The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Boddy created regimens that combined elements from his self-education, most famously the pulldown drill, which became a staple of Driveline’s underload/overload velocity training program. One difference between Jaeger’s long-toss and pulldown regimen and Boddy’s is that winters are much less cooperative in Seattle than in Southern California, and space at Driveline grew tight. Boddy didn’t have access to open fields, so instead of throwing to a partner, his pitchers threw into the nylon net of an indoor cage.

  The athletes Boddy was training gained velocity. In 2016 and 2017, college pitchers who completed weighted-ball programs at Driveline increased velocity by 2.7 mph and 3.3 mph, respectively, when comparing their first bullpens to their last. (Although Driveline’s first peer-reviewed velocity study of weighted-ball effects in 2018 yielded range-of-motion gains in a six-week program, it did not produce overall velocity increases. The group that did gain velocity suffered no injuries.) Still, the practice drew criticism every time Boddy posted video of another athlete exceeding 100 mph on a pulldown throw. Boddy posted some of the common doubts and criticisms, including “How hard does [the pitcher] throw from the set position on the rubber? I bet this stuff doesn’t transfer.” And: “Yeah, but these guys are just spraying it and don’t focus on throwing strikes!”

  “None of it was embraced by any coach that I knew, none,” Boddy says.

  Boddy responded to skepticism with the story of Casey Weathers, a former star at Vanderbilt and a first-round Rockies pick in 2007. An elbow injury and complications stemming from Tommy John surgery had derailed his velocity and career. Unemployed and adrift, he e-mailed Boddy in March 2014, explaining that he was unsure of where to go and wondered whether Boddy could help restore his velocity. Weathers’s former college teammate, Caleb Cotham, a minor-league pitcher with the Yankees, had suggested Weathers contact Driveline. On his first day at Driveline, Boddy had him hurl weighted balls at max intent and also captured high-speed video and radar readings of his throws.

  “The look on his face after I told him to throw weighted baseballs as hard as he possibly could was pretty funny,” Boddy wrote. Weathers’s first max-effort, crow-hop throw with a regulation five-ounce baseball hit 93 mph. Three days after showing up at a facility unlike any he had ever visited, his top five-ounce velocity improved to 95.1 mph. After ten days, his velocity on a crow-hop throw had improved to 96.9 mph. After two weeks? 98.7. Weathers signed a minor-league deal with the Rays later that summer. Although he never advanced beyond Double-A, he did return to pro baseball, and with improved skill.

  The most common criticism associated with Driveline was a perceived increase in injury risk. Some pro teams have complained that pitchers training on their own with weighted balls have been injured, and Boddy does caution against employing weighted balls and max-intent practices without proper coaching and buildup of strength. He’s aware of the correlation between throwing velocity and Tommy John surgery, but he wonders how many of the pitchers who’ve been injured were built and trained properly and how many would have hurt themselves even with a different type of training. And while any pitcher can become a surgical candidate, very few pitchers are capable of pitching in the majors without elite velocity, which makes some risk worthwhile.

  “I’m not so arrogant to believe that we develop velocity the ‘right way,’” Boddy told a Baseball Prospectus writer. “But I think we’re open-minded and we do a lot of research.… From a macro perspective, I’m very concerned about injuries. We haven’t defeated the problem, and I don’t know if it is a defeatable problem.”12

  On Twitter, Boddy wrote: “The term ‘risk-reward spectrum’ is used disproportionately by those who are trying to only mitigate risk. If there’s one thing I learned as a professional gambler, it’s that far too few people maximize value and reward.… You can’t be risk-averse all the time, because the largest risk in athletics is opportunity risk in the form of Father Time and aging kicking your ass, unrelenting and unstoppable. You have to maximize output, and often that means taking outsized risks. Period.”

  In other words, maybe some pitchers will get hurt trying to throw 90 mph, but if they can’t throw 90, they’re probably not going to pitch for a Division I college, let alone in the majors. Mocking coaches that downplayed the importance of velocity training, Boddy tweeted, “‘Stop trying to throw hard! Just command it!’ *cuts player three weeks later and cites poor velocity as the reason*.”

  Boddy has always been brash and confident, which doesn’t make relationships easy. As with Bauer, the same stubbornness and self-belief that has contributed to his maverick success has also strained his relationships with the less enlightened. He has little patience for stupidity or laziness. If an employee asks him a question they could have found an answer to through a Google search, he’ll scold them. He’ll often engage in Twitter disputes, arguments, and challenges.

  Although playing the game is often a prerequisite for acceptance within the coaching ranks, Boddy is unimpressed by pedigree or title. He views degrees from prestigious universities on the résumés of applicants to Driveline almost as negative qualifications. On Twitter in the summer of 2018, he lauded Google and Apple for dropping college degrees as application requirements. Boddy wants to employ outliers; after all, he was one.

  In 2012, two years before Weathers arrived at Driveline and the same year Bauer was struggling through his first full professional season with the Diamondbacks, Boddy was still a relative unknown. In his day job, he was excelling: he had moved on from Microsoft to a software-development job, which earned him a $120,000 annual salary. But Boddy’s passions clearly were with Driveline, and that year he quit his lucrative job to commit to running his fledgling company full-time. It was an “outsized risk,” trading economic security for a paltry, poverty-level income, even though he had a wife, a child, and a mortgage. (Boddy describes his wife as “eternally understanding.”) In February 2011, Boddy had begun writing for the Hardball Times, a baseball-analysis website. The platform expanded his reach and exposure within the baseball-nerd community. He researched and wrote on topics like Tim Lincecum’s velocity decline and why it was wrong to bet against Blue Jays prospect Marcus Stroman despite his lack of prototypical size (he was right).

  Boddy caught the attention of Ron Wolforth, who complimented him on a blog post he had written. Boddy researched Wolforth and discovered that his most famous client was Bauer, whom Boddy had watched on TV as Bauer pitched in the College World Series. The ESPN broadcast had shown Bauer using his shoulder tube, and ESPN analyst and former All-Star Nomar Garciaparra had derided the routine as “odd.” Garciaparra said Bauer would not be able to continue with his exercises in professional baseball because of the injury risk. (Ironically, Garciaparra dealt with a number of injuries throughout his own career.) During the same telecast, former MLB player and future manager Robin Ventura had said Bauer was “only allowed to do all those things because he is so good.” Boddy found Bauer fascinating. In his first Hardball Times post, titled “Pitching mechanics, the uncertainty of data, and fear,” he cited Bauer, whom he had never met.

  “We must understand that what someone did to get to the major leagues is often what will keep them there—we should not fear things like Trevor Bauer’s unorthodox mechanics and training protocol,” Boddy wrote. “We should be amazed by them, and we should investigate them.”

  He saw that Wolforth hosted periodic coaching clinics, so he sent him an e-mail, asking to present some of his research. Boddy got on the schedule for the following year. He wanted to share a piece of primitive wearable technology: an arm sleeve, constructed from neoprene and parts of a Nintendo Wii console, that measured forces and stresses associated with the throwing motion.

  It was a clumsy device, as homebrew as his old PVC pipes, but it worked, measuring arm speed, rotation, pronation, and yaw, or twisting around a vertical axis. Although nothing came of the sleeve from a commercial standpoint, the project was valuable experience.

  “Anything I c
an do to understand first-principle stuff helps me learn other parallel things that are related,” Boddy says.

  He spoke twice over two days at the Texas Baseball Ranch in December 2012, lecturing about data collection and technology and presenting information from the sleeve and high-speed cameras. After his second talk, he was swamped with questions, including the one from Bauer about which memory card he needed for his high-speed camera. It was a humble beginning to a relationship that would alter not only the trajectories of their own unlikely careers but also the prevailing conception of what’s possible in baseball.

  Bauer’s and Boddy’s passion for technology brought them together. But their relationship deepened over another shared passion: the biomechanics of throwing. In 2013, his first season with the Indians, Bauer had grown concerned about pain he’d developed during the previous season with Arizona. Since then he’d been dealing with groin, back, ribs, and biceps pain and discomfort that he’d never experienced before. “It was very clear I needed to make a [mechanical] change if I was going to last ten years in the big leagues,” Bauer says.

