Creating A System For Plate Discipline: Focusing The Feedback Loop
When it comes to swing decisions it often isn’t for a long time that a player knows whether he made a good decision or not. Yes players can use game feedback to help fill in these gaps but often when players do this it can be with their own ideas of what happened. The mind can play tricks on people so the idea is that we want to avoid using our own self reporting of situations as much as we possibly can.
Providing players with focused feedback is important especially when building a process around swing decisions. I have covered a few other thoughts on this topic below previously so I don’t want to go down too far down different rabbit holes today.
Each player will obviously have their own strengths and weaknesses that they individually need to work on. While these Individual Plans may provide players with a clear ‘destination’ often players can take back-roads, and have the directions become misleading. We need to provide players with information that provides bumpers for them to know where they are going wrong or in many cases what they are doing correctly.
Presenting information to players that they can use to understand what happened in the game/practice should be one of the main goals when using Instructional Technology in Baseball. Players need to know whether or not the swings that they took in a game where closer to their goal or not. Think of someone who shoots archery.
The feedback is quick. Almost instantaneous when it comes to their results. Did they hit the target? Yes or No. How close where they to the bulls eye? Close or Far? Where did they miss? Further more the person shooting has a clear metric to work with. The scoring system.
Baseball is much more ambiguous. Was it a strike or a ball? Maybe? Was that a pitch I could drive? Yes or No OR MAYBE?
How often are players presented with these ambiguous results when playing the game? The answer is pretty much continuously. Without clear direction players will fall into the answering these questions their own ways.
The idea that we need to know what players ultimate destinations is important when presenting information on a consistent basis. When presenting swing decisions information you are giving players information that pertains to these goals. For example, lets say that a player has issues hitting the baseball hard. You might start to present him information which can help to conceptualize where they need to be swinging.
(The plot below is for Javier Baez clearly Baez doesn’t have an issue hitting baseballs hard but I’m going to use him as an example. )
The plot above is all of his swings from a game last April. We can see that from a one game snapshot that we get an interesting look at how a players swing decisions play out. You can see how this would line right up with this players goals. If the player can see that not many pitches are barreled in a particular area then they can start to understand where they need to adjust. Ideally shifting swing decisions into more strategic areas.
If we focus on Javier again but look at his swing decisions for that given day but instead focus on his ability to swing at strikes, we start to gather different information on the hitter.
Both pieces of information start to give us more information into what might be going on with a hitter. The focus should be to have a clear road map for hitters and to also present them with information which is valuable to helping them improve. These heat maps could potentially even be altered to have an individualized aspect to them as well if that were the case.
Overall different players will need different information. Creating a space where you can focus in on what a players goal is should be considered. If they are continuously getting different pieces of information that can easily make players heads spin. Understanding what is available to both coach and player can help to start to align the reality of the situation to the goal that the player and coach both want.
