And Then Nothing
Every day across every clubhouse in baseball, hitters gather in a room. A coach pulls film, walks through data, and builds a unified story for how their offense will attack that night’s pitcher. The plan is set. The meeting ends. Players head to the cage, take the field, and play the game.
And then nothing.
No one revisits the plan. No one asks whether the hitter who wanted to ambush early breaking balls actually did it. The lesson was taught. Whether the plan was followed is a question most teams never bother to ask.
Most teams prepare each day, but few hitters are accountable to what was taught. Coaching Staffs spend hours each day putting together detailed plans and then no one ever bothers going back to see how well they followed it. That’s wasted preparation, that is a daily ritual with no feedback loop.
Most of that energy goes into the structure of the meeting itself. Across the game, pregame preparation takes one of two forms: a large group setting where the entire offense gathers together, or individual meetings where hitters develop their own plan before cage work begins.
What has changed is the sophistication layered onto those meetings.
Over time, pregame preparation has become increasingly complex, with teams adding new technology, deeper data, and different methods of presentation in an effort to better support hitters at the plate. Nearly every season brings another story about an organization rethinking its approach moving away from broad, team-wide messaging toward more individualized preparation and placing greater responsibility on hitters themselves to own the information.
The meeting remains the same in principle. The debate lies in how it should be taught, delivered, and ultimately used. The argument to move away from the team wide approach is that hitters will be attacked different based on which side of the plate they bat, or what stature they have within the lineup and league in general. Not small miscalculations.
Pitchers don’t attack every hitter the same way. They challenge the middle of the order with their best stuff in the highest leverage counts. The bottom of the lineup may see a completely different pitcher more offspeed, less willingness to pick at corners. A team wide plan rarely accounts for any of that.
The alternative approach places greater responsibility on the hitter. Rather than receiving information in a team setting, hitters are expected to come up with their own attack plans, develop an individual plan for the opposing pitcher, and bring that plan to the hitting coach before beginning their day.
The appeal is understandable. Individual preparation encourages ownership, forces hitters to engage with the information themselves, and recognizes that no pitcher will attack two different hitters in exactly the same way.
Still, the traditional group meeting carries advantages of its own. A team setting creates shared awareness of the opposing pitcher and allows the offense to view how it may be attacked from a broader, macro perspective. Coaches can establish common language, highlight organizational priorities, and ensure that important information reaches every hitter in the room.
Just as importantly, the meeting guarantees something increasingly difficult to create during a long season: collective discussion. For a brief period, the entire offensive group is in one place, talking through ideas, comparing perspectives, and building a more complete picture of the challenge ahead.
From a teaching standpoint, the individual approach can sometimes be easier to get away with. It gives players more wiggle room to avoid fully engaging with the material, particularly if the conversation stays broad or unchecked.
The group setting, on the other hand, can feel more laborious for players, especially when the quality of instruction is poor or the meeting becomes overly passive. But that friction is not always a negative.
Players are often better at pushing each other than coaches expect. A hitter says he wants to see the ball up. A teammate or coach asks: what pitch? Early count or two-strike? What if this guy is wild and can’t locate it to begin with? Suddenly the hitter is actually thinking, not reciting. What started as a safe answer becomes a real plan pitch type, count, situation. The group setting, when it creates that kind of pressure, does something an individual meeting rarely can.
When a hitter is asked individually how he thinks a pitcher will attack him or what he is looking for that night, he can often rely on broad rules of thrumb that hitters have repeated throughout their careers. See the ball up. Eliminate a pitch. Stay through the middle. Familiar language that sounds actionable, but often lacks specifics.
A group meeting, when run well, has the ability to challenge those default responses. Players are asked to explain their thinking, compare ideas with teammates, and move beyond generic approaches toward something more concrete and opponent specific.
These meetings can grow stale over time no matter the level of engagement. Most teams experiment somewhere between these two approaches over the course of a season, adjusting based on personnel, results, and the rhythm of the clubhouse.
Just as individual meetings can allow players to glaze over their thinking and avoid the depth a specific game may demand, team meetings carry their own pitfall. Too often, the coach ends up doing all of the thinking while players sit passively and “absorb” information rather than actively wrestling with it themselves.
Regardless of how information is delivered, the objective remains the same: accountability to the plan. That is the missing link not the plan itself, but what happens to it after the meeting ends.
The issue is often not whether the meeting was individual or team-based, nor whether enough information was presented. The real question is whether players are held accountable to the plans that emerge from those conversations.
If a hitter says he wants to ambush early count breaking balls but then plays passively in those situations, he has ultimately failed to live up to the plan that he set for himself. Just because a player didn’t follow the plan doesn’t guarantee failure, but it does mean there was a disconnect between intention and execution.
Meetings should not simply be spaces where information is transferred. They should create commitments. And those commitments should be revisited, discussed, and evaluated after the game with the same seriousness used to prepare for it.
Too often coaches set out a plan and then nothing is done after the fact. That would be like a teacher delivering a lesson, assigning work, and never checking whether students understood the material or applied it correctly. The lesson may have been taught, but the learning was never confirmed.
Meetings should not end when players leave the room. They should extend into postgame reflection and accountability. Because the purpose of preparation is not simply to inform hitters. It is to help them think, commit, and learn.
I have never been in a hitters meeting but am curious about a few things.
Why is this an either/or versus a both and?
As a manager of a team at work I had both team meetings to communicate things that applied more globally and to generate discussion, collaboration and brainstorming at times across the team.
But I also had 1:1s with each direct report. I am sure most managers outside of baseball do the same.
Also, your point on the feedback loop is a great one but I would add a dimension of for the players who did apply the information, did it work?
I was on a ballpark tour last season when they took us into an area the home team used. Some players had left laying around printouts of the scouting report on that nights opponent. Of course I was curious and looked it over while the tour guide was yammering on.
It was more simplistic than I would have expected and there were some points in it that I would put in the debatable bucket. So there should be feedback on the information itself as well.