Well first congrats to my longtime assistant coach and lifetime Brewers fan — They DID IT!!!!
What a series — I loved the drama. Someone told me it was boring. It wasn’t to be. I loved the small-ball try to get bases, move runners and play strong defense.
Many times over the years I hear the question to a coaching prospect at an interview “What is your coaching philosophy.”
I always think about that as it’s a broad question.
My core goal is to make it so fun and they learn enough that they want to play next year.
But in terms of coaching, I spend a LOT of time on DEFENSE. If the other team doesn’t score they don’t win. Just watching “Saban” a great show on Netflix and it talks about the PROCESS and not the RESULT. The results come if the process is followed. I run the same warmups every time I have the same pre-game rituals and my practices run the same way with sets of stations lots of parents and there is a predictability to it that lends itself to let everyone know THERE IS A PROCESS. It isn’t just haphazard. That comforts players, coaches, parents.
So I share the philosophy with the world series winners — DEFENSE matters, communication matters. And even in the world series there were dropped balls — often I suspect because it was LOUD and players hadn’t practiced with that kind of noise. Note that this is another great lesson in that you have to simulate the real thing if you want results.
The Brewers ultimately won because they had more pitchers the manager could trust than the Rays. The first couple of games the same guys closed out the 7, 8 and 9 and that led to a deeper bullpen than the Rays. Game 3 was 12 innings. The Rays used their same guys and when it hit the 12th they pulled them and I think the thought may well have been — well we have depleted the opposition. If we lose now it’s really OK. The whole bullpen was reasonably fresh for game 5 and voila, they closed out the Rays the next day. So my philosophy is strong defense, don’t overuse pitchers — at the youth level I’m always afraid of hurting young arms so I try not to use them too much even with everyone clamoring to use them and work as a team. Also my philosophy is to handle failure by not living in the past. Baseball is a game of momentum, in little league you get down by 10 runs everyone knows it. I try to teach teams to not focus on the past or the scoreboard — sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t but it is a thing that I think is key to my philosophy which is to teach kids how to be resilient to failure. A strikeout when batting, a home run when pitching are all failures — but you don’t want one mistake to turn into two. So I’d have to put resilience core to my philosophy as well. Both teams showed fantastic resilience. The Rays blown out in game 3 were right back at it in game 4. The Brewers in game 1 had a play that they thought was a game ending double play and it was overturned and they had to go back on the field. They could have easily let that get to them, but what did they do. Went back to work and struck out the last batter. Tell that story to your players so they learn how to get over failures as life is full of it and you just can’t let it affect the next pitch, the next day or the rest of your life. Baseball is great at teaching resilience — so hats off to the Brewers and my longtime assistant coach! (Note he’s been an ump for a long time now but he’ll always be my long time assistant to me).
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