A Chaining-Mastery,Discrimination Training Program to Teach Little Leaguers to Hit a Baseball

One of two little league baseball teams, consisting of boys between the ages of 8 and 12, was taught to hit a baseball using a chaining-mastery program extrapolated from the "Total Golf" (Simek & O'Brien, 1981) program. Following two baseline games and a baseline measurement session, 10 of the 12 boys on the experimental team participated in a chaining-mastery batting program, beginning with slow pitches from close to the batter and progressing to normal speed pitches from the regulation distance. Both game performance and a repeat of the baseline measures following Game 6 showed large increases in the number of hits. The control team showed no such increases. Following Game 6, a program of discrimination training for hitable balls (strikes) was instituted with the experimental team using a mastery approach to produce earlier discriminations of strikes from balls. Number of bases on balls increased for Games 7 through 10 after remaining stable for the first 6 games. For the control team, bases on balls increased during Games 3 through 6, but remained stable for Games 7 through 10. Batting averages revealed similar improvement for the experimental team from a baseline of .250 to .342 for Games 3 through 6, and .369 for Games 7 through 10, and no improvement for the control team (baseline = .281, Games 3 through 6 = .230, Games 7 through 10 = .230). Two members of the experimental team rejected the chaining-discrimination training program in favor of practice in "guided positive fantasy" for batting skills, which was provided by the father of one of the boys. These two boys showed little improvement on the dependent measures. The results suggest that a program of chaining-mastery instruction for batting and discrimination training for pitch selection can be effective in teaching little leaguers to hit.