  He had tried to mimic Lincecum, which was logical in that Bauer was also an undersized right-handed pitcher. But Bauer was well aware that in 2012, Lincecum had started to break down; he was finished as an above-average pitcher by age twenty-eight. “The long-term effects of moving that way and not being built muscularly or structurally to be able to handle that started piling up,” Bauer says. “I was on the same track [as Lincecum].”

  After the 2012 season, Bauer had begun to gather information on how he could clean up his throwing motion. In addition to meeting with a Stanford University doctor to get imaging done of his hip and shoulder, which had become part of his annual after-season routine—Bauer has an archive of his elbow and shoulder images going back a number of years—he had his delivery mapped by biomechanist Bob Keyes. Keyes found that while Bauer created an elite level of speed and energy down the mound, his posture was off. He had too much spinal tilt. As he released a pitch, his spine was tilting at 45 degrees toward first base, whereas Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens—the top pitchers Keyes had tested, pillars of durability and performance—were more erect, around 70 degrees. They also produced more hip-shoulder separation. Much like twisting a rubber band, the more the shoulders can turn relative to the position of the hips, the more energy is generated. Keyes measured Bauer at 52 degrees of hip-shoulder separation, but Maddux and Clemens had achieved 72 degrees.

  When Bauer was told he would not make the major-league team in the spring of 2013, he decided to rebuild his delivery. Initially, he kept the plan to himself.

  As he remade his motion, Bauer was a mess. In 138 1/3 innings between Triple-A and the majors, he walked eighty-nine batters. His fastball velocity fell from averaging 93.4 mph the previous year in Arizona to regularly sitting between 89 and 91.

  “All the coaches were super frustrated with me because I wouldn’t listen to anything they had to say,” Bauer remembers. “They would say, ‘You have to throw the ball down more.’… What’s the point? Until I fix my mechanics it does me no good to practice a skill. They didn’t understand that.”

  The front office sent minor-league pitching coordinator Ruben Niebla to Columbus to give a homework assignment to Bauer. The Indians wanted to better understand what he was trying to achieve. On the front and back of two pages of 8½-by-11-inch paper, Bauer drew diagrams and stick figures. He returned his homework the following day to the Triple-A staff.

  “They looked at me like I was from another planet,” Bauer says. Indians general manager Mike Chernoff still has the drawings.

  One point of contention was that some coaches wanted Bauer to extend his glove farther out in front of his body at foot plant, rather than tucking toward his torso. Those coaches were endorsing the traditional idea of equal-and-opposite balance of limbs in a delivery. “It’s just wrong,” Bauer says, growing animated to the point that he pounds a table and rattles a glass and silverware as he recounts the experience. “I don’t deal well with someone who doesn’t know as much about a subject as me trying to tell me what to do.” Bauer was arguing for “positive disconnection,” or folding his glove arm down and near his body as his throwing arm came through, a move designed to initiate and accelerate the twist of his torso and maximize rotational velocity, a key to increasing throwing velocity.

  After the 2013 season, Bauer sent a biomechanical mapping of his delivery to Chernoff to support his argument. Bauer and his father had attached reflective tape to key joints on his body and filmed his delivery. On the first video, it looked like dots moving through space. They attached another video revealing that those dots were actually Bauer throwing a pitch. It demonstrated that the optimum upper body rotational axis wasn’t around the spine, as some staff had argued, but the glove-side arm. It was likely the first such e-mail a GM had ever received from a player.

  After the 2013 minor-league season ended, Bauer knew the mechanics he wanted to build. Falvey had collaborated with him on some changes, but Bauer wanted to find new ways of implementing them. Though they hadn’t spoken much during the season, Bauer hoped Boddy might have answers.

  In October 2013, Bauer arrived at Driveline. Boddy had relocated the operation to suburban Tacoma, to the second floor of a facility named Clubhouse 71, which had previously held low-level Ultimate Fighting events in its main gym. Bauer describes it as an attic space complete with exposed steel I-beams supporting the sloping roof of the structure.

