The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  “The Royals do this today: they play seven minutes of catch every day, and a guy yells out 60, 90, 120, and every time he yells, you move back to 60, 90, 120 feet, and that’s it,” Boddy says. “It’s amazing that that is still a fucking organizational philosophy, but it is. Don’t throw the ball over 120 feet? OK, well, you throw it from shortstop to first base over 160 feet. You do the math.”

  In 1998, Baseball Prospectus created a pitch-count-based metric called Pitcher Abuse Points, which the site claimed could help predict injury and which set one hundred pitches as the point at which pitchers began incurring abuse. Sports Illustrated published an article asserting that increasing young pitchers’ workloads by twenty innings or more from one season to the next made them more susceptible to injury. Boddy says that while rules began to emerge about pitching, they were not rooted in science. And they were not working.

  By the end of the 2018 season, Hardball Times analyst Jon Roegele’s Tommy John surgery database contained 1,651 entries—and although the surgery was forty-four years old, half of the surgeries on professionals had occurred since April 1, 2012. No one understood precisely how to slow the epidemic of elbow injuries. “Sixty percent of what BP wrote was false,” Boddy says. “Not in a malicious way, but we lacked the statistical rigor to ascertain whether these things are true or false.”

  During his third-shift work at Microsoft, in an open row of desks under fluorescent lighting, Boddy devoured roughly thirty books and 120 papers about athletic training over the course of a year. He was teaching himself to be an expert at training baseball players by learning the fundamental concepts on which a theory, system, or method is based.

  This process is rooted in the thinking of Aristotle, who called it reasoning by first principles. It was an idea instilled in Boddy as a child by his father, who worked for a time as an electrician for British Petroleum and at NASA’s Glenn Research Center when Boddy was growing up. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is also a proponent. During a TED Talk interview in 2016, Musk explained how his process of innovation begins by boiling “things down to their fundamental truths and reason[ing] up from there.”1 This method, Musk argued, is far superior to reasoning by analogy, “which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations.”

  When Musk began researching how to build a rocket, he told Wired,2 he put aside conventional methods and approached the problem with a fresh perspective. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles.… What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2 percent of the typical price.” SpaceX was born.

  Baseball was similarly in need of fresh thinking. When Boddy began his research, coaches and teams generally had been copying what other people did with slight variations for more than a century. Little original thinking had been done on what actually mattered in talent development. Now Boddy wanted to learn about biomechanics, about the kinetic chain of the athlete, about increasing mobility and strength. About the building blocks, the first principles, of revolutionizing player development.

  Mike Marshall, the 1974 NL Cy Young winner, became a significant influence. Marshall had a PhD in kinesiology and used what he learned to apply Newtonian physics to pitching, resulting in unconventional mechanics. Marshall believed that if he could run an entire professional organization, he would get “eight to ten more miles per hour from every pitcher.”3 That idea fascinated Boddy. Marshall enlisted unusual training practices (including a high volume of throwing) and unusual implements (like wrist weights and plastic javelins) to promote, as Boddy wrote on his blog, “a straight driveline towards the target,” with no twisting of the pitcher’s hips toward second base. The driveline was one of Marshall’s favorite concepts, and Boddy borrowed it to name his blog, which he began in October of 2009 and maintained despite a small audience. Later he named his business Driveline Baseball.

  In his highly technical book Coaching Pitchers, Marshall addressed the power of deceleration and wrist-weight training. He believed that if a pitcher’s brain did not think his decelerator muscles could handle the force generated during the delivery, it would subconsciously limit throwing velocity. Marshall wrote, “If drag race cars have the ability to achieve five hundred miles per hour in a one-quarter-mile track, but the race track has a two-thousand-foot cliff only one hundred feet past the finish line, then the question is: Can the drivers stop the cars within one hundred feet? The question that their cerebellum asks baseball pitchers every time that they try to release their fastballs at higher velocities is: Can the muscles… safely stop their pitching arm within the distance between the release and when the pitching arm fully extends straight forward toward home plate? Baseball pitchers must have big brakes!”4 Marshall had his pupils train with wrist weights to increase the braking abilities of muscles in the arm. They would also become a staple of Driveline training.

