learned that simple is better, which is a kind of loose generalization of less is more. The simple-is-better idea is widely applicable to the representation, analysis, and reporting of data.” (p. 1305).

     Maybe what you describe in your comment is some sort of this “simple is better” approach/view, which in turn might be in line with the rephrasing of throw overhand as take the straight ahead approach and not trying to get fancy. So perhaps, yes, in some way this might have been learned in little league :)

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     • Anon:

       Good point! Dad Carpenter should’ve removed the advice “keep your shoulder down” and substituted the much more generally useful, “it’s often more efficient to QR decompose the design matrix and fit the product of R and the target coefficients.” That’s news you can use in so many contexts, but “keep your shoulder down” only works in baseball (and I guess softball, and maybe cricket, I have no idea).

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   • Please grant child Bob a bit of poetic license and thievery of a trope form. I should have said “learned about life”, as the self-help books were saying about kindergarten, but even that’s too broad.

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4. I never played Little League. We played lots and lots of softball in elementary school recess. The three main sports for us were kickball (up to about 3rd grade), softball after that, and soccer throughout. My favorite was always soccer, but I ended up playing lots of softball too. I was always picked last, which was correct because I was a terrible hitter. I’d chase any pitch, no matter where it was, and I don’t know if I ever hit it out of the infield in my life. I could almost always get to first base because I was so fast, but, if I was at bat, anyone who was already on base would be in trouble.

   Years later, I coached Little League, some as an official coach (this was a parent-coached league) and some as unofficial when the official coaches would show up late to practice or not at all or would spend all of their time coaching their own kids–by which I mean, screaming at them.

   I wouldn’t say that “Everything I know I learned from coaching Little League,” but the experience did teach me a few things:

   – Compared to our group in elementary school recess, the kids playing Little League had much better skills–they could really throw, catch, hit, and pitch. Even the 9-year-olds could throw strikes with some regularity. (Not perfectly, though. I remember one game where the pitcher hit the batter and the pitcher felt so bad that he was the one who burst into tears.) Skills aside, though, these kids had very little game sense. They often had to pause to figure out what base to throw to, when to run and when to stay on base, etc. In contrast, we had poor skills but we all pretty much knew where to be and what to do at all times–this is what comes from watching tons of baseball on TV and playing lots of softball at recess. Playing lots of softball doesn’t teach you how to hit–just look at me!–but it does become second nature what you’re supposed to be doing on the field.

   I got a similar feeling from coaching soccer. Some of the kids had excellent skills but, until their mid-teens, they were often positioning themselves poorly on the field. For example, when playing defense they’d sometimes camp out in the corners of the field. I’d always tell them to stay closer to the middle–to keep themselves between the ball and the goal and not to trap themselves near the sidelines–but they’d inevitably drift away from the ball on defense. I guess this is something you have to learn by doing, for example by playing games in recess year after year after year.

   It’s a funny thing: ball-handing skills really need to be taught (unless you’re a natural) but positioning skills are something that are best learned from experience.

   – Another other thing I learned is that parents who want to be baseball coaches are often assholes. Or maybe coaching brings out the asshole in them. In addition to showing up late for practice, these coaches would spend most of the game berating their kids, also they’d cheat all the time–for example, the little kids had a pitch limit of 50, but the coaches would routinely keep them in longer. OK, the speeds these kids were throwing I don’t think there was any risk they’d be injuring their arms, but when you keep one pitcher in longer, then you’re taking playing time away from other kids who’d like to pitch. The coaches were also always trying to get around the rule that every player has to rotate between the infield and the outfield, they’d always place their kids at shortstop, etc. Also they’d stack the teams at the beginning of the season so that the coaches who were part of the clique would get the best players. It was a real Bad News Bears situation.

   It wasn’t like this for kids soccer. There, the coaches were mostly very nice–ok, not always, a couple times I had assistant coaches or coaches on opposing teams who were pretty abusive, but mostly they were really patient with the kids–and we were all careful to give roughly equal playing time, to put kids in a variety of positions, etc. OK, it’s easier to do this in soccer–even your best players can use a rest from time to time, and you can encourage them to run harder while they’re on the field–; still, it was a much more supportive and egalitarian atmosphere. The kids are still trying to win, just under the constraint that the teams are intended to be balanced and everyone’s getting roughly equal playing time.

   – Finally, I learned that some kids shouldn’t be out there at all. We had one player who . . . ummm, I don’t know if he ever swung the bat once. OK, he probably swung on occasion, but his entire plan at bat was to stand there and hope for a walk. It got to the point where the umpires were so annoyed that they’d start calling a strike for just about every pitch thrown to him. As an unofficial coach, I didn’t feel I could do anything about it, but if he was my kid, I would’ve told him to swing or he’d get benched. (Similarly, as a soccer coach I didn’t feel I had the authority to tell the kids not to do headers, but I told my own kids that if they ever headed the ball, I’d immediately pull them from the game.) I’m not saying that a player should never go for a walk: sometimes the opposing pitcher has no control, and you want to help your team win, but to never even try for a hit . . . why are you out there playing baseball at all? It’s not like this kid was a pitcher, and he was pretty much always stationed in the outfield where he’d touch the ball only very rarely.

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   • ”Skills aside, though, these kids had very little game sense. They often had to pause to figure out what base to throw to, when to run and when to stay on base, etc. … Playing lots of softball doesn’t teach you how to hit–just look at me!–but it does become second nature what you’re supposed to be doing on the field.”

     I find the cognition behind this stuff extremely interesting for two reasons:

     1. As a cognitive process, it doesn’t seem to have the same characteristics as many of the big theories of ”decision-making”.

