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Recommended Baseball Equipment
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Coaching Youth Baseball - The Rightfield Syndrome: Part 2
Rightfield Syndrome Maturation Rates
Physical maturity levels vary widely between individuals of the same age. At
the Little League age (10-12) there can be a noticeable difference in the
physical maturity of players. The beginning of adolescence for the average
male is around 12-years-old. An early maturing male may begin adolescence at
10-years-old or earlier while a late maturing male may not enter puberty
until the age of 15 or later.
Associated with adolescence is an increase in height, weight, muscle mass,
and bone mass. The individual is transformed into a body that is much more
capable of performing at higher and more coordinated levels of physical
activity due to the change in physique and stature.
The implications of maturation rates and youth baseball are great. For
example, a 15-player team may have five players who are early maturers, five
who are average maturers, and five who are late maturers. The five players
who are early maturers may have a biological age that is two to three years
ahead of their chronological age while the five players whose rates of
maturation are later than the average may have a biological age that is two
to three years behind their chronological age.
This translates, at the physical level, into having five players on the team
who are between the ages of 14 and 15 and another group of five who are
between the ages of eight and nine. So essentially there are kids with the
bodies of 14-and 15-years-old competing against kids with the bodies of
eight-and nine-years-old. This example may seem drastic, and in most cases
this does not happen to such an extreme, but it is entirely possible in a
youth-sport setting like Little League baseball.
It is no wonder that we typically see the bigger and more physically mature
kids making up the majority of the all-star teams. At the Little-League
level, the game of baseball favors the players who are bigger and stronger.
The bigger and stronger players can throw harder and farther, swing the bat
faster and with more control, handle a baseball glove more proficiently, run
faster, and in general produce more strength, power, and coordination with
their physically advanced bodies than the average and late maturing players.
Thus, the early maturing players tend to occupy the positions considered to
be of the most importance on the field, pitcher and shortstop. It is no
coincidence that these positions involve a lot of throwing and catching.
These positions also require the player to engage the game and to become
involved mentally with learning the game of baseball. Meanwhile, the later
maturing players tend to occupy the less important positions such as
outfield, particularly rightfield, where they will be less likely to have to
throw and catch and less likely to be making decisions that will affect the
outcome of the game.
The early maturing players also tend to occupy the more important positions
in the batting order, slots one through five, while the late maturers are
typically placed at the bottom of the line up in the seven, eight, and nine
hitting slots.
Early maturers' physical size and stature provides them with an advantage
when it comes to hitting. They have greater bat speed and better bat control
than the later maturing players.
This phenomena tends to decrease as the level of play and specialization of
position increases. For example, players who were right fielders at the
lower levels of little-league often become left fielders or first baseman,
if they haven't dropped out by then, at the higher levels of junior-high and
high-school baseball because the throwing distances are shorter at those
positions. However, the "Rightfield Syndrome" is particularly prevalent at
the Little-League level.
Youth sport coaches and parents need to be keenly aware of the fact that a
late maturing child will eventually catch up to and many times surpass the
early maturer in the changes associated with adolescence.
This means that the smaller, less physically mature child has the same
physical potential of playing Major-League baseball as the early-maturing
child. There is little correlation between stardom at the Little-League
level of play and stardom at, and beyond, the college level of play.
While maturation rates may explain some of the difference in youth-league
performance levels coaches and parents should avoid pigeonholing players
into positions because of physical features that may simply be a byproduct
of differences in maturity levels between players.
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