  Marshall’s critics wondered why, if he had broken the code of pitching mechanics, all of his pitchers didn’t throw 90-plus mph. Glenn Fleisig of the American Sports Medical Institute (ASMI), one of the few biomechanics labs in the country that collected data on pitching mechanics, was a Marshall skeptic. Since 1990, Fleisig had studied two thousand pitchers, ranging from the youth level to major-league all-stars. Using markers attached to the pitchers’ bodies that tracked the movements of their limbs, he could compare and analyze deliveries. Fleisig and ASMI believed healthy, elite major-league pitchers had developed the best mechanics and that therefore those pitchers should be studied and copied. Marshall wasn’t convinced that making the majors proved that a pitcher possessed exemplary mechanics.

  Marshall brought some of the pitchers he trained to ASMI to undergo biomechanical exams and have their mechanics compared to the elite group of major-league pitchers Fleisig had recorded. Though Marshall’s pitchers were similar to Fleisig’s group in shoulder rotation and elbow extension velocity—key kinetics in velocity creation—they threw with far less velocity.

  Boddy theorized that there was a break in the kinetic chain of the Marshall pupils. Marshall believed in “powerfully pronating” pitchers’ forearms to protect the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL). Boddy suspected that pronating slowed a part of the kinetic chain, which begins when a pitcher’s foot hits the ground, creating a force that works its way up the body from the largest parts to the smallest.

  Boddy could reason from first principles and boil down velocity creation into simple physics. For instance, velocity began from the ground up. “The legs generate force through ground reaction,” he wrote. The pitcher’s front leg strides and plants in the ground. His pelvis then rotates around the front leg, generating rotational momentum, and the pitching arm follows like the end of a whip.

  “Anyone familiar with cracking a whip can tell you that the ‘looseness’ of the whip is what creates the miniature sonic boom at the end of the whip,” Boddy wrote. “If you were to make a segment of the whip stiff, it would break the smoothly flowing energy of the kinetic chain down the whip, causing the final velocity of the tip to be much lower than it normally would.”5

  Boddy had other influences, including former powerlifter Eric Cressey, who worked with a number of major-league clients and who aided Boddy’s understanding of how to train. Boddy studied Soviet sports science. He was forming theories, too, but by 2010, he knew he needed to test them to turn them into athletic law. Much of the information he was seeking simply did not exist.

  This is a common problem for innovators. To test something completely new requires the construction of new diagnostic instruments. Consider the case of the most famous of all Ohio-born entrepreneurs, Wilbur and Orville Wright. After a failed attempt at flight in the fall of 1901 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wrights were despondent. “It was not just that their machine had performed so poorly, or that so much still remained to be solved,” wrote their bio
grapher, David McCullough, “but that so many of the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations and tables… data the brothers had taken as gospel—had proven to be wrong and could no longer be trusted.”6

  Wrote Orville in his diary: “We knew that it would take considerable time and funds to obtain data of our own.… We had to go and discover everything ourselves.” So they returned to Dayton, Ohio, and built a six-foot wind tunnel to “crack the code of aeronautics themselves.”7 Boddy wanted to crack the code of pitching. To do so, he needed the equivalent of his own wind tunnel. He needed a biomechanics lab.

  Boddy wanted his lab to be capable of conducting three-dimensional analysis. There were limits to two-dimensional analysis based on video, which Boddy didn’t regard as true biomechanics research. Baseball action occurs in all three planes of motion: frontal (front and back), sagittal (left and right), and transverse (up and down). A state-of-the-art biomechanics lab carried a six-figure price tag, but Boddy believed he could construct one for hundreds of dollars, not thousands. Like Musk with his rockets, Boddy would build on a budget.

