Improvements in training the final frontier in MLB performance

Baseball-specific training

Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: One concern I have heard from scouts is how early young athletes focus solely on baseball and hurt the natural growth of their body. Is that something addressed in Driveline’s training at that age?

Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: There is definitely some concern to youth athletes specializing in baseball too early. We encourage youth athletes to take 3-4 months off from baseball/throwing a year, which means the few that we work with we only see in the winter. We also don’t see that much year round playing of baseball in the Northwest just because of the weather. (Writer’s note: Driveline Baseball’s headquarters is in Washington state.)

Beyond the physical stress of throwing year round, there is the mental burden that often isn’t talked about. A lot of Soviet research saw that really early specialization (10-12) cause mental burnout at ages 18-20.

There is a lot of nuance involved in where an athlete wants to or should specialize in a sport like baseball that is often missed especially once you start discussing high school athletes. Overall youth athletes (younger than high school) should try to play multiple organized sports and if they truly only want to play baseball, then some time off from throwing, like I mentioned above. Once athletes get to high school it gets a bit more complicated.

For high school athletes you want to know how big and developed they are compared to their peers, what sports do they currently play, do they want to play in college (and what level), how good are they right now etc. So it’s a bit more complex than everyone should do X. Unfortunately most of the ‘play multiple sports’ talk confuses correlation with causation. A bigger stronger 15 year old is going to have all sorts of coaches wanting him to play different sports for them, not so much for the 5’2” 15 year old. In reality playing multiple sports doesn’t make a better athlete, the better athletes are getting more opportunities to play multiple sports.