baseball: rotation of players

Question
John, you helped me with prior question.  Coaching group of 8 year olds this year.  13 players on team and want to give all equal time.  Also want to have them play different positions during game.  I am looking for an EASY to way handle rotation of players in and out of game to assure all get equal time and still meet all LL criteria for announcing changes, etc  (a simple formula I can follow)  I have searched we but have not found anything.  Thanks

Jim Bierfeldt

Answer
Hi Jim,

I understand your question.  Not all 8 year old can pitch, so I will leave this up to you.  As for the others, when I coached 8 year olds (gee...7 years ago??) my league had a strict rule:  all kids must change postion at least once in the game (except pitchers).  So, I rotated them by baseball postion.  

In baseball:

pitcher is position 1
catcher 2
1st base 3
2nd base 4
3rd base 5
shortstop 6
left 7
center 8
right 9

So at the start of each defensive inning:
2-3; 3-4; 4-5; 5-6; 6-7; 7-8; 8-9; 9 to bench (you have 4 extra players); bench to catcher.

Remember:
"Practice like you play and play like you practice"

SO, when you have your practices, get the kids use to rotating like in the game.  For example,

batting and fielding practice:

batter hits at least 4 times;
when over, batter moves to 1st base, 1st to 2nd, etc.

The pitcher is different.  Not all kids can throw and there is a safety aspect.  I hope your league does not force the pitcher to change too.  If yes, it will make the above rotation look like a juggling act!!  I have at least 3 pitcher per team.  Each pitcher can pitch at least 2 innings.  

At age 8, in our league, no pitcher can pitch a complete game (at least one change).  2.5 innings is considered a game pitched SO child must rest for 1 full day before pitching again.  I hope your league is not a complicated as ours!!!  

Rotate your pitchers every 2 innings, if you can.  It depends on how many innings you play.  For our league, a game is limited to 9 innings or 2 hours, which ever comes first.  At 8 years old, we usually had about 5 innings.

The nice thing about the above rotations is that it helps you with the positioning of your players.  When you start a game you could make your infield strong and then have room to play with the outfield defense.  You'll have at least 3 innings with a strong defense.  Like a batting order, you could work with the strengths of your team and work in a balanced rotation cycle. Kids get use to the order of starters, just like they get use to the batting orders.

Best of luck,

JohnMc