Step even just one foot inside the Williamsport Crosscutters clubhouse door and you'll see a bulletin board littered with information.
Thumb-tacked one-by-one, it's a schedule of events. It's a list of responsibilities. It's rules and regulations from the office of the Commissioner of baseball. It's a warning that there's going to be two kids - one dressed like a duck and one dressed like a penguin - racing around the bases following the second inning.
The bulletin board is there so manager Andy Tracy can keep workout schedules, pitching rotations and charting responsibilities for the players regimented and easy to follow. They want the players to be able to focus freely on baseball and not have to worry about whose day it is with the radar gun, whose day it is for early fielding drills or whether the infield drag by the grounds crew happens after the third or fourth inning.
It's a wall of structure for a team filled with first-year professional baseball players. It represents the things Tracy and the coaching staff doesn't want his players to have to think about. There's a focus in the Philadelphia Phillies' organization to turn the game back over to the players.
Most of them are coming from amateur teams - either high school or college - where they don't have to think for themselves anymore. Coaches relay every pitch call to a catcher and make all the defensive positioning calls from the dugout. That's not what the Phillies want for their minor league players.
"The whole game has been taken out of the players' hands," Tracy said during the Cutters' most recent homestand. "We're trying to make an emphasis in the organization to give the game back to the kids."
It's all a part of the process for Tracy and many players who are first-year professionals. It's a process Tracy has talked about since his first day in Williamsport. It comes with learning how to be a professional.
The Cutters' coaching staff doesn't want to hold the hands of their players to guide them through the season. They want the players making the decisions.
Of course, this means they're going to be some rough nights and Tracy understands that. That's just part of the reason these players are still in the New York-Penn League.
"They're taking to it," Tracy said. "They're making mistakes. But I think you learn through failure. That's a positive thing, I think. The positives are awesome, but when you make mistakes, I know for me I could think back to when I made a mistake and make the adjustment."
As manager of the youngest team in the NY-PL, Tracy said he expected to have to go over situations with many of the players who were selected in the draft last year out of high school. Where some of his surprise has come is he's also had to make the same points for some of the college players.
But it's the way of the amateur game. College managers are being paid big money to produce wins, not professionals. So they put the entire program and decision-making process under their control.
Williamsport pitching coach Aaron Fultz noted during the homestand that many college draftees are taught to pitch backwards in college (use the off-speed pitches to set up the fastball). It's a completely different mindset from what Fultz wants his pitching staff to do.
And even though he's trying to hammer that way of thinking out of his staff, it still rears its ugly head from time-to-time when pitchers get into trouble. They start going back to what is comfortable, and pitching backwards for years is what is comfortable over something they're just now learning and trying to implement.
"It's all they've ever known," Fultz said. "When you get out there competing, you forget about some things that you're trying to get to and you just try to go to what you were."
Tracy expounded on how the amateur game has changed since he was drafted out of Bowling Green in 1996. He can't ever remember coaches calling every pitch. He remembers having the obvious offensive signals and occasionally being positioned in the field by a coach, but otherwise, the players were on their own.
It's not that players today are lacking baseball knowledge, they're just not being taught the fundamentals of how the game is played.
"I don't think they're able to play the game free-minded. Things are controlled more," Tracy said. "So when they come here, we almost have to teach them all situational baseball - defensive stuff down to the offensive things - as opposed to them kind of knowing the general rules of baseball like in the past."
The goal is to have the players learn not just how to play the game, but how to understand the game and its situations. Making mistakes on this level is a good thing. Learning now means a less likelihood of making mistakes once they get to the big leagues.
"When they get on the field, it's time for them to use their mind and their ability," Tracy said. "Let it flow. Don't be so structured out on the field. Let them be the athlete that they are and what they were drafted for."
There's no piece of paper thumb-tacked to a bulletin board that can tell a player how to do that.
