Can you groom a baseball player by hothousing? The New York Times has an interesting article on how IMG Academies has extended its programmes from its famed tennis work to baseball and other team sports. The weird part is how far-reaching the programmes are:
Tommy Winegardner’s parents had gone in for one of IMG’s new offerings: media training. It is provided by a company called Game On, which has an office on campus and is ‘‘retailed out,’’ as it is said at IMG, for $2,500. Tommy is many years (if not forever) away from having to face some media mob after a game, but the program is also designed to prepare students for such eventualities as college and job interviews as well as to bring ease to everyday social interactions.
Man, soon they’ll even teach “clubhouse chemistry”. There’s lots of interesting nuggets in that one article. For one, there’s a bit on how un-athletic even the jocks in high school these days are, at least in terms of all-round ability:
The culprit is early specialization: many young athletes can perform the mechanics of their own sport, but too often in a repetitive, almost metronomic way, and they lack many of the other elements of all-around athleticism.
And if you were a sabermetrician planning on spending the money on the academy, you might be offended by their emphasis on productive outs:
Out at the ball field, I watched a four-hour practice devoted to ‘‘situations.’’ ‘‘Runner on third base, one out, infield drawn in - what do you do?’’ Bolek asked. Tommy was the first to answer. ‘‘You hit a fly ball.’’ ‘‘Right,’’ the coach said. For the next 30 minutes, hitters stood in against pitching from an assistant coach and practiced taking the kind of swing that would produce an outfield fly ball. When the infielders moved back, they practiced hitting ground balls to score the runner. They worked on sacrifice bunts and on hitting ground balls to the right side of second base to move runners from second base to third base.
It’s entrenched small-ball philosophy like this that lets the Sox swoop in and pick up the Mark Bellhorns of the world on the cheap.