Welles Park, an urban playground of closely cropped baseball diamonds surrounded by busy city streets and hemmed in by chain link fences, bears little resemblance to a palm-fringed Pacific atoll.
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And Little League baseball would seem an unlikely model for cybernetics, the science of automated control systems that in the 1940s grew out of the first antiballistic missile tracking systems.
Coral reefs and cybernetics aren’t mentioned at all in a manual on coaching the outfield published by a group of Welles Park parents this summer. But those two topics are integral to the manual, used so successfully it is attracting attention from as far away as Cleveland and California.
Mike Lieber, author of the simple, 15-page how-to booklet, said he wrote it as an outgrowth of his own frustration.
Several years ago, at age 49, Lieber found himself working as a outfield coach for his 6-year-old son’s team, and with nothing to teach them. Whatever skills and knowledge of the game he once possessed had long since atrophied.
“Most parents are like me,” said Lieber, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and resident of the Welles Park neighborhood. “They don’t really know much about baseball, and they’re too embarrassed or afraid they’ll teach the wrong thing if they try to coach.
“That’s too bad. A lot of kids’ leagues suffer because there isn’t enough adult supervision. And nowadays more than ever parents should be involved with their kids’ activities.”
Lacking baseball knowledge, he relied instead on his skills as an observant social scientist to help coach his kids.
Lieber has spent a career studying the fishing society of 500 Polynesians who live on a remote South Pacific atoll called Kapingamarangi. His work on Kapingamarangi is noted for applying cybernetics as a way of looking at human organizations and behavior.
His professional experience started to pay off at the very first outfield practice he presided over.
“I knew I was in trouble at my first practice,” Lieber said. “Mainly I was lining the kids up and tossing them balls just to keep them occupied.”
He said he never noticed a kibbitzing old man from the neighborhood who watched him and the kids struggle for some time before speaking up.
“The kids are all right-handed,” the old man blurted out, startling Lieber. “Tell them to keep their right foot a half-shoe length behind the left when they bend to catch the ball.
“That way, their right elbow won’t hit the right when they stand up to throw.”
Lieber had his boys and girls try out the man’s advice, and it worked. Turning for more advice, Lieber said the man had disappeared.
The experience, however, made him recall how years earlier he had collected and described the traditional Kapingamarangi fishing lore. It involved cataloging hundreds of fish species native to the atoll, their seasonal appearances and habits and the indigenous fishermen’s gear and methods.
Doing so was a painstaking process of ferreting out the fishermen most admired by other fishermen and getting them to talk about what they knew.
Lieber began patiently looking for workable coaching methods that were easily passed on from coach to child, like respected elders in Kapingamarangi pass on traditional fishing knowledge to their inexperienced youth.
The drill that really solidified Lieber’s coaching approach came from an out-of-town houseguest of his who turned out to be an experienced Little League coach from Honolulu.
Called “Cover the Turf,” the drill calls for the coach to throw the ball toward two fielders. The player closest to the ball goes after it, while another runs behind the first in case the first misses it.
In essence, one player backing up another becomes a self-correcting system. That happens to be a working definition of cybernetics. It can be applied to machines, like thermostats that regulate building temperatures. Or human behavioral techniques, such as an apology that can lower levels of anger and misunderstanding.
Lieber decided cybernetics turned out to be a pretty good approach to coaching daydreaming 6-year-old third basemen and left fielders who let slow ground balls dribble past them for home runs.
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“With kids as young as we’re working with, you don’t expect them to catch balls on the fly,” Lieber said, “but if you get them working together as a cooperative unit, you’ve done something.”