Playing Better Baseball - Rick Wolff

Playing Better Baseball

by Rick Wolff

NEW, 208 pages

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About Playing Better Baseball

Teaching baseball fundamentals is difficult, but not nearly as tough as guiding players beyond a basic performance level. Veteran coach and player Rick Wolff, who worked his way up to the pro ranks on smarts and sweat, now shares insights he gleaned from playing and coaching thousands of games at every level of competition.

You`ll find tips on:
• choosing and using equipment,
• conditioning the body and throwing arm,
• practicing pre-season, in-season, and off-season,
• developing offensive, defensive, and pitching skills,
• focusing, adjusting, and staying sharp mentally, and
• helping players showcase their skills.

Playing Better Baseball is the reference and instructional tool you`ll wish you had when you started coaching. It`s the perfect guide for helping players who want to perform at a higher level. Pass it along to your players to read or use it yourself to develop each athlete`s full potential.

This book covers all the bases, from choosing the right bat to getting the most out of each at-bat. It`s a great assistant coach to have at your side.

About Rick Wolff

Rick Wolff's inside knowledge of baseball comes from an outstanding career as a professional player, television analyst, writer, and coach. He played in the 1971 College World Series while a sophomore at Harvard University. The following year, he was drafted by and signed with the Detroit Tigers. When his playing career ended, Wolff served for eight years as the head coach at Mercy College (NY), where he transformed a struggling Division III program into a nationally ranked Division II organization. From 1989 to 1994, Wolff served as the roving performance enhancement coach for the Cleveland Indians.

The author of 14 books about sports, business, and sport psychology, Wolff has written articles for numerous consumer and academic publications ranging from Sports Illustrated and Sport to Psychology Today and Psychological Reports. He has served as on-air commentator on ESPN, SportsChannel, and the Madison Square Garden Network.

Wolff received his undergraduate degree in psychology from Harvard University, magna cum laude, and his master's from Long Island University, with high honors. He is a long-time member of the American Baseball Coaches Association and the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sports Psychology. He lives in Armonk, NY, with his wife and three children.

Reviews of this Book

"The very best book available for teaching the mental, physical and fundamental sides of baseball. Playing Better Baseball gives you an unparalleled insight into the advanced game of baseball. It's tremendously informative, unbelievably technical and extremely enjoyable to read. Playing Better Baseball will be the key to helping you bridge the gap between potential and performance."
Brian Graham
Cleveland Indians AAA Manager
USA Today Baseball Weekly's
1996 Minor League Manager of the Year

"Playing Better Baseball" is very thorough in covering every aspect of the game, especially the mental side of baseball."
Joseph J. Grillo Jr.
Head Baseball Coach
Byran Hills High School
Yonkers, New York

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.

Playing Better Baseball