Baseball Coaches Unplugged is a podcast for insights on high school baseball coaching, travel baseball development, and college recruiting from coaches building winning programs. Each episode features real conversations about high school baseball coaching, travel baseball development, college recruiting, player development, practice planning, pitching and hitting development, and building a winning baseball culture.
If you’re a baseball coach looking for practical ideas on running better practices, developing players, navigating the recruiting process, and leading a successful program, this podcast delivers insights from experienced coaches across high school, travel, and college baseball. Hosted by 27 year veteran high school baseball coach Ken Carpenter.
Today on Baseball Coaches Unplugged, respect for the game is slipping. Routine plays, strikeouts, and doubles are being over celebrated with chirping and antics. Coaches are responsible for the culture. What coaches allow becomes a standard for how players behave, and energy is good, but humility matters. Celebrate big moments, but players should still act like they've been there before. Respecting the game, next on Baseball Coaches Unplugged.
Baseball Coaches Unplugged is a podcast for high school travel and college baseball coaches who want to build better players and stronger programs. Each episode features real conversations about high school baseball coaching, travel baseball development, college recruiting, player development, practice planning, teaching and learning development, and building a winning baseball culture. If you're a baseball coach looking for practical ideas on running better practices, developing players, navigating the recruiting process, and leading a successful program, this podcast showcases the best coaches from across the country. With your host, 27-year high school, Coach Ken Carpenter.
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Hello and welcome to Baseball Coaches Unplugged. I'm your host, Coach Ken Carpenter. If you enjoyed today's show, got one simple ask. Be sure and share it with a friend or a fellow coach that you think might be able to gain something from it. We have over 200 episodes available for coaches and fans of the show to listen to. And we'd love to have your feedback if you would like to reach out to us. Check out our website. It's www.athlete1.net.
Well, today I'm going to cover a topic that kind of makes me sound old school or maybe even like uh an old guy. But I I think it needs to uh be touched on, and I think uh some may agree with me, some may not agree with me, but I would love to hear your thoughts and uh I'm gonna jump into it right now. Picture a dig drive to left field. Hitter flips the bat and goes into his home run trot, only to have the ball caught near the warning track. Instead of hustle, it's look at me. That's the thing that's been rattling around in my head lately. Not because I'm anti-fun, I'm really not. I love a dugout that's got a lot of energy. I love teammates losing their minds for each other after a big hit, a huge strikeout, a walk-off, a championship dog pile. All that is part of why baseball is beautiful. But somewhere along the line, we've started blurring the energy with theater. And you can see it everywhere now. Youth fields, travel ball weekends, show social clips on X, Instagram, all chopped up into these little 10-second fireworks. A kid shoots a routine single through the six hole and he's pounding his chest, pointing to the sky. Pitcher gets a strike out with two outs in the third and walks off the mound like he just slammed the door in game seven. A hitter bangs a double in the gap and bat flip says 450 walk off. No man, it's you just did your job. And then there's the noise, the chirping, every pitch, every inning, constant commentary. Baseball has always had an edge. Competitors talk, that's not new. But when every single moment turns into a little performance, especially one that feels aimed at a camera somewhere, we start drifting from something that the game always needed, and that's respect. Respect for the opponent, respect for the moment, respect for the game itself. I've been around the game for over 27 years. Youth players, high school players, around college programs, elite travel organizations. And one thing has held up pretty well across all of it. The best players usually don't need to announce themselves every 90 seconds. They hit the double, get the second, dust themselves off, look in for signs, and get ready for the next pitch. They strike somebody out, toss it around the horn. Go get the next guy. That quite confidence used to be a badge of honor.