  How do you build a cutting-edge biomechanics lab from scratch? Boddy decided to go straight to the experts. He called ASMI.

  ASMI researcher David Fortenbaugh, a graduate of Rocky River High School in an affluent suburb not far from Parma, listened patiently as Boddy explained what he was trying to create. It was, Fortenbaugh explained, an impossible task. That was before he learned that Boddy wasn’t an engineer or an orthopedic surgeon or a doctor in sports medicine, but a college dropout.

  Boddy wasn’t deterred. First, he needed physical space, so he found an indoor facility next to a trailer park in north suburban Seattle. Boddy offered to maintain the entire facility in exchange for reduced rent on part of the space. He installed a batting cage and set up a weight room, which was just a set of dumbbells and barbells surrounded by chicken wire. He now had a space to train athletes within walking distance of his condo, and he would stay there for a year and a half. Next, he needed methods and technology to record forces like angular velocity—the speed of a point (or limb) rotating around an axis—and movements associated with the pitching motion.

  Boddy read about a method called direct linear transformation (DLT), which was pioneered in the 1970s to measure an object’s movement in three dimensions. To use the theory, Boddy had to be able to follow the math, whose equations looked like hieroglyphics.

  So Boddy taught himself linear algebra.

  After attaining a functional understanding of the math, Boddy built his markerless biomechanics lab. He first had to define the three-dimensional space in which he would observe his clients. To calibrate this 3-D space, he needed a reference object. So in October 2010, Boddy and Matthew Wagshol, a long-serving biomechanist at Driveline, went to a Seattle-area Home Depot. In a store aisle, they began building a cube-shaped skeleton of white PVC pipe to serve as a first subject. Before they left the store, they took a photo of the apparatus being built; visible in the background is a sign above a checkout counter that read “Do More, Have More.”

  They transported the cube back to the nascent Driveline. The plastic skeleton defined the 3-D space for the cameras and primitive software. Boddy measured its height and width and the distances to and from its joists and entered the dimensions into the DLT algorithm. Boddy and Wagshol then spent “countless hours using terrible software meant for graduate students that we twisted in so many directions to just spit out answers.” For about $2,000 in cash—“I wasn’t maxing out credit cards because I had done that in a previous life and ruined my credit,” Boddy says—and hundreds of hours of his time, he had his biomechanics lab. He could collect data on the movements of pitchers and eventually learn how to make those movements more efficient. “Real research involves testing your own theories using as many objective measures as you can find,” Boddy wrote. 8

  Pinned above Boddy’s office bathroom toilet today is a sign that says, “Being rigorous is like being pregnant: You can’t be a little bit pregnant.”

  Over time, Boddy learned that the lab had its limits, and the raw data meant little without context and regular snapshots of players’ progress. There were things the lab could not record, including pronation and supination of the arm. It would quickly become outdated. But having learned how to assemble a lab from the ground up, he could do it again, bigger and better.

  Boddy settled into a routine. In those early years he would take the bus home from the Microsoft office in downtown Seattle, grab dinner, and then walk to the facility to work in the evenings. He placed ads on Craigslist seeking athletes to train. Four days a week, he would give hitting and pitching lessons and, once a month, conduct biomechanics exams on each athlete.

  “It was horrible,” Boddy says. “The maximum number we ever had was eight athletes. For two years, we basically had an average of four kids.”

  No one seemed to notice his research, and he was again dealing with depression. But then he had some good fortune: a set of weighted balls was mistakenly shipped to Driveline. They sat in the corner of the gym for months. “I was cleaning out the gym, and I was like, ‘These have to get out of here,’” Boddy says. His then partner Jacob Staff stopped him. “I can [still] hear [Staff] saying, ‘You’re an idiot. You’re going to say this doesn’t work? You have no idea if it works or not. You’re intelligent and you’re going to say this? That’s embarrassing.’”

