How Ego And Arrogance Can Be The Demise Of A Baseball Career

or kill you...literally.

Player development personnel as well as scouts dread the uncoachable prospects. On a personal level I've encountered uncoachables on every level...from Little Leaguers to pro ballers. It was just as frustrating for me to deal with each one of them...no matter the level they were playing on. In the end there's nothing to you can do for the uncoachable player to help prevent an injury or develop the skills that will keep from stifling their development if they refuse to change... except by divine intervention.

An example of how serious a pro player with a resolute stubborness that was unable to see or feel the obvious damage that he was doing to himself from a mechanically bad habit, had me pleading with him to change his ways after I evaluated his performance for a scouting report. In the fall of '87 in a Southern California Fall League scouting assignment while I was attending the Pro Baseball Scouting School with some Astros scouts, I had the opportunity to see a hard throwing righty in a game. The Astros had drafted this right handed pitcher in June '87 and would later sign him in May of '88 before they would lose the draft rights to him. They had him pitching in the Fall League where AAA players all the way down to HS players could be in this league where they could compete against one another. After seeing him pitch, I told the Astros scouts there at the game I spotted a dangerous flaw in the deceleration phase of his follow through that could cause rotator cuff problems or even worse damage... blood clots. As for the problem, this pitcher was following through and then adding a whiplash recoil at the end of his follow through. The shoulder is already dealing with up to 300lbs of torque during the follow through...there's no need to add more stress with a violent recoil. The Astros' scouts encouraged me to go down to the field and talk to him about it. Well, I tried.

I'm not sure why he liked the recoil. Maybe he thought it looked super cool or some other reason, but he told me in no certain terms that he would he never want to change what he was doing since he "was having success with it and it got him where he was today."

Long story short, some years later, he died in a hotel room from a heart attack due to a blood clot from his pitching shoulder after a pitching performance earlier that day.