     2. As far as I know, we don’t have good theories of how people do it. (But maybe I’m just ignorant).

     In online PC strategy games, competitive players can spot a single unit from their competitor and then immediately seem to know how to reposition their 15 or so units across the map – even though they in all likelihood have never before seen that combination of own units, competitor’s units, and map.

     It seems to me like master chessplayers do about the same thing, but in chess the game tree is well-defined and much smaller, so it’s maybe less impressive.

     It is an interesting thought (to me) that maybe this is the primary decision-making task that humans perform: given the observed context, what general strategy should I adopt? Maybe this macro-level decision accounts for most of the heterogeneity of behaviour that we observe, and the stuff we study in the lab is mainly the micro-level carrying-out of components of the general strategy.

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   • If you want a real parents and coaches can be assholes experience, be an umpire. I did that in high school and it was a real lesson in leadership and defusing hot situations, since you were basically a kid put in charge of a bunch of unruly adults. I was threatened more than once. I was also literally knocked out (for less than a minute, I think) when an enthusiastic catcher threw his mask off over his head right into my eyebrow. Dad once hit a towering fly ball in fielding practice that a kid missed and it broke his nose. Luckily, my dad was all about sportsmanship and respecting that the coach is in charge of the team and the umpire’s in charge of the game. Sparky Anderson, Earl Weaver, and Billy Martin, the managers I saw the most, were not what would be called good role models for kids. And don’t get me started on all the gloating these days. While I’m not calling for a return of the bean ball to keep manners in line, the bat flip as highlight moment goes a bit too far in my opinion.

     I played hours of baseball all summer, including curb ball, a particularly Detroit sport involving making the street a diamond with the cement seams making bases. The “batter” bounced a rubber ball off a rounded curb. With a good ball, you could bounce it nearly to the houses behind as a seven or eight year old. It was tricky not to “hit” an easy fly ball or dribbled grounder. But just doing this kind of thing day in and day out makes you better at it. It just becomes second nature to position yourself when a left-handed “batter” comes up or someone you know is strong or weak. There’s an xkcd about this, naturally: https://xkcd.com/1414/

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     • Bob:

       With rec league soccer leagues we had problems with the referees. The refs were parent volunteers, just like us, and most of them were very reasonable, but some of them were drunk with power. I remember one ref who was always just itching to give out red cards–I guess it made him feel more important when that happened. We also did have some teen refs, and they were just fine. I recall one game where a coach started to argue with a teen ref who politely but firmly stood his ground.

       Surprisingly often there would be minor arguments over the rules. The refs and coaches sometimes were confused about various things such as the offside rule, and of course they’d always be overconfident about their wrong opinions.

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       • They instituted a “buildout line” for younger soccer players, it is located around the 1/3 mark on each side of the field. Offside only started past this line. I remember a game where the ref called offside, but the player wasn’t past the buildout line (a situation analogous to being called offside while you’re on your own half in regular rules). Parents got upset and started calling to the ref about it. At halftime, the ref came and said that we were absolutely right, he had made a mistake. It happens, I respected that ref a lot more than other refs.

         Another situation that often causes confusion is if the goalkeeper comes out past the last field defender. The refs tend to still call offside based on the position of the last field defender, but it’s the position of the goalkeeper that matters in that case. It’s easy to get wrong in the heat of the moment. Refs have a hard job, but some of them are just not that good.

         I tend to think they give out too few red cards. My son was once shoved to the ground, and then the other player ran over my sons back. He had bleeding cleat marks across his back… Ref didn’t even call a foul.

       • Daniel:

         The thing that bugged me the most was the refs not calling handballs. In the girls games, whenever the ball would go into the air, a bunch of players would instinctively lift their arms to the sky, and often this led to a handball. Not on purpose, exactly, but easily avoidable. It was my impression that the refs didn’t call these because they didn’t want to slow the game down, but as a coach I’d have preferred they’d just call the handballs when they happened. A few such calls and the players would know to keep their hands down and focus on where they should be playing. No big deal, but it annoyed me every time.

       • Andrew, here in LA club soccer that’d never stand. They don’t always call handballs when the ball goes to the players hand which was in that position from the start, but any play where a player moved their hand into position to intercept the ball would be called (of course conditional on the ref seeing the event)

         My biggest complaint has always been about dangerous play that is allowed. because not only is it dangerous, but it encourages the other players to escalate their play to be dangerous as well in order to compete or to get retribution. This escalated so much that in one game several players ran across the field to shove another player to the ground after the Nth time that player did a clearly dangerous play that would be called assault if you did it in any other context. 4 or 5 players from each team received red cards in that game, but it was 100% the referee’s fault IMHO.

5. Wonderful memories. Thanks for sharing

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6. Some of the comments about keeping your eye on the ball reminded me of baseball practice in winter time when it was too cold to be outside and we trained inside. One of the things we did was hitting bottle caps with a smaller bat. So, it wasn’t “keep your eye on the ball” but “keep your eye on the bottle cap” in that case.

   I guess that hitting-the-bottle-caps thing was to train and try to improve hand-eye coordination or something like that. In light of the “everything I need to know I learned in Little League”-list here is an attempt to generalize and summarize that practice into some more general life-lesson. It may teach something like:

   “Doing something difficult might make something else easier to do”.

   (referring to the hitting small bottle caps with a small bat as a way to train hand-eye coordination for hitting a larger ball with a bigger bat)

   “In each situation, you can do the best you can do with what you have”

   (training in winter time might result in training indoors and doing things that are more indirectly related to actually playing baseball but they might be good for something and you are “doing what you can do with what you got”)

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7. Lots of good lessons from little league! I learned some similar ones when I played little league myself. Though my team was quite bad and we lost most of our games :)

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