  Boddy remembers thinking, “Goddammit, he’s 100 percent right.… I am pretty sure it’s going to hurt people, but I will give it a fair look.” On a fundamental level, he says, “that’s how Driveline started. It was me taking the scientific method to everything and asking, What else don’t I know? Is lifting weights really good? Maybe it’s stupid.”

  Boddy searched for weighted-ball research and found a paper authored by University of Hawaii professor Coop DeRenne in 1994 that reported that work with weighted balls had improved velocity in high-school and college test subjects without any adverse health effects. DeRenne studied 45 high-school and 180 college pitchers who were randomly assigned to three experimental groups, including a control. The pitchers trained for ten weeks. The two groups that were exposed to weighted-ball training, including heavier and lighter balls, enjoyed velocity gains without increased rates of injury. If that result was repeatable, the training would revolutionize development, allowing pitchers to raise ceilings that were thought to be immovable.

  Boddy researched more of the science underpinning the concept, including Frans Bosch’s book Strength Training and Coordination: An Integrative Approach, about as dense a book as one can find about how the body works and gains athletic skill. Bosch defined weighted-ball-style practices as overload training, which utilizes implements that an athlete “is not yet equipped for and that call for adaptation.”9 The overload training tool that Bauer had already begun using, the weighted ball, would become closely associated with Boddy’s future company.

  Throwing a heavier ball—say, seven ounces—increases total force. When the pitching arm is cocked back to begin the throwing motion, in maximum external rotation or lay back, the ball feels heavier. The body adapts to manage the greater total force. But overload training could also be paired with underload training in a complementary, two-pronged approach that could improve total force and peak force. The underload ball enables the arm to move much faster, creating a higher peak force that ultimately determines throwing velocity. Strengthening the body with heavier balls and greater total forces allows it to take on greater peak forces.

  To many instructors, overload training seemed inherently dangerous. Still, some, like Cressey, had challenged that assumption as early as 2009, when he noted that the weight of a baseball (five ounces) was three times lighter than that of a football (fifteen ounces) but that quarterbacks suffer far fewer arm and shoulder injuries than pitchers, despite possibly throwing even more often. A typical set of weighted baseballs ranges from three to eleven ounces. “If you increase the weight of the imple
ment [in this case, the ball], you slow down the arm action,” Cressey wrote. “If you slow down the arm action a bit, the deceleration demands drop—and it appears to be more arm-friendly.”10 In 2017, Fleisig tested a hypothesis at ASMI that “ball and arm velocities would be greater with lighter balls and joint kinetics would be greater with heavier balls.” He found lighter balls did produce faster throws and arm velocities, but the second part of his hypothesis was proven wrong. Overweight balls produced “decreased arm forces, torques, and velocities.”11

  But such studies, and data on player-development practices in general, were rare.

  By 2011, Boddy had moved Driveline Baseball operations to a larger location, the site of a former grocery store, and had accepted a position as the strength and conditioning coach for RIPS Baseball, which trained players and ran youth select teams in Seattle. He now had access to dozens more athletes. He gathered forty-four junior-high and high-school pitcher volunteers from RIPS Baseball to test what he called his MaxVelo Program, which incorporated “advanced deceleration drills, connection balls, plyometric training, high-speed video analysis and rhythmic stabilization methods.” The results were eye-opening.

  The control group of fourteen pitchers practiced on their own, in most cases not very intensely. They collectively suffered a slight velocity decrease during the test, falling from an average of 70.8 mph pretest to 70.3 mph posttest. The second, basic group followed a routine throwing program. Its members averaged 68.1 mph pretest and 70.3 mph posttest, a 2.2 mph gain. The MaxVelo group of ten pitchers engaged in an assortment of training practices that Boddy had come to believe in, including deceleration training and high-speed-video analysis. That group averaged 72.0 mph pretest and 79.1 mph post test, a remarkable 7.1 mph gain.