Throw. Catch. Hit.

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Learn your craft. This is the time to improve and here are some of the skills needed in the game of baseball. For too long, too much emphasis has been put on metrics and not enough on teaching the actual fundamentals of the game.

BallNine is here to help ballplayers at any level.

Throw.

Catch.

Hit.

Enter Mark Weidemaier, who is currently the director of player operations and field manager for the Bismarck Larks of the Northwoods League, a collegiate summer wood bat league.

Mark has a lifetime of baseball experience, having been a major league coach, a scout, a manager, and a special assistant to GMs, He has learned from some of the best in the business. He also has a Master’s degree in physical education with an emphasis in sports administration and management.

As for boots on the ground or cleats in the dirt, Weidemaier owns 45 years of baseball experience.

With so many ballplayers revving up their training at this time of year (there is only one NFL game to go, the Super Bowl) here is a golden opportunity to get the fundamentals right. And baseball desperately needs to get back to fundamentals.

Let’s start with throwing the ball. This is the perfect place to start. And this is for parents, too: “Hey Dad, wanna have a catch?’’

Yes.

“If you want to get very basic,’’ Weidemaier told BallNine, “I think one of the most important things is they’ve got to learn to play catch properly. There is a science to it. With the Yankees in the minor leagues we really developed when I was the defensive guy and the field coordinator, now this goes to the pro level, too, but I did it in Bismarck this summer. I’d watch these college guys get about 10 feet away and flip the ball like they are shooting a foul shot, what the heck are you guys doing?’’

“For me with young players, playing catch is just as important as batting practice, it’s a workout, right?’’

I see that drill all the time too at the amateur level in both baseball and softball and I’m thinking the same thing: What the heck?

Here is what Weidemaier recommends, and he is not about wasting any time with those silly flips.

“Three minutes at 60 feet,’’ he said. “It’s very simple, you go from the foul line to the pitcher’s rubber, basically, that’s 60 feet, so you got three minutes at 60 feet, three minutes at 90 feet, which is the length of the bases, and then three minutes at 120. That’s a nine-minute throwing program and if you are doing it right, you are stepping on your tongue.’’

Do the throwing session right, you get tired.

“For me with young players, playing catch is just as important as batting practice, it’s a workout, right?’’

Weidemaier also made it clear to “stretch, do your running, your plyometrics, whatever, and get loose before you throw. In other words, you don’t throw to get loose, you get loose to throw,’’ he said.

Got that? You get loose to throw.

“And once you pick the ball up, that is a workout for me,’’ he said. “If you want to take it past 120 to 150, now you have to loft the ball so you are building arm strength and avoiding arm injury and it is a 12-minute workout; and I’m telling you if you do it right, you know, catching the ball, centering it up, set your feet and throw it right, it’s a workout. And it leads right into your infield practice or whatever else you do.’’

Baseball begins with playing a simple game of catch.

“You throw at a target, like an emblem on the chest, aim small, miss small, it goes back to that,’’ Weidemaier said.

Coaches, for Little League players, you can adjust the length of the throws accordingly.

Weidemaier has coached all over the world and when he was in South Korea he noted: “They start at 20 minutes throwing, and they don’t start at 60 feet they are at the length of the bases to start, and they are throwing rockets from the first throw. Why? Because they practice and they throw a lot,’’ Weidemaier explained. “It’s not rocket science and when you do it consistently you not only build arm strength, you avoid injury. It’s pretty simple.’’

Soreness is part of the deal sometimes too.

“It’s like sprinters,’’ Weidemaier told me. “You are going to have sore legs. If you throw you are going to have sore biceps, you are going to have a little bit in your forearm, as long as it is not your elbow or your shoulder, you’ve got to build arm strength by throwing a baseball.’’

All that is pure gold for any ballplayer and yes, through the years I would watch stars like Ichiro Suzuki, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez throw from the plate to deep in right field before games at Yankee Stadium. You have to throw to learn to throw.

There’s more.

“Not only that, but half these guys also don’t even know how to grip the damn baseball,’’ Weidemaier said. “You grip it with the wide horseshoe pointed towards your thumb, across the seams where you actually with the fingertips bite that seam, you put a little pressure there so that when you throw it, you backspin the heck out of the ball so it stays in a straight line. The thumb is right under the ball in the grip.’’

See the accompanying photos from Weidemaier on how to properly grip the baseball.

All of this can’t be just the coach’s responsibility. Players need to go out and put in the extra work. He pointed to the limited hours available in college programs. “They don’t play enough,’’ Weidemaier said. “Nobody gets enough at-bats, they just don’t play enough.’’

And now with the transfer portal some coaches are hesitant to send players out to summer leagues because they don’t want to get them “poached’’ by another program.

