Growing up in New York I began a love affair with baseball that has not stopped. There were a combination of influences. My grandfather was a huge baseball fan. He lived and died first with the Brooklyn Dodgers and then the New York Mets. I was at his apartment in Brooklyn every Sunday either…

  Branch Rickey was a baseball player and executive who is probably best remembered for breaking the color barrier signing Jackie Robinson. This was his greatest feat but if you look closely at the man himself, it is incredible what an innovator he was. Rickey was born in Portsmouth Ohio. After high school he went…

When legendary football coach Bill Parcells was once asked if he was ready when he was appointed head coach of the New York Giants, he responded, “No one is ever really ready for the task of coaching an NFL franchise.” This is a professional league that has only 32 jobs. I would never compare becoming…

  Lacrosse coaches love both you and I! They love us because they know that our best players are one boring practice, one boring week or one boring season away from tossing their gloves for lacrosse sticks. Baseball has been at a crossroads for a few years now. In the past, a lot of talented…

  Burnout in youth sports is a threat to the physical and mental stamina of young athletes.As competitive youth athletics engages younger participants each year, the threat of, both, physical and mental burnout in young players grows more imminent. Over involvement in competitive leagues has long-term consequences for kids, if after the first 12 years…

 I plead guilty, but guilty with an explanation. I told my star pitcher before the game, who is also on a travel team, not to throw more than 6 curve balls in the game. My decision was based on the fact that the team we were playing had two really powerful hitters, two of the…

  On May 6, 2001, the Capitol City League Rockies and the Satchel Paige League Memphis Red Sox from the Washington, D.C. area took the field to play each other in a tee ball game. What made this tee ball game different from any other game was the fact that it took place on the…

 When I sat down to write this article I couldn’t help but remember a movie I saw a few years back called Flash Of Genius. It is a story of a man who had invented a form of the Intermittent Windshield Wiper that is used today. The short of it is that he spent his entire…

 I’ve coached Little League for 25 years and do clinics all over the Northeast every year. During the question-and-answer sessions I always get asked what I see as the biggest difference coaching now versus when I first began twenty-five tears ago. I see a lot of differences, but two really stick out to me. The…

  In my first Baseball Chronicles book, one of my most popular articles in terms of feedback was “FourThings Coaches Should Practice But Don’t.”   The four things I mentioned were: Pitchers not practicing fielding from the mound, catching a foul ball near a fence, players not sliding, and practicing fielding wild pitches or passed…