Louisville Bats manager Delino DeShields gets his infield ready with a tennis racket

Delino DeShields retired from the big leagues following the 2002 season, but his impact on the game is far from finished. In 2011, he joined the Reds organization as manager of the Class A Dayton Dragons, and has since worked his way up to skipper of the Triple-A Louisville Bats -- where he's set about disrupting the fungo industry for good:

Yes, DeShields really runs infield drills using a tennis racket -- you can check out even more footage in the clip at the top of this post, captured by MLB.com's Mark Sheldon.

Delino DeShields uses this racket to hit ground balls to infielders. It's pretty neat to see. #reds pic.twitter.com/R6SDszH9CF

— Mark Sheldon (@m_sheldon) March 3, 2017

The logic behind it is actually pretty simple. As he explained to Sheldon, it helps speed things up:
"We don't have a lot of time [to practice] a lot of days, I get feedback from the kids and I wouldn't use it if they didn't like it. There's more than one way to skin a cat."
A bit unorthodox, sure, but we'll defer to the man who could do stuff like this at second base: