In my 45 minute interview with Kyle Boddy, President and Founder of Driveline, we touched upon so many areas I have broken the interview into 3 parts with Part 1 running today. In later portions of the interview you will hear a draft time story about Mason Miller that Boddy was hoping he would have occasion to tell, he will ponder how small market teams can best compete using the kind of expertise Driveline offers, and the proverbial much much more…
First and foremost I want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, longtime A’s fan and friend Margie Kahn for transcribing my interviews and making it possible for me to publish them reasonably quickly – or in this case probably at all. Without her this doesn’t get published, so thank you Margie!
I hope you enjoy part I. Parts II and III will run as they are transcribed, but whether that is sooner or later they will not be forgotten.
Nico: I want to learn a bit about the ins and outs of Driveline. I guess my starting point would be, we’re A’s fans here, and if the A’s were looking at their pitching staff and wanted to recommend a couple of pitchers to go to Driveline, on what basis would you make that recommendation of who could most benefit or need the services?
Boddy: That’s a great question. I coached against the A’s a bunch in A ball when I was with the Reds, so Lansing was in our (league)…so I got to see quite a few of the younger guys. The A’s have historically drafted a lot of ’command first’ arms, that’s what they do. They like guys who throw strikes, value that over stuff in the draft. So that’s a good fit, guys who throw strikes and have pretty decent “pitchability,” but they have trouble maintaining guys at the highest level due to lack of stuff. That’s an area we can help significantly with.
Nico: So, I think that fans’ perception of Driveline is that you work with mechanics to help guys throw harder, but I know it’s a lot more nuanced and complex than that. Can you talk about some of the parts the fans may not be so familiar with?
Boddy: Yeah. We do a ton of work with command, we’re probably the leading experts in that. It’s just that command as a whole is much further behind stuff. Stuff is very simple. I wouldn’t say easy to develop, but it’s like everyone understands if you throw 100 MPH and you throw a slider that moves a lot, that’s good. That’s pretty simple.
Then you just gotta figure out how to develop those things. So we did. We spent over a decade figuring that out. But realistically it’s not too complicated – mix and match algorithms. But command I think is something that people haven’t done a great job of studying. It’s quite hard. What is good command? If I throw a pitch right down the middle, if I want to throw a pitch 0-0 we call it, right down the middle, what is my average miss distance?
No one knows, like how good a pitcher is throwing, because strikes and balls are totally different, it’s not the same way as you measure command. So, for example, if I’m 0-2, a really bad miss is not the same as a bad miss on 3-0. So you can’t always evaluate pitchers based on if they throw strikes or not, you want to figure out where they throw strikes and what pitches do they throw strikes with, and do they throw into the right zones.
Then the big thing that you don’t know is what we call intended versus actual. So, if a pitcher throws a pitch and it’s a ball, you would assume that that’s a bad pitch. But was he intending to throw it there? Because if he was intending to throw it there and he hit there, then that’s good command. That’d be a bad decision but it’s good command.
So we developed a thing called the “intent zone tracker” and we can actually track how good players are at hitting the spots. They signal their intended location and they throw the pitch and we measure the average miss distance, and we have thousands and thousands of these pitches now, and so for every level. Youth sports to high school to college to minor leagues to big leagues, we can measure the intended distances. And from that we can plot how good are you at throwing a fastball up, for example, compared to how good you are at throwing the slider away.
Maybe you have better what we would say “lower miss distance” on the slider away than you would on the fastball up. Well that means that you’re more consistent at throwing the slider away for a strike or for the intended location than you are a fastball up. And that’s really valuable information for a pitcher to know because if he wants to throw a strike and needs to throw a strike in this count, then what location is the best chance of a strike. So that’s the kind of stuff I think people don’t know a lot about Driveline.
We definitely tweet about it, we’ve patented it, we’ve written about it, we sell it to colleges, and despite all that people just want to talk about weighted balls, which I understand. It takes time to be known for something different.
But I think people forget about Driveline that we had the first overall draft pick last year, and it was a position player (Travis Bazzana). He’s trained since he was in high school and he went 1-1 to Cleveland and he’s a second baseman. He’s a good player, and people just kind of still associate us with pitching, which is funny considering on the hitting side we’ve probably had more growth than anything else.
Nico: Yeah, we don’t hear as much about that. License to brag: what are the success stories that you’re most proud of?
Boddy: Really, Travis Bazzana, first overall pick, is a great story. He came out of Australia, not known for baseball, went to Oregon State, obviously not just a great baseball school but great development school, they really care about developing their players and they have. They’ve just done a great job developing their players. So he spent 3 years there, got better every single year. Got drafted first overall, which is so validating because we started our hitting division 7-8-9 years ago, and everyone thought we were stupid for getting into hitting.
So that was really cool, to see it culminate in that. And our director of hitting also, he works for the Red Sox, and they have the number one farm system, bolstered largely by the position players. So Marcel Mayer, Christian Campbell, Roman Anthony, David Hamilton, Wilyer Abreu, some of the great young players. He’s done a hell of a job. So I’m there with the Red Sox, been there about a year and a half now, and it’s been a fun advisory role.
I don’t really do any of the work, it’s all those guys who do the work. But the growth of the hitting has been awesome to watch, and I know that this isn’t necessarily a hitting podcast but I did want to say that’s been the coolest thing to watch over the last 3-4 years is that the hitting stuff we’re seeing take off and our sales are great, and we don’t feel like we have any competitors on the hitting side. We think we’re the only show in town, which is pretty damn cool.
Nico: We have a lot of readers who have kids who are anywhere from little league to high school, college. So is there an optimum age or moment in someone’s career where you see the best window to get involved with something like Driveline?
Boddy: Yeah. We have an academy program here, so we have teenagers, as young as 12, and that’s great because it’s not like we’re doing velocity programs with 12 year olds or anything like that, it’s just we can control their player development. It’s the parents who want the development first program, not necessarily trophies. Although our teams are quite good. It’s more about how do we set good habits and see if they like it.
Now, if you don’t live in Seattle and there’s no academy teams, what I would say is the best time to get your kid involved in a program like Driveline is when they’re old enough to commit to, “Okay, this is the sport I want to play in college.” Like if they want to play at the next level, that’s what I would say. So you want to start around 15-16, a little bit older, because they should play multiple sports growing up. You shouldn’t force them – I don’t think you should force kids to do anything really, but I do pretty firmly believe in forcing kids not to play baseball year round.
That’s hard to deal with in the south, in areas of good weather year round. But for me there’s all this research showing the physical benefits of taking time off. I don’t disagree with that, I think that’s all true. More importantly, though, what I see a lot because my cousins were elite soccer players and they got burned out from playing year round, and they started to hate soccer toward the end of their amateur career.
And that’s what I worry about is the mental health, psychological effect of making kids play year round, never giving them escape from something. What people have called, and I wish I could credit the person who said it first, the professionalization of amateur sports. It’s a real problem. We’re turning these 12, 14, 16-year-olds into professional athletes, and not literally by the NCAA NIL rule, although that is true too, it’s more like we have perfect game rankings, we have streams of all the games, we have, it’s not, kids aren’t ready for that kind of stress, pressure, expectation.
It should be fun. There should be competition, should be about winning and losing, should be emotion in the game, no doubt. They should play baseball, they should play basketball, they should play hockey, they should play chess, they should play Magic The Gatherer, they should play computer games. They should do many things, and that’s what I feel strongly about. I know that wasn’t the question, but I think it’s really important to do at a young age all the way up until they’re like 15-16.
It’s like “Hey, kid’s pretty good at a bunch of things but he’s really good at baseball and he’s ready mentally, psychologically, to commit to playing only baseball, focusing on baseball.“ That’s when I think you want to get them involved in something like Driveline.
Nico: Year-round baseball has been linked or suggested as one of the things in life causing pitcher injuries among youth. The other one, of course, is the pursuit of velocity. What are your thoughts around the rather alarming increase in pitcher injuries and where it’s coming from, and also what Driveline can do to help?
Boddy: I think one of our biggest products that no one talks about is Driveline Pulse. We bought Motus the company (a sports sensor platform) and it’s a wearable that people wear, all of our youth players wear it, and that measures the number of throws and measures stress and it’s proven to reduce injuries, proven to measure work loads and so really make a dent. Probably 8 major league teams have partnerships with us and they buy our products and they use our software to help reduce injuries, and it works. There’s no question about it. And yet very little has been written about it.
But this isn’t to blame baseball writers or anybody. What it is, is what do you hear the most about? Do you hear about how to prevent cancer? Or do you hear how to cure it? Right? And there’s no conspiracy, I’m not one of those people, but the cure is always much more interesting than the prevention because the prevention of a lot of diseases, prevention of a lot of injuries is about go to sleep, get seven hours of sleep, eat right, diet, exercise, do all the boring s***. Nah, I don’t wanna do that, you know? Don’t throw so much, don’t play year round, whatever.
And then suddenly we want to talk about it when they get injured. It’s the years before that. Are they lifting correctly? Are they lifting weights? Are they staying away from blue light at night? Are they getting enough sleep? What’s their nutrition like at home? It’s no one thing to solve the injury problem, it’s like if we’re not taking care of all the small stuff, that’s a big problem.And the velocity thing is an issue, but at the end of the day, people are gonna get what they incentivize, so there is tons of injuries in all the other sports due to increasing velocity of many other ways.
For example, in football there is obviously the concussion stuff that’s really deplorable, that’s being covered up in the NFL, but there’s also tons of ACL injuries, tons of noncontact injuries due to prioritizing speed. We want players to run faster, we’ve prioritized sprint speed. And what we’re seeing are a lot of levels of microfractures, a lot of levels of serious injuries to the lower body in soccer, football, track, a bunch of other sports. This is just what happens when you push bodies to the limit.
And so for as long as running fast and throwing fast are beneficial in your sports, we’re gonna get that. It can’t be about “Hey, we should throw slower and we should learn to pitch.” It’s like guys who throw slower and do that likely work at Costco. That’s the reality of the situation. So we can’t tell parents and we can’t tell people that just don’t care about these things, that’s just not reasonable. It doesn’t line up with economic sense. How can we do a better job promoting the holistic understanding of prevention and understanding how we can monitor work loads, not only help set them up for success later in life to stay healthy, but also what actually is best for their performance.
Because if we can say that, and we really can, that’s what will get people to listen. So I think that’s kind of the message. It’s a complicated message, no doubt. I’ve done a bad job explaining it here. But because it’s complicated, it’s easier to be, “Hey, we throw hard, we should stop throwing hard, that’s what get people hurt.” Okay, you’re not wrong, but why do people throw hard? Do they throw hard because they like seeing the number on the board, or do they throw hard because that’s what college recruiters and scouts are looking for?
And if doing something would make you better at your job but could cause potential increased risk, a lot of adults would do it. Like why do you work 2 hours of overtime every day, every job, when you’re trying to get ahead and get a promotion?Well, I think I just explained it. It’s like the same kind of thing. Driveline does focus on a lot of it, and the pulse product is I think our #1 weapon against it. And major league teams are seeing adoption, colleges are adopting it more and more, so I feel confident that it’s going to get into the mainstream media over time.