Now to be fair, travel baseball has done a ton of good. Better competition, better coaching, more exposure, more opportunities. Kids are seeing different arms, different styles, different regions. All that matters. The development piece is real. There are incredibly skilled players coming through baseball because the travel system gave them reps and visibility they wouldn't have had otherwise. Because high school baseball is played during the same time that college baseball is being played. But there's a trade-off nobody likes to talk about. When every game is filmed, when every at bat might become a clip, when every strikeout might end up online by dinner, the temptation is to turn the game into content. And baseball was never meant to be content first. It was meant to be a test. A test of discipline, a test of patience, a test of humility. This is a sport where the best hitters in the world fail seven out of ten times. Seven out of ten. Imagine any other part of your life where that would still make you elite. Baseball humbles people for a living. So when we build a culture that says every ordinary success deserves extraordinary celebration, we're kind of fighting the deepest lesson the game is trying to teach. And let me gently poke at a popular assumption here. More celebration does not automatically mean more love of the game. Sometimes it means more love for being seen, loving the game. That's a different thing. One is passion, the other's performance. They can look the same for about three seconds on video, but they are definitely not the same thing. The line to me is timing. Walk off arm run, celebrate like crazy. Winning a title, donuts. Base is loaded, last inning, huge punch out. I want to feel the fire from the parking lot. But if the routine play gets the same reaction as the rare one, then the rare one starts to feel cheapened. When everything is a highlight, nothing is. Think about it this way. Do you ever watch the nightly news at 630? They start off every show with breaking news. When I was young, if you heard breaking news come across the TV, you stopped what you were doing and listened because something important has happened. But that's not the case anymore. And honestly, one of the most intimidating things a player can do is handle a big moment like it isn't too big for them. No extra show, no speech, just yeah, that's my assignment. Next pitch. It's not flashy, which is probably why social media doesn't love it. But baseball
people do. They notice. This is where I think coaches have to look in the mirror a little bit, because players, especially young players, are unbelievably good at reading the real rules of the team. Not the rules on a poster, the rules and the reactions. What gets corrected? What gets ignored? What gets laughed off because hey, that's kind of funny. Culture isn't what you say in a meeting, culture is what you tolerate. If a kid bat flips on a routine double and the coach shrugs, that's the standard now. If the dugout is chirping nonstop and nobody pulls a player aside to say, nope, not how we do things here, then guess what? That becomes the team voice. We act surprised later, but the truth is players usually aren't inventing the culture. They're revealing it. I heard an old coach say years ago, act like you've done it before. And I know that can sound like one of the old dusty baseball sayings that you see stitched on a pillow somewhere. But it's actually deeper than it sounds. It doesn't mean to be a robot. Doesn't mean don't enjoy the game. It means understand that a double is part of the job. A strikeout is part of the job. A routine grounder at short is part of the job. Do it well, do it consistently, move on to the next pitch. Because composure is not weakness. Composure is a weapon. The player who's steady, prepared, and never rattled, that's the one who gets in your head. The loudest guy in the field can feel intimidating for a minute. The composed one feels dangerous the entire game. And I've seen this over and over, the players who go on to higher levels, the ones who really understand baseball, they usually figure this out pretty quick. They realize the game keeps scores in ways social media doesn't. It notices your preparation, your body language after failure, your response to success, whether you can stay humble in a sport built to humble you anyway.
So if you're a coach listening, I think the challenge is pretty simple. Even if it's not always comfortable. Are you building a team that respects the game or a team that performs baseball? Those are not the same. One can survive bad innings, bad calls, failure, slumps. The other one needs attention all the time. And that kind of team gets real real fragile real fast. And if you're a player, especially a young one, ask yourself this. After a big play, what are you trying to say? Are you celebrating your team in a moment that matters? Great. Or are you trying to turn a routine act into a trailer for yourself? That's worth sitting with. Baseball doesn't need less joy, it needs better judgment. It needs players who know the difference between emotion and theatrics, and coaches willing to defend that line even when the crowd likes the show. Because we're not teaching kids how to play, we're teaching them what deserves applause and what should simply earn a nod, a breath, and a quiet jaw back to your position for the next pitch. Respect is not old-fashioned. It's how you take care of the game long enough for the next generation to love the real thing.
That's a wrap. Thanks for tuning in to Baseball Coaches Unplugged. Be sure to tune in every Wednesday. Next week, I'll be bringing in a new coach to talk baseball. And today's show was powered by the Netting Professionals Improving Programs One Facility at a time. Contact them today at 844-620-2707, or you can visit them online at www.nettingpros.com. As always, I'm your host, Coach Ken Carpenter. Thanks for listening to Baseball Coaches Unplugged.
