★[Team Building] Speaking Up and Calling Out

In baseball, coaches often tell players to 'Speak up!' or 'Your voices are too quiet!', but there are many cases where players speak up without fully understanding why they are doing so.
Indeed, strong teams are very vocal, and their voices have enough intensity to overwhelm their opponents, with content that is meaningful.

Knowing the benefits of speaking up, as well as the timing and content, will lead to improved team performance.

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🥎　The effects of speaking up

◉　Alleviating fear

There are experimental results showing that when humans feel fear, they are more likely to return to a calm state of mind if they shout.
Also, since fear is an emotion that is strongly imprinted on the brain, errors and failures have a characteristic of being psychologically repetitive, especially during games.

In such cases, just speaking up has the effect of reducing the image of failure and alleviating fear and tension.
However, extreme tension can sometimes cause a player to lose their voice. This can be prevented by training to speak up during regular practice.

◉　Promoting calm judgment

You hear the voice you produce with your own ears, which allows you to recognize your own feelings and situation (self-awareness). This awareness has the effect of preventing your mind from going blank.
By speaking up yourself, you can recognize the situation you are in and keep your thoughts calm even in a state of tension.

◉　Facilitating communication

For example, when a fly ball is hit between fielders, who should catch it? Communication by speaking up allows for a smooth response. Especially at this time, calling the other person's name or position makes it clear who you are speaking to.
Also, when a teammate seems flustered, calling their name can make them feel that 'their presence is acknowledged,' which can be a trigger for them to regain their composure.

◉　Improving performance

There are experimental results showing that muscle output increases by 5-6% by speaking up. You often see pitchers on TV broadcasts shouting after they throw; this is to increase that muscle output.
Shouting has the effect of taking in more oxygen and loosening up muscles.

However, you need to be careful, as focusing too much on speaking up can sometimes cause your attention to the game situation to wander.

◉　Increasing concentration

Humans are equipped with a braking instinct where psychological limits come before physical limits in order to prevent bodily damage (the gap where even if your head thinks you cannot exert any more power, your muscles actually still have some capacity left).

By speaking up, you can release the brakes created at this instinctual level, shake off distractions, and increase your concentration.

◉　Creating a sense of team unity

Human thoughts become ideas, turn into words, and are output as voice. Even if the entire team shares the same mindset, it is difficult to create a sense of team unity if it is not expressed through voice.
The sense of unity created by speaking up generates a 'flow' (a psychological sensation) during a game. Even when losing, you can play with an atmosphere as if you are in the dominant position (a psychological sensation that you are superior to your opponent).

However, we do not ask for people to just shout blindly. Rather, we try to prevent unnecessary noise (e.g., just making noise for the sake of it).
When should you speak up? We will share this with all players through meetings and the like, so that highly effective communication can be performed when necessary.

In baseball, 'speaking up' is often done to create energy, such as saying 'Let's go!', but as an important meaning of speaking up, beyond just creating energy,
voice for predicting the next play, preparing, and confirming
is prioritized as a team.
It is important to communicate by having a 'conversation' rather than just 'voice,' and through this, individuals and the team can recognize risks in advance and prepare for them.

🥎 100% Confirmation

Since mistakes are part of baseball, we perform actions like covering in defense, for example, to minimize the damage caused by those mistakes.

At this time, if you become careless or overconfident, thinking 'Surely we won't make a mistake (in this situation)...', you will neglect the covering that should be done when the time comes.
Even if you have acquired the movement of covering in daily practice, it remains a manualized movement, and it leads to situations where:
● You don't know what to do when an unexpected movement is required...
● The position you go to cover is poor, and you end up letting the ball pass behind you.
(There was no point in going to cover)
This is not a technical problem, but something that can be sufficiently executed if you have the awareness (it has nothing to do with whether the team is strong or weak).

◉ Self-confirmation + Team-wide confirmation

To cultivate the ability to recognize and avoid such risks in advance, it is important to constantly worry about and continue to confirm possible risks, such as:
Always pay attention to your surroundings (is there anything unusual?)
What will you do if there is a mistake? Assume it
Assume how to respond if the opponent uses a strategy (stolen base, hit-and-run, squeeze, etc.)
and so on.

Confirmation is done by: ① first confirming in your head what you should do, and ② then calling out to teammates to ensure nothing is missed and confirming with each other.
By doing this, the team can maintain a state of always performing
100% confirmation
. For 100% confirmation, calling out plays an important role.

🥎 Calling out during offense

● Confirmation of out count
● Confirmation of base situation
● Confirmation of opponent's defensive position
(e.g., if playing in, they are aiming for a throw home)
● Confirmation of baserunning judgment according to the situation
(e.g., should the runner on 3rd go or stop on an infield grounder?)
● Confirmation of signs (however, so that the opponent does not find out)

🥎 Calling out during defense

● Confirmation of out count
● Confirmation of defensive formation/coordination (relay plays, etc.)
(e.g., with a runner on 3rd, is it a throw home or to 1st?)
● Prediction of batted ball direction and situational judgment
(e.g., with a runner on 1st, confirm response to a ball hit to the right)
● Prediction of opponent's strategy/alert points
(e.g., 3rd baseman alert for bunt, 2nd baseman/shortstop alert for stolen base)
● Confirmation of signs (however, so that the opponent does not find out)

↓ 'Calling out before the play' by case is...

※ Call out even the obvious things

Especially, no matter how obvious you think something is, it is important to call it out every time so that you do not neglect confirmation.

Even for plays that are highly likely to be successful without calling out, calling out and confirming can increase the probability even further.
Also, even in the same situation, it is necessary to change the content of preparation based on the reactions of the batter and runner, and at that time, the calling out of even obvious things plays an important role.

🥎 Calling out during practice

Since it is quite difficult to suddenly start calling out during a game, it is important to do it from daily practice. It creates a good atmosphere in practice and allows players to level up together (a team culture is formed where problems are not left as they are, but solved on the spot).

◉ Calling out to share problems and judgment criteria

Regarding the various plays performed during practice:
● For mistakes, call out on the spot what should have been done.
● For good plays, speak up and offer praise.
By doing this daily, the team will share a standard for judging "what kind of play is good and what kind of play is bad."
This "shared standard of judgment" will definitely prove useful during split-second plays in games.

◉ Encouragement to overcome tough basic drills as a team

For example, with running menus,
"It's just tough..." "I wonder when this will be over..."
When doing menus that make you think this, it is very difficult to overcome the hardship individually without a very strong will, and it is easy to slack off when no one is watching.
At times like this, by creating an atmosphere in practice where the whole team pushes each other hard and calls out "Nice run!!" when finished, you can turn "individual grueling practice" into "practice that the whole team overcomes together."

◉ Encouragement to make everyone a participant in practice

Also, during practice where the batter is the main focus, such as batting practice, other players—the fielders, the batting pitcher—tend to just wait for their turn, thinking, "I wonder when my turn will come..."
To make this more meaningful practice where everyone is a participant, it is basic to approach it with the mindset of:
Fielders ⇒ Fielding practice
Batting pitcher ⇒ Pitching practice
However, by having all players involved in the practice "speak up" or "offer advice or encouragement" to the batter, the team's awareness toward practice can be raised, and the practice will become more active.

By permeating this kind of atmosphere during practice within the team, the commitment to practice increases, which leads to an improvement in team strength.

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