Paul Mainieri coached 41 years of college baseball, from Air Force to Notre Dame to LSU and most recently at South Carolina. When he retired, he was the active leader in career wins in Div. I with 1,533. His teams won 46 championships, including the College World Series with LSU in 2009.

Alex Bregman was thought of more as a catcher prospect. He had caught the whole summer before he came to LSU. I had told him during the summer to catch for your summer team, but take ground balls at shortstop every day and let me decide whether or not you can do it there.
I only use him as an example because the first day we went out there, he displayed to me that he had the natural instincts to field the ball. The ball just had a way of finding the pocket of his glove on a consistent basis.

There’s the old traditional way that we all grew up learning to field a baseball. Great balance and your left foot slightly ahead of your right foot.
Then the Hispanic influence came to America, and they started fielding the ball with their left-foot back, and a little bit more flash.

But the infielder I think revolutionized how to play infield defense was Ozzie Smith. What Ozzie did was he just attacked everything. He fielded balls on the run all the time. When you field a ball on the run, you are attacking the ball, and you might not catch it before the next bounce, but you certainly can get it on a short hop. And short hops are easy to catch. They look fancy to fans in the stands, but they are really easy to do.
The other thing to do is, once you’ve caught it, you’ve shortened the throw to first base. So if you’re adept at throwing the ball on the run, you have less chance for an error that way.

Just emphasizing making routine plays. My attitude has always been for infielders to be really aggressive and attack the ball. And that way their throws will be more consistent as well.

Outside of that, I don’t really have any major secrets. I had great infield instructors when I was growing up. I had a great college coach who worked with the infielders by the name of Tom Schwaner.

Bucky Dent was the shortstop for the Yankees, and he had played for my father in junior college. I was 12 when he played for my dad, and I thought Bucky walked on water. He was my idol and I had the eye-black and the wristbands just like Bucky, because I wanted to be just like him. When he was in the big leagues and would come back to Miami, I would literally work out with him in the off-season. So every day when I would take ground balls, he would give me little tips here and there, which obviously I passed on to the players that I coach.