Friday Baseball Nuggets
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-- You can learn a lot about Monte Lee by watching him conduct practice.
Preparation in baseball is a lot different from football or even basketball, so there's a lot more of a low-key approach to who watches practices.
Clemson's practices have generally been open to the public over the years, so the media can come in and watch too. Earlier this week we spent a couple hours watching the Tigers practice, and while the routines were mundane the interactions between Lee and his players were quite interesting and revealing.
Jack Leggett was as close to a micromanager as you can get. That's not necessarily all bad, because the details matter and there were plenty of positives that came from him being such a stickler.
Lee is a dramatic change from that. But that doesn't mean the team spends an entire practice joking around. This particular session was a mix of the serious and the fun.
During one particular sequence, his fielders were working on pickoff plays and defense with runners on. The outfielders are typically the base runners during these segments, and when a couple of them didn't do a very good job of presenting a game-like look (one taking too big a lead and getting there too early, and the other giving half-hearted effort and not leaving soon enough), Lee spent about a minute giving a stern lecture on the importance of game simulation.
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