Certainly, there could be more practice time on every level.

If you are going to come away with one thought from this article, here it is, and I can’t emphasize this enough.

“The only way to get better at baseball,’’ Weidemaier said, “is you have to play baseball. And that’s not hitting in a freaking cage indoors all winter. I throw BP to these kids and as soon as they hit the ball, they lift their eyes to see where the ball went, like what the heck are you doing? You look at a guy like Mike Trout, he hits a homer, and he is already halfway to first before he ever picks the ball up. I say, “Fellas, you lift your eyes just a half inch off the ball, much less your head, you aren’t going to hit (nothing) in the game.’’

One way to get ballplayers to play more ball is some days Weidemaier has his players show up and instead of hitting in a cage, he goes directly to “American Legion’’ style of play.

Now, I played American Legion ball back in the day, so I knew exactly what he was talking about.

You show up in your car with your uniform on and play the game.

“Trust your swing, go to war, and try to beat the pitcher,’’ he explained. “You know, you get out of the car, warm up in the parking lot and you go strap it on and play, right? If these guys haven’t had 100 swings in the cage nowadays, they don’t feel comfortable, yet they are still going 0-for-5. You know what, it doesn’t count in the cage. You’ve got to compete. It’s you against the guy on the mound. It’s all a mentality.’’

Weidemaier, 70, wants to teach baseball in its purest form, it’s about competition and you are seeing some teams in the majors finally emphasizing the competitiveness of the game and not just the metrics.

Lessons have been learned through the years and Weidemaier saw these baseball lessons with his own eyes. “I can never forget watching the Cardinals with George Kissell, a master, they would have a game and at the end of it they would send all the players to centerfield and they would dump a bucket of balls out there – and he would have them pick them up and throw to the backstop,’’ Weidemaier said. “That was a great idea, at the end of every day they would just stretch their arms out and cool down by basically building arm strength.’’

When it comes to defense, Weidemaier learned from the best too and he specifically mentioned the great infielder Ted Kubiak, an artist with glove work, and this is stuff Weidemaier does with the college kids, the same thing he would show major league players throughout his coaching stops.

He showed them a backhand technique where you can bring your right foot for a right-handed player “to where the ball would stop, right on your foot, if you can get behind it, the key is you just don’t time up to get to the ball, you’ve got to get to the line of the ball when it is hit. If you can set up behind it, then it doesn’t become a do or die play,’’ he said.

And more. “The glove must be fingers and palm to the sky, so that when you rake through the ball your glove face is open and not just where you are hanging the glove. You have to open your glove. It’s easy to dangle your glove down there but in the big leagues, guess what, the ball is moving too fast to catch it, so you better get the mechanics of the glove action going to make that play,’’ Weidemaier said. “Once again, you’ve got to work on it. It’s got to be taught and then it’s got to be practiced.’’

This is physical on-field work, not iPad work.

“There is a proper way to do these things,’’ Weidemaier said of the setup. “Everything starts with the ground up, so you have to talk about the lower half.’’

To understand the setup, Weidemaier, back when he was a scout and an instructor, “I would take video of Cal Ripken Jr. and I’d cut his body into four quadrants,’’ he said. “Across the waist, bottom, right left and top right, left. I would watch every move he made, one of the greatest players, now I am going to teach what he does. You have to learn footwork, technique and you have to have drills that improve body balance, agility and footwork but you don’t do that with a weighted ball. You do that with a baseball.

“I remember I was with Kansas City, Howie Bedell was our minor league field coordinator, the old Phillie, he took this to big league camp to Dick Howser. It was just a continuous run with a fungo man at second base or the mound and the players would run from left field to right field, all the way around and at the end drop a ball into a bucket with the coach hitting a fungo, as they run for 20 minutes. If you catch it, you catch it, but if the ball drops you pick it up and run. In a continuous run you are building leg strength, but you use the bat and ball,’’ he said. “And you can do it in the infield running first to third. ‘Let’s go to the weight room.’ No, let’s go take some grounders (or fly balls) and I’ll wear your ass out in 10 minutes.

“It’s like Ted Kubiak said, whether you throw a ball against a wall or whatever, repetition with the ball and the glove is how you build skill. You don’t build skill going to some laboratory and having somebody strap something on you.’’

And here is a quick and final word on hitting because we are running out of time.

“When you teach hitting you have to start at the bottom too, you have to set your feet,’’ Weidemaier explained. “You have to have a good base to hit off. There has to be stride separation, there has to be a balance point, there’s got to be a launch pad, you got to have your hands in the launch position, you have to be on time, you’ve got to get your foot down.’’

Do all that and you are on your way, a baseball primer.

Throw.

Catch.

Hit.

Now is the time to work on those baseball skills, most importantly, in a baseball way.