Play Ball - Thomas O'Connell

Play Ball

by Thomas O'Connell

NEW, 240 pages

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About Play Ball

Play Ball: 100 Baseball Practice Games is the best way to develop players’ skills, execution, and on-field team play!

With more than 100 skill-building competitions, Play Ball: 100 Baseball Practice Games covers everything from the fundamentals of fielding, pitching, catching, and hitting to special situations such as rundowns, base stealing, and bunting. You’ll even learn how to incorporate the games into team practices to perfect execution and prepare for opponents.

Renowned coach and American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame member Tom O’Connell includes games for individual players as well as group competitions for infielders, outfielders, and pitchers and catchers. Coaching tips and variations also allow the developmental games to be used with beginning, intermediate, and advanced players and teams alike.

From outfielder to catcher, from player to coach, Play Ball: 100 Baseball Practice Games is your guide to more productive and engaging practices, focused play, and on-the-field excellence.

About Tom O'Connell

Tom O'Connell has over 30 years of amateur and professional baseball coaching experience. A Major League Baseball recommending scout since 1986, O'Connell has worked for the Cincinnati Reds, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the 2008 World Series champion Philadelphia Phillies. A recipient of numerous state and national awards for his coaching, O'Connell was named the 1991 Wisconsin Baseball Man of the Year, elected president of the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) in 2002, named the 2004 ABCA Coach of the Year, and inducted into the ABCA Hall of Fame in 2007.

O'Connell is a contributing writer for the Collegiate Baseball Newsletter and author of numerous articles in baseball publications such as Touching All Bases and the ABCA Quarterly Digest. He also wrote Coaching Youth Baseball and Coaching Baseball Technical and Tactical Skills for the American Sport Education Program.

O'Connell lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Reviews of this Book

"Amateur baseball has been waiting for a book like Play Ball. Tom O'Connell has done a magnificent job in laying out the practice-to-game concept for the readers."

Ron Polk
Assistant Baseball Coach, University of Alabama at Birmingham

"Tom O'Connell, one of the most respected baseball coaches in the world, has hit a home run with Play Ball: 100 Baseball Practice Games. It should be required reading for every baseball coach on all levels of the game.”

Lou Pavlovich
Editor, Collegiate Baseball newspaper

"Coach O'Connell has assembled learning, teaching, and playing all in one book. Play Ball is a must-have for any baseball library, and I have never seen a more comprehensive book that can be used by coaches, parents, and players at all levels and all ages. You will use this book over and over."

Tim Saunders
Dublin Coffman High School
2000 USA Baseball Developmental Coach of the Year
Ohio High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame Member

“Making kids comfortable with competing, giving them that feeling that they must do their best and accept the result is the coach’s job. This phenomenon is the subject of Tom O’Connell’s excellent new book Play Ball: 100 Baseball PracticeGames.”

-John Miller

Coach and player for the Brussels Kangaroos

About Baseball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team) take turns hitting against the pitcher of the other team (the fielding team), which tries to stop them from scoring runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways. A player on the batting team can stop at any of the bases and later advance via a teammate's hit or other means. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team records three outs. One turn at bat for each team constitutes an inning and nine innings make up a professional game. The team with the most runs at the end of the game wins.

Evolving from older bat-and-ball games, an early form of baseball was being played in England by the mid-eighteenth century. This game and the related rounders were brought by British and Irish immigrants to North America, where the modern version of baseball developed. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is now popular in North America, parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball, in contrast to the derivative game of softball.

In North America, professional Major League Baseball (MLB) teams are divided into the National League (NL) and American League (AL). Each league has three divisions: East, West, and Central. Every year, the major league champion is determined by playoffs that culminate in the World Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular season division winners, plus one wild card team. Baseball is the leading team sport in both Japan and Cuba, and the top level of play is similarly split between two leagues: Japan's Central League and Pacific League; Cuba's West League and East League. In the National and Central leagues, the pitcher is required to bat, per the traditional rules. In the American, Pacific, and both Cuban leagues, there is a tenth player, a designated hitter, who bats for the pitcher. Each top-level team has a farm system of one or more minor league teams. These teams allow younger players to develop as they gain on-field experience against opponents with similar levels of skill.

Play Ball