May 25

May 25 Update

What can baseball look like in 2020? - Baseball Alberta & Driveline Baseball

Baseball Alberta's latest update (on May 22) has increased the prospects of our return to the field sometime in 2020. As it stands, provincial sport organizations (PSOs) have been tasked with developing a return-to-play protocol for their member programs to follow. These protocols will be vetted by Alberta Health Services and will serve as a pathway for member programs (like SPMBA) to return to the field. A word of caution, however, as this return-to-play protocol may be radically different than baseball has ever been. When we are able to return to playing baseball in 2020, it most assuredly will not be anything like the game we have come to know and love.

As always, please adhere to local guidelines on participating in baseball-related activities. Many municipalities are re-opening public parks and green spaces, so we're encouraging our members to stay active and get outdoors where possible while following public health guidelines. Due to Baseball Alberta's suspension of baseball activities, we cannot offer any formalized programming until this suspension is lifted.

Driveline Baseball is a baseball development, performance training, and research company based out of Seattle, WA. If you don't already do so, go to their website and subscribe to their mailing list. You'll get a free 8-week program for weighted ball training as well as their weekly Sunday Thunder Nuggets newsletter, which is undoubtedly the best weekly compilation of current baseball happenings, popular culture, sport science research, and whatever Driveline is working on at the moment. It is an immensely beneficial resource that no one, regardless of their level of baseball, should miss out on. Driveline's youth baseball director, Deven Morgan, has developed a blog post detailing their methods for returning to playing youth baseball. Please note that Washington State has different re-opening timelines, guidelines, and restrictions. This is meant to provide a brief summary of the article and illustrate how to return to normal baseball activities while coming out of a period of inactivity, like what we're dealing with during our current pandemic crisis.

Post COVID-19 Return to Play Guidelines for Youth Baseball Players

First and foremost, how can we return to play? The reality of our current situation is that most players in SPMBA - at any level - have experienced a severe reduction in baseline movement and activity levels since mid-March. Some very fortunate athletes have been able to keep up with their baseball development thanks to resources they have at home. Some have seen baseball shut down and haven't looked back. Others have wanted to get back to playing baseball, but due to lack of resources, time constraints, or isolation restraints have not been able to do any baseball at all. We cannot assume that all our athletes have been active and keeping busy. We cannot go out during our first practices or first organized activities on-field and red-line our athletes. What do we need to consider in this pursuit for returning to normal baseball activities?

Regardless if a player is at the competitive or community levels, they are in need of an on-ramping window to "get up to speed" and to be able to play in games. Most of our athletes in SPMBA are at a skill level in which a throw from shortstop to first base is a high-leverage endeavour: where it takes all their intent, strength, and coordination to hope that the ball makes it to first, let alone accurately. We put our athletes at great risk for injury and negative long-term outcomes if we try to jump in with both feet into games. We need defined plans at all age groups to build up their workloads and stress levels to a point where their bodies can effectively handle the stressors of in-game competition and effectively recover from these stressors.

As Coach Morgan states in his article, "If, however, we take this period of acclimation away from players and drop them directly into games, we are taking them from an undertrained state into an overly stressed state over a very short period of time. That is not good."

This is specifically with respect to throwing and pitching too! This doesn't even account for hitting, fielding, and even general athletic abilities too. Coach Morgan recommends the Pitch Smart guidelines for pre-season throwing. The Pitch Smart on-field resources site shares plotted out preparatory throwing programs for athletes within the 9-10, 11-12. 13-14, and 15-18 year old age groups. These are not inclusive of adequate warm-up and cool down routines. A combination of this programming with a whole-body dynamic warm-up resulting in the athlete sweating and with a cool down consisting of a hard series of sprints is a great recipe for preparing for pitching. The ages 9-10 plan is a 30-day plan to prepare for playing games.

To illustrate this example further, here is a realistic throwing day for the 11U age group. These drills can be searched online to illustrate how to do them. These drills can be exchanged for other warm-up activities too. If kids want to play a game of Spikeball to get their bodies warmed up, that is fine. If they need a foam roller or band routine, that is fine too. Our goal is to get players sweating prior to throwing.

If we return to the field in late August or early September, will we be able to have our players pitch? My response, albeit likely extremely unpopular, is that we cannot and should not allow our players to pitch over such a short time window. We would need to adjust how we play the game with accommodations like pitching machines or coach pitch, especially at the 13U and lower age groups. Maybe we could finish the "season" with a couple games where each player gets to pitch - a jamboree-styled final day. Development-wise, it would be irresponsible.

Much of the meat and potatoes of the article revolve around data-driven approaches to track on-ramping and player workload. Driveline acquired Motus, a baseball technology company, a few months ago. They leverage Motus sleeves (a standard arm sleeve with a removable bluetooth sensor for tracking acceleration and torque in throwing arms). We don't have access to analogous data as there is nearly no one in our program with the devices or the capacity to collect data from our athletes. We will have to rely on Driveline's collection of youth baseball data and the assumptions they make therein to follow their return-to-play protocol. It's not necessarily worth going into detail into their data on this platform as there is minimal relevance to our coaches and families in SPMBA without actually owning the devices. I do recommend that serious baseball players get them as it provides an incredible opportunity to track throwing workload at any point in the year.

Based on the data they have acquired with Motus, Driveline and Coach Morgan's recommendation is that players engage in four weeks of a preparation window in order to return to games (aligned with USA Baseball's Pitch Smart guidelines above). From there, they break down how to schedule these throwing workloads and how to apportion them appropriately in-season. Irrelevant of our circumstances, this is an excellent planning resource for coaches to ensure equally distributed playing time and throwing workloads. A breakdown, age group by age group is below:

We would have to modify some of these plans to fit our age groups, such as bumping the age brackets to cover our 9U, 11U, 13U, and 15U age groups. The pitch counts would also have to be modified to fit Baseball Canada's pitch count rules.

There are a couple prerequisites to follow this programming too. The preseason phase has four weeks of 3 practice sessions per week. They are also requiring every player on these teams to pitch.

Coach Morgan's article also dives into 14 and 7-day preparation windows, which I won't dive into, but are available on their website. These plans are not sure-fire ways to avoid injuries, but a structured, data-driven game plan is the best way to approach whatever season we're left with. Furthermore, any sort of baseball is better than nothing. Providing players with opportunities to have fun, socialize, and engage with baseball is our best course of action. Playing catch, hitting off a tee, or playing wall ball (i.e. the 1-wall handball courts by Wes Hosford are open). Any way to get players involved in baseball in any capacity is of the utmost importance.

Yours in baseball,

Coach Lovie
Baseball Development Lead
Sherwood Park Minor Baseball Association
baseballdevelopment@spmba.ca