Give your pitchers a baseball

How many times have you told a pitcher to go warm-up and the pitcher walks around in search of

a good baseball?  What’s it like when the pitcher on the mound is struggling and you need a relief pitcher to be ready NOW! and he wastes time looking for a ball?  I don’t know about you but I have lost it a couple times when that has happened.

One solution is to give each of your pitchers a new ball at the beginning of the season.  They put their name on it and are told that when they warm-up, they are to always use that ball.  If they lose it, they negotiate the use of someone else’s ball.  

I have found that this does two things:

1. It eliminates the wasted time looking for a good ball because they should already have one.
2. It reduces the mysterious “disappearance” of your good baseballs.  You give them one so they don’t “mistakenly place others in their bags” (i.e. steal them) as much.

Side question: Why is it that every baseball team on the planet, regardless of level, has one guy who has around 27 team baseballs in his baseball bag and swears he has no idea how they got there?

Of course, you are relying on kids to keep track of a baseball and … well … you know how that goes.  

I think this strategy does help though.