- #True stretch cage on craigslist software#
- #True stretch cage on craigslist plus#
- #True stretch cage on craigslist series#
Boddy’s training worked, and Weathers signed a minor-league contract with the Tampa Bay Rays.īut Boddy’s most valuable collaboration would be with Cleveland Indians pitcher and fellow iconoclast Trevor Bauer.Ī self-described terrible natural athlete, Bauer’s childhood coaches trained him in unconventional methods he’d carry into the majors. After working with Boddy for two weeks, his fastball had risen to 98.7 mph. When he first arrived, Weathers was throwing at 93 mph. He wondered if Boddy could help get his pitching arm into big league shape.Īt Driveline, Boddy put him to work throwing weighted balls while recording and analyzing the results with high-speed video. He was contacted in 2014 by Casey Weathers, a former baseball star at Vanderbilt and first-round draft pick whose career had been derailed by injuries. “None of it was embraced by any coach I knew,” Boddy says in the book.īoddy, who made Driveline his full-time career in 2012, would soon be vindicated. Integrating hard throws of weighted balls into his training, he found that his pitchers increased their hurling velocity by 7 miles per hour.īut whenever he’d post a video of his training online, he’d be met with derision, with posts like, “I bet this stuff doesn’t transfer” and “Yeah, but these guys don’t focus on throwing strikes.” Optitrack cameras in Kyle Boddy’s lab show how quickly a player moves, with green being the fastest, red the slowest. He ignored them at first, since weighted balls weren’t used to train pitchers, as they were believed to increase the risk of injury.īut Boddy, employing a scientific approach, did his research and learned that the few studies on the subject had shown the opposite.Īfter moving to a larger facility in 2011 and becoming the strength-and-conditioning coach for a local youth-baseball organization called RIPS Baseball, he now had players who could test his theories.
His approach got a boost when a set of weighted baseballs was delivered to Driveline by mistake. He created his biomechanics lab for around $2,000.īoddy advertised on Craigslist for athletes to train, but given the primitive nature of his facility, he could only accept a few people at a time.
#True stretch cage on craigslist software#
He re-tooled inexpensive software to suit his equations, and in order to create these equations, the college dropout also taught himself linear algebra.
He installed a batting cage, brought in barbells, and built a 3D imaging cage out of PVC pipe. Marques Gagnerĭefiant, Boddy rented a space next to a trailer park, negotiating cheap rent by helping care for the entire facility. Trevor