Facebook has a great feature for polling the fans of your page. Your Facebook page as a youth sports league or AAU organization or baseball team can use polling to engage your audience, learn more about trends, and use data to help make smart organizational decisions. I love the feedback and the interaction with players, coaches, and baseball leaders through polling.
This past week, I polled fans of my Facebook page – The Rhode Island Baseball Experience – about what is more effective for developing young hitters. Here is the post from Facebook:
In the Coach Pitch (ages 6-9) division, do you prefer pitching machine or live pitching for this age group? A pitching machine, if working properly, can be a consistent program to develop that hand eye coordination. A parent/coach pitching live BP is more realistic to the actual game of baseball, not to mention the human factor of adjusting to different pitches. What are your thoughts?
The results are in. 38 votes were tallies. 67% voted for a coach throwing batting practice. 33% voted for a pitching machine. And here are some comments by some local RI baseball parents and coaches:
” Coach pitch creates a scenario where the pitch caters to the batters ability, which is contrary to the actual game. The player’s development suffers. Our first generation machine pitch players were strong hitters and it showed in tournament play.”
” Why would you strictly use coach pitch at 8/9? I can understand if the team has no pitching but at least give them the opportunity to pitch to the batter then maybe bring in a coach for a few pitches if he can’t get close to the strike zone. But by 8/9 it should be strictly kid pitching.”
” I’ve had a few kids in coach pitch were the parent complains that their kid can’t hit me or another coach pitching but is a superstar off the machine. I feel you get stuck at a young age.”
Thanks to everyone who took part in this poll. If you care to comment further, go to my Facebook page and continue the conversation.
The Rhiter 
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