Infield Drills

They do not say that practice makes a man perfect without any reason. Practice does surely make us perfect in whatever we are doing. Be it sports, education, professional life or any other thing, you cannot excel unless you practice the skills you are interested in. Talking of sports, in USA, any discussion on sports can never be replete without baseball, right? When baseball is at the professional level, there is no option to practicing hard and sweating it out. Various drills and practice routines are thus chalked by the coach for every department of the game. Infield drills are one of the significant aspects of baseball and softball. Taking a lowdown of these drills in the following text, are you going to pitch in?

Infield Drills for Baseball

There are so many of these drills, it is going to be tough task describing all of them, but I will try. Moreover, it is what the coach thinks will work is what matters and he accordingly chooses and decides the drills.

Beating the Ball
The coach, in this drill will set the defense and fielders as usual. Then a hitter will get a soft toss from plate for putting the ball into play. The harder he hits, the better it will be. Bunting is not allowed. What the infielders need to do is that they have to field it and then throw it to the first, second and third home plate consecutively, one after the other. This of course will have to be prior to the runner getting around the base. The fouls are considered to be outs.

The Short Hop
This drill, can be easily amongst the number of baseball infield drills for kids. This drill involves the coach telling players to first partner up and face each other with a ball with a distance of 3 yards between the two. The fielders have to be in a proper fielding position, requiring them to bend their knees, put their buttocks down and hands out in front of the center of the body. A fielder will then pass a short hop in front of his partner, that is around 12 inches maximum in front of the player's baseball glove. The partner will have to then field the ball on short hop and work on fielding ball bottom up or getting under the ball using the glove. Objective is to enhance the blocking and collecting of the ball.

Progress With Progression
The players have to be paired for this drill. Next thing the coach does is to see that first basemen are down first base line with gloves. Fielders sans gloves have to be two steps behind second-third baseline and two steps to the right of the first basemen. The fielders are then asked to place the ball on baseline and they assume a good infield position. On the coach's signal, the first fielder advances in the direction of the ball, lining up with both hands around ball with his head down, looking at the ball. The feet are placed so that the back foot (right foot) is perpendicular to the first base. The player then picks up the ball and throws it to 1st base. The point is to make sure that the throws are accurate as much as possible and not hard. This can be used in softball too!

Communicate
The objective of this drill is to improve the communication between the players. The coach will hit a number of balls for the players to field. Now, the catch here is that the fielder will have to yell which base is he going to throw the ball when the ball is in mid air. The coach will be stationed in the batters box to conduct the drill. The whole point of this exercise is to help the infielders to be alert and listen to calls given out, while they are fielding.

In addition to these, as I said, there are umpteen baseball as well as softball infield drills, though it is tough to cover all of them. Double play, infield rotation, drills for improving the throwing accuracy, four corners drill and many more such drills are involved in baseball training. All these are crucial, as the infielders can help save a match for a team by restricting the score and getting the batting side out. Till next time, it is ciao from me!