Jun 18, 2016 5 min read

Wild Things catcher Eddie Sorondo remembers the first start of his sophomore season for Delaware State’s baseball team.

Sorondo memorized the game plan, knew his pitcher’s tendencies and repertoire, and studied the opponent’s batting lineup. He was ready to play.

It also was the first time in Sorondo’s baseball career that he was given the go-ahead to call his “own game” as a catcher. He had never called the pitches when he played in the youth leagues, high school, summer leagues or his freshman season in college. Sorondo was finally free to signal for the pitcher to throw a fastball, curveball or change speeds. Whatever pitch Sorondo thought would work, he was to call that pitch.

So when the game began, Delaware State’s starting pitcher stepped on the mound and looked at Sorondo for his sign for the first pitch.

What did Sorondo do?

“I looked into the dugout,” Sorondo said with a laugh. “I was waiting for the coach to give me a signal. He saw me staring at him and said, ‘What are you doing? I told you to call the pitches.’ It was just habit. After all those years of coaches calling every pitch for me, I naturally turned and looked into the dugout and waited for a signal.”

Sorondo is a rare breed of catchers in that he was able to call pitches for three seasons in college before playing professional baseball. The biggest change in amateur baseball games over the last 30 years has nothing to do with aluminum bats, but rather with coaches at every level calling every pitch of every game for their pitchers.

“From the time they start playing travel ball until they get to the pros, players don’t have to think for themselves,” Joliet Slammers manager Jeff Isom said.

Watch any college baseball game and the scenario is the same. The catcher looks into the dugout as a coach touches his head, nose, ears, mouth and chin in some sequence. The catcher then looks to his wristband, on which is a chart used to decode the coach’s signals. The chart tells the catcher what pitch the coach called. The catcher then relays the pitch selection to the pitcher.

“I have a hard time watching the college game and tempo is why,” Wild Things manager Gregg Langbehn said. “When you have coaches calling every pitch, that’s why games go three hours.”

The coach-to-catcher-to-pitcher chain slows the pace of college and high school games to a crawl and does little to prepare catchers for professional baseball, where they have to call each pitch.

Both Langbehn and Isom spent multiple years as managers in the lower-level minor leagues and they had to help almost all of their catchers learn how to call games. It didn’t matter if the catcher was straight out of high school or had played four years of major college baseball, he likely had never called pitches.

“In five years as a manager, and 10 years overall, in the Houston Astros’ system, I had only one catcher who had ever called pitches before he reached pro baseball,” Langbehn said. “That was a catcher from UNLV.

“From personal experience, college kids are the hardest to teach from a player development standpoint. When in college, they don’t have to think for themselves. That’s because everything is micromanaged.”

Micromanaging games is all part of amateur baseball these days. College baseball is more popular than ever, and more and more schools are sinking big money into ballparks and salaries for coaches. It means the pressure to win is greater than ever, which leads to coaches controlling every aspect of the team, including calling pitches.

“You understand why they’re micromanaging,” Isom said. “The coaches are worried about their jobs. If the team doesn’t win, then it’s the coach who is going to be gone. There is so much pressure to win in the college game today.

“College coaches are all about winning. They feel like they’re smarter than everybody else. That’s another reason they’re calling pitches. College, high school, travel ball, it’s all about winning. In pro ball, at the rookie and Class A level, is about player development.”

Coaches calling pitches from the dugout in the independent Frontier League is rare. Generally, the rule is the manager or pitching coach will suggest an occasional pitch but usually leaves it up to the catcher to call the game.

One exception in Washington was in the team’s initial season of 2002, when Isom was the Wild Things’ manager. It didn’t last very long.

In Washington’s debut game against Canton, Isom recalled that it was decided that assistant coach and former major leaguer Kent Tekulve would call pitches. When the first Coyotes hitter stepped into the batter’s box, Tekulve flashed a signal to catcher Shaun Argento, a player with three years of pro experience. Argento then called for a different pitch. Tekulve tried again before the next pitch. Again, Argento called a different pitch.

The message was clear.

“That was the end of that,” Isom recalled. “(Argento) didn’t want anybody calling his pitches.”

Argento went on to call Jason Hickman’s no-hitter that season. It was the third Frontier Legaue no-hitter Argento caught in his career, which remains a league record.

And Argento called every pitch in each of those no-hitters.