If you live in a climate where the winters are full of snow and cold, preparing for the baseball season can still be accomplished using a few tools and a little imagination. Your basement or your garage can be used to practice hitting, catching & throwing. Even if you live in a warm climate, there may be times when there is no one around to play catch or throw batting practice. All of the drills discussed below can be done indoors or outside and can be accomplished with just one person.
Practicing Your Swing
Some of the tools you will need for practicing your swing are a net, a baseball tee or a Mauer’s Quickswing https://www.mauersquickswing.com, a bat, a broom handle, and various types and sizes of balls (plastic wiffle balls or golf balls, tennis or rubber balls or if you are outside; baseballs). If you have an adjustable tee, practice your swing using different tee heights within your strike zone. Some tees also allow you to set it up to simulate an inside pitch or an outside pitch. If you have this type of tee, practice “pulling” the inside ball (right-handed batters hitting to left field & left-handed batters hitting to right field) and then practice hitting the outside ball to the opposite field (right-handed batters hitting to right field & left-handed batters hitting to left field). A tee is a good tool for developing the muscle memory of your swing and your eye-hand coordination. One of the skills that you will also want to develop is your hand speed and your ability to react to a moving ball. This is where the Quickswing comes in handy. The Quickswing allows the hitter to manually feed the ball into the device and then allows time for the hitter to get into their stance before the ball drops into the batter’s hitting zone. The Quickswing can be adjusted to various degrees of difficulty & various heights. You can develop your skills even further when you increase the level of difficulty by using a broom handle to hit plastic golf balls.
Joe Mauer Quickswing
Catching
The only tools that you will need for playing catch with yourself are a ball (a tennis ball or rubber-coated ball work well), your baseball glove and a wall (your parents will probably prefer that you use a garage wall or a wall in an unfinished basement or any outside wall). Kids have been using walls to play catch with themselves for decades. Position yourself about 20 feet from the wall and begin throwing the ball to various spots on the wall. Your throws should cause you to catch balls above your head, between your head and your waist, below your waist, on the glove side of your body as well as on the backhand side. A good workout will have you moving your feet from side to side and your glove up & down and from side to side.
Throwing
The only tools you will need for practicing your throws will be a net & a bucket of balls and some tape. Use the tape to create a target on the net. The distance of your throws will depend on the site of your workout, however, the maximum distance should be about 70 ft. If possible, practice throwing to the target on the net from various distances & angles. Keep a count of the number of times you hit the target out of every ten throws.
Hopefully, you off-season workout for baseball will have you ready for opening day!
–John Bissenbach, Author of the Well Prepared Coach™: 25 Youth Baseball Practice Plans. For the past 30+ years, John has coached over 50 youth sports teams.