WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 4: (AFP OUT) Employees sit in front of computer monitors at the command center of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters, shortly before a visit by U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) on August 4, 2017 in Washington, DC. Trump visited FEMA headquarters to receive a briefing on the hurricane season. (Photo by Michael Reynolds - Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, DC – AUGUST 4: (AFP OUT) Employees sit in front of computer monitors at the command center of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters, shortly before a visit by U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) on August 4, 2017 in Washington, DC. Trump visited FEMA headquarters to receive a briefing on the hurricane season. (Photo by Michael Reynolds – Pool/Getty Images) /
Fans have been enthralled by the home run spike in MLB since the second half of 2015. While many things are being debated, one area seems overlooked – improved training in MLB athletes.
The home run spike in MLB has accompanied a significant increase in the average velocity in pitches thrown. Over the last 15 years, the average velocity of pitches has climbed 3 MPH. The number of pitchers throwing 100+ in a season used to be one or two, and now every team seemingly has one or two pitchers on the MLB roster that can reach back for triple-digit velocity.
While many have theorized that perhaps a change in the ball or the bat has been responsible for the increase in home runs, many MLB players have begun to seek out the assistance of private hitting instructors and specific baseball trainers who are focusing more on smart training to improve baseball play, not just have a player look good in his uniform as many personal trainers that a player could hire at his local gym may provide.
A number of private instructors have really become quite well known through their work with hitter swing path and hitter approach at the plate, but a few places are working on the whole player, from training the body to training the mind to learning the mechanics of the game in such a way to both maximize performance of the game and minimize injury and/or damage from the game. One of the industry leaders in that realm is Driveline Baseball. Driveline’s research associate Michael O’Connell was gracious enough to field a number of questions and provide some excellent insight into exactly what Driveline is doing in their part of training a better baseball player. Because much of the question on training starts at a young age, many of the questions focus on training of high school and younger athletes in this interview.
We will be breaking these down in the following way:
With that, we’ll start with today’s focus on what is next in baseball training and development.
What’s Next
Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: Easy question, possibly longer answer: what’s next?
Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: The first thing would the the tracking software that we are currently rolling out. In the past we’ve run all of our tracking of athlete results in Google Sheets, our lead throwing trainer Matt Daniels made the system originally. It still works but it has some difficulty scaling to the number of athletes that we currently see. So we decided that we should create our own software. Kyle hired Dwayne St. Arnauld to be our project manager for the software development and rollout and it’s been great. We’ve gotten a bunch of employees testing out the software and giving feedback so we can create something we’re going to use everyday.
It’s going to be much easier to look at the results of one athlete and importantly for the research team it will be easier to look at a large group of athletes data at once. It will streamline a bunch of work that we’ve been doing which is fantastic. All of our new athletes that come in are going on the software and once we get everyone in, we’ll be using machine learning and AI methods to improve results.
This is going to be great for productivity and is going to give us a much tighter feedback loop for athlete results. We’ll be able to look closer and see much more specifically why athletes respond differently to our program and how we can make small tweaks to make them better. We hope to open up the software to facilities and other groups that use our training as well. So we’re looking forward to doing that this fall.
We are also looking to move beyond data driven blog posts and we are looking to get papers in peer review journal. We’ll still have blog posts using the Motus sleeve and other projects but we are aiming to move bigger projects to be published. For examples of what we will still be putting on our blog, two of our research interns just finished up their summer projects. Kyle Lindley wrote about his experiment with EMG sensors in pitching and Anthony Brady wrote about what he found looking at brain activity in hitting.
This is really exciting because we are fortunate enough to have an elite selection of athletes who are very willing to do almost anything we ask them to do. We want to use this to help make public as much information as we can to help other coaches and athletes. We also want to be open source as much as possible, which means publishing the raw data along with the results. This is something missing from current literature that we really hope will open up some doors.
Much of the current baseball literature is completed on high school and some college athletes, so it’s hard to tell how those results translate to professional results. Does a paper looking at internal rotation and elbow extension look the same with an athlete’s throwing 75 as athletes throwing 90? We hope to answer that question. Research Assistant Joe Marsh & biomechanist Matthew Wagshol have been leading the charge on the biomechancis work so far and it’s really exciting to be a part of.
First off, I want to again thank Michael for his thoughtful and thorough answers that have been published throughout this week! It was an absolute pleasure to delve into the topic and to have such open and honest answers was exceptional to work with.
On today’s topic, I have to admit, being a guy who loves statistics and statistical models that the idea of software as Michael is describing with professional athlete inputs would be absolutely remarkable to be able to use to begin discovering what variations lead to different performance positives and negatives and also to injury issues and frankly to injury prevention in some athletes who have a body that can withstand “abuse” that other arms melt under.
Having the wearable tech data on players that would give an idea as to why a guy like Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson can throw hard into his 40s with minimal time missed and other guys break down before ever reaching the majors would be an incredible thing to begin to start translating down the line in training – an absolute revolution on the horizon!