  Bauer had not intended to throw that day. But as Boddy spoke about possible solutions and drills, his words made so much sense that excitement surged within Bauer. He was wearing street clothes, including Nike Free running shoes. Nonetheless, he picked up a ball and took it to the mound.

  To improve his posture and add torque, Boddy told Bauer to hold a two-pound ball, an overload implement, in his glove hand and throw a pitch. The drill was designed to keep his glove side more elevated and his upper body back with less spinal tilt while his lower body moved forward. Boddy called the practice a “linear distraction.” The drill also forced his glove side to decelerate in the proper sequence because he was compelled to tuck the two-pound ball near his body as he began to throw, which increased his rotational velocity while keeping his head and body more in line with his target. He could feel the improvement immediately.

  Boddy then had Bauer work on a drill called a pivot pick, a Driveline staple. The pair moved over to a plywood wall, another homemade structure erected for athletes to pelt with sand-filled PlyoCare balls. The Plyo balls are weighted and feature a malleable PVC shell, which removes the feeling of throwing a baseball and helps pitchers throw without being bound by their baseball mechanics.

  Boddy instructed Bauer to begin perpendicular to the plywood board, with his right hand closer to it. His mission: to lift his right elbow to shoulder level and, without moving his feet, twist his torso until his chest was parallel with the board. From that position, he would throw the ball into the board as hard as he could. Bauer went through the drill. His hips turned. He threw at an awkward angle, his left foot pivoting as he slammed a Plyo ball into the wall with a thud. The drill created a twist in his core that Bauer could feel. It also reduced unnecessary arm motion and reinforced the concept of positive disconnection, forcing his glove arm to firmly tuck to his body to generate throwing force at the awkward angle.

  Rather than telling Bauer how to perform an action—the foundation of coaching in baseball for one-hundred-plus years—Boddy was allowing him to learn implicitly, through his own organic actions, which could then form the basis of more efficient and natural movements.

  “Most of the mechanical stuff I knew I wanted to do was through Bob Keyes,” Bauer says. “Bob didn’t have a whole lot of teachable drills or thoughts. Kyle had a way of doing it.”

  While most coaching advice comes via verbal cues, Boddy wrote on Driveline’s website that “we don’t take the time to examine their effectiveness and what we are asking o
ur athletes to do.… There is little evidence to suggest that having a coach tell a player he should change a movement pattern is effective in either immediately changing the movement or creating a lasting change.” He cited some commonly recycled coaching instructions and examples of accompanying confusion.

  “‘Use your legs more.’ Produce more force? Or move faster?”

  “‘Don’t fly open.’ Upper half or lower half?”

  “‘Stay back.’ For how long?”

  Stare at the target? “Another myth,” Boddy wrote. “Gaze-tracking studies don’t show that locking the eyes on the target has anything to do with throwing strikes.” Finish in a good fielding position? Also wrong. (It disrupts the kinetic chain.) Bauer appreciated Driveline’s learning methods and that Boddy was willing to question everything. After their first sessions together, Boddy wrote that Bauer “was able to reproduce an excellent high-level pattern that should set him up for vastly improved control, velocity, and health.”

  In Arizona in the spring of 2014, Bauer’s posture and rotational and linear separation improved. His velocity spiked. “I didn’t throw a pitch below 95 [mph] in spring training,” Bauer says. “Everyone freaked out and told me not to throw as hard during spring training and save it for the season.”

  He was recalled on May 20 for a start against the Tigers in Cleveland. His fastball averaged 97 mph, where it had topped out in college. On the season, his fastball averaged 94.9 mph—the ninth-highest mark among all pitchers who threw at least 150 innings and 1.5 mph harder than his average in 2012. Most important, Bauer’s body felt better. Although he had an uneven season—his 4.18 ERA was slightly worse than the 3.92 AL average for starters—it was the first year in which he had thrown the majority of his innings in the majors. Driveline had delivered tangible results. It became Bauer’s new off-season home.