“It was stuff like, ‘Improve your command.’ How’s a pitcher supposed to go into the off-season and improve his command? He needs a drill. He needs to know how to measure if he’s getting better.” Branch Rickey had understood this, forbidding his managers from criticizing a player’s mistakes without telling him how to correct them. “It isn’t enough to tell a youngster that he strikes out too much—he knows that as well as the manager,” Rickey’s comrade Fresco Thompson wrote. “What he must be told is how to reduce his number of strikeouts.”
