Maybe you played ball growing up, maybe you didn't. Either way you've got twelve kids, nine spots on the field, and a parent in a lawn chair who is keeping track.
So you do what everybody does. You keep a list. You rotate who sits, straight down the roster, and at the end of the year the innings come out even and you figure you did right by everybody.
I thought that too. Then I actually checked.
What I did
I ran a whole season through a computer. Twelve kids, twenty games, six innings a game. Three sit every inning, and the bench rotates straight down the list — the way you'd do it on a legal pad, because that's the only way you can do it in your head while a game is going on.
And I made this pretend coach fair as a judge. No favorites at all. When it came time to put nine kids on the field, the computer just threw them out there at random. No "he's my shortstop." No "she can't catch." Nothing. Nobody has ever coached that even-handed in the history of the game.
The innings came out perfect
Every kid: 90 innings. Not about 90. Exactly 90, all twelve of them.
If somebody audited that season, they'd shake your hand and go home.
Now look at where those kids were standing.
| Player | Innings | Innings in the infield | Times at shortstop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ben | 90 | 43 | 18 |
| Cole | 90 | 37 | 5 |
| Kai | 90 | 47 | 11 |
| Jude | 90 | 31 | 7 |
Ben played shortstop eighteen times. Cole played it five. Same team, same season, same innings.
Kai spent 47 innings in the infield. Jude spent 31. Sixteen fewer — and if you were only counting innings, you'd swear those two boys had identical years.
That same season, Ben pitched nineteen innings and Eli pitched six.
I figured maybe I just got a bad roll of the dice. So I ran it twelve more times. Every single season, the innings came out perfect. And every single season, some position went to one kid three to eight times more often than a teammate. The closest the infield ever got was a nine-inning gap. The worst was nineteen.
Nobody cheated. There's no bad guy in this story. That is just what chance does over twenty games when nobody is watching the position column.
Why it matters more than the innings
Ask a ten-year-old if he had a fair season. He is not going to say "I got ninety innings." He's going to say he never got to play infield, or that he was stuck out in right field again.
Kids don't count innings. They count positions. So do their parents. Nobody has ever walked up to that fence and said "my kid didn't play enough." What they say is "my kid always plays right field."
So the one number we all keep track of is the one number nobody is actually upset about.
And it won't look fair on any given Saturday
There's one more thing underneath this, and it's worth knowing before it happens to you.
Being fair across a season only looks fair across a season. Any single game, by itself, is going to look lopsided — because the way you even things out is by giving a kid a good day after he had a thin one.
But a parent only sees one game. They see today. They have no idea their kid played three innings at shortstop last Saturday. And they're not wrong to notice today. They just can't see the rest of it.
Which means you can be doing this exactly right and still get cornered in the parking lot with nothing to show for yourself. That matters, because the natural move — evening out today's game so it looks good from the bleachers — is the thing that wrecks the season.
What to actually do about it
None of this takes an app. It takes counting something different.
- Write down positions, not just innings. One more column. Even a tick mark every time a kid plays an infield spot will catch what the innings column hides.
- Keep the same sheet all year. Most of us start a fresh page every Saturday. The unfairness doesn't start fresh. Clear the page every week and you can be careful twenty times in a row and still finish the season with a kid who never left the outfield.
- Move the positions around too, not just the bench. If the bench rotates down the roster but the positions don't move with it, the same kids keep landing in the same spots. Whatever order you use for who sits, use a different one for who plays where.
- Have the number before anybody asks for it. When a parent comes to you, "it evens out" doesn't end the conversation. "Through eight games he's had eleven innings in the infield, same as everybody else" does.
And if you've got a big roster, this gets harder, not easier. Sixteen kids means there are 11,440 different ways to pick who sits in a single inning. The guys who need a system the most are the ones with the least chance of holding it in their head.
Or let something else count it
READY builds your fielding rotation and batting order in one tap, and keeps track of every inning every kid has played at every position all season — so you've got the number before anybody asks. It also does the thing this article is about: infield and outfield innings are counted as their own totals and balanced across the season, weighted above everything but bench time, so the gap Kai and Jude ended up with never opens in the first place. Free on the App Store, and free in any browser.
Or open READY in this browser
The season above was run through the same rotation engine the app uses. Both coaches got the identical roster, schedule and rules — the only difference was how the field got filled. Written by Rick Paauwe, who coaches youth baseball in Livermore, California.