During baseball season there’s no rest for the weary

There’s no denying the grind that is high school baseball.

Seven games in six days is not uncommon as teams make a mad dash to get in all 35 of their allowed total for a season.

Is it too much? Is it time to draw back the number of games and focus more on practice and developing the fundamentals of baseball?

The majority of coaches are in agreement on the subject.

“If we’re playing more than four days in a row it’s tough,” said Glenbard North coach Rich Smelko. “But I think everyone would rather be playing than practicing. Kids want to compete.”

In many ways baseball is a unique entity in high school sports. The majority of the preseason is spent indoors — not exactly the best place to work on flyballs.

In fact many teams don’t even step on a baseball field until their first game because of the iffy early-spring weather. Teams literally hit the ground running when their schedule begins, and they don’t slow down until it ends in June.

Unlike football or basketball, there is never a buildup to a game. Scouting is rare, and preparation for specific opponents is practically unheard of until the playoffs.

From April to June, it’s just game after game after game. While many other sports take it easy during Spring Break, baseball gets after it even more. Last week several teams played five varsity games on top of the junior varsity contests they played as the second half of doubleheaders.

It’s a sport that looks in desperate need of a break, but no one seems to want one.

“It’s a little bit of a grind, but I’ve never felt like it affects the caliber of play,” said Wheaton North coach Dan Schoessling. “It might be nice to get more time to work on things, but you get better at the game by playing it more.”

Because Wheaton North gets out of school at 2:15 p.m., the Falcons are able to get on their field well before the standard 4:30 p.m. start time. It’s almost like getting in a practice before a game.

Neuqua Valley also gets out of school early, which allows them to get in a full workout before home games. Even on days they play on the road the Wildcats have time to work on their hitting before jumping on the bus.

“What I enjoy about the game is playing the game,” said Neuqua Valley coach Robin Renner. “You may get more practices with fewer game days, but I don’t want to be practicing in the middle of the season and neither do the kids.”

Renner admits, though, that certain intricacies of the game fall through the cracks with no practice time. When an unfamiliar game situation presents itself, sometimes you just have to rely on good old-fashioned common sense.

“A lot of times you’re coaching on the fly and stuff happens that you haven’t gone over before,” Renner said. “In order for you to be a good team, your players have to have a lot of baseball sense because a lot of times they’ll have to react on their own.

“That baseball sense comes from playing games,” he said.

Like the natural improvement in all sports, baseball teams will be playing much better in late May than they are right now. The question is whether the level of play would be even higher with a practice thrown in every once in a while.

Unfortunately, there’s no time to dig for an answer because everyone’s caught in the whirlwind of playing games every day.

It’s a discussion that’ll have to wait until the next rain delay.

“It’s definitely a whirlwind,” Schoessling said, “but if there’s something we really need to work on, we’ll find a way to work on it no matter how many games we’re playing in a row.”

kschmit@dailyherald.com