Driveline Baseball Interview, Part 4: The MLB Swing Revolution

Swing Revolution

Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: Much of the Statcast stuff with swing is stuff that was already coming out of Driveline. Could be a long answer, but what do you see is still not yet accepted in the game that will change offense?

Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: Baseball is way behind in utilizing technology, especially compared to other sports. There are many pro teams where the front office knows one thing from Statcast data but the coaching staff has a different way of teaching. The helpfulness of launch angle and exit velocity should be pretty much universally accepted yet there is still a good amount of pushback on whether it’s useful, which seems ridiculous.

This isn’t necessarily Statcast-related but in order to translate training to in-game situations, athletes need to be challenged more. Most of baseball practice is well below the kind of challenge you would see in-game and that’s an issue. For us that usually means trying to hit off a high velocity pitching machine or practicing hitting sliders or curveballs. If you take a step back and realize that the best pitchers you are going to see at almost every level throw harder than average and have one above average offspeed pitch, then you should probably practice hitting high velocity and offspeed.

Our Hitting Director, Jason Ochart, does an awesome job tracking and monitoring our athletes to see how they’re getting better. In the end, having Statcast data gives athletes measurables to shoot for.