Running an efficient Baseball practice is not as easy as it may appear, as there are literally hundreds of skills to be taught and learned in the game, and there is never enough time to accomplish everything you want.
Beginning of Practices: As soon as the player arrives at practice he should automatically pair up and begin throwing.
They should start out @ 40-50 feet apart, throw for a while, then extend their distance to 80 - 100 feet apart.
Once you feel they are loose enough to begin, let's not be silly about this, these are kids, they don't need a half an hour to loosen up, but it takes longer than 5 minutes, I would take the infielders and my a-Coach would take my outfielders.
It's a good idea to swap duties with your a-Coach from time to time.
It's not that you question his ability, but you as the Head Coach need to have a firm mental analyst of what each of your players is capable of in case you need to make a move during a game situation.
Other than the Pitching and Catching positions, any of my players could step into any position and play adequately.
They may be a natural born outfielder, but because of their strong arm they were also trained at 3rd base and possibly shortstop.
Depending on the time of season and what you decide may require the most work to improve performance, this part of the practice could be between a third of the practice time to a half.
In the beginning of the season, we would then turn to batting practice.
My catcher would suit up, the players scattered to their respective positions and I would throw batting practice.
Here's a situation where the age of the players, your personal thoughts on the subject and your personal abilities come into play as far as deciding whether to do this exercise this way or not.
I know coaches who totally disagree with this method while performing baseball practices.
They maintain their pitchers need the "game feel" of throwing to the catcher with a batter in the box.
Throwing to a catcher on the sidelines is not practice enough.
They also maintain the batters need to be accustomed to a pitcher the same age and size as they are.
They say the batters get a false sense of security because I'm throwing which they won't have when they face an opposing pitcher.
These are all valid points and as I have said from the beginning I don't know it all and I'll try to give you methods different than I teach.
This is one such situation.
I liked to pitch batting practice because I did have better control, more swings in less time per hitter.
I could move the ball around seeing if a hitter had a particular strength or weakness which I could coach on immediately.
As my players aged, I had a better curve ball than most of my pitchers and it really didn't matter if my elbow hurt the next day from throwing 50 curve ball or not.
Again, I could coach the hitter as I threw.
Telling him what differences to look for in the ball movement, rotation or my arm positioning, as I announced which pitch I was throwing.
I did experiment with players throwing batting practice.
It may have been due to my type of competitive attitude coaching style, but I found my pitchers trying to strike batters out.
Not my idea of batting practice.
Baseball Practices are suppose to be just that.
There's two methods to consider.
You're the coach.
As an after thought.
In between batters reaching the plate, I'd always throw two pitches in the dirt for my catcher to practice blocking.