What Your Coach Really Means
A guide to help you translate your coach’s confusing, conflicting, and sometimes downright wrong terminology
“First Step Back”
Sentence – “When the ball is hit to you in the outfield, you want to take your first step back so it doesn’t go over your head.”
How you may interpret – This is for you outfielders. You may treat this as a hard fast rule. When the ball is hit in your direction, your first step should be backwards no matter what. The ball could be hit barely behind the shortstop and you think that it is correct to still take the first step back.
What your coach is trying to say – IN GENERAL (should not be always) your coach would rather see the ball fall in front of you than behind you. Obviously something that falls behind you could result in extra bases, while something in front of you is probably only a single.
However, always taking your first step back is going to inhibit you from catching balls that you otherwise would. Your first step should be in the CORRECT direction, meaning that if the ball is directly in front of you, your first step should be straight in. It is better to see contact, wait to make the correct read, and then make your first step in that direction as opposed to breaking back, realizing that step is in the wrong direction, and then having to recover from that bad step.
There are two rules I have for outfielders:
- Catch the ball - If you catch every ball that is in your catch radius over the course of the season and throw ZERO guys out, I am good with that. Nothing starts up a rally like a misplayed flyball in the outfield that should be an easy catch.
- It is better to be right than it is to be fast - This you can take as a life lesson. If a project is going to take a week to do making sure everything is correctly done, that is better than messing something up and "completing" it in 5 days. You're going to spend 3 days correcting your mistakes and now you took more time to complete the project. The same thing applies in the outfield. It's better to wait a split second and take a correct step, than it is to take a wrong step and then have to recover from it.
Watch MLB outfielders come in on the ball. In general, on a ball that takes them toward home plate, their first step is toward home plate. It's hard to on TV because the camera pans away, but try to watch replays of players coming in and making those diving catches. If the first step is back, the ball is falling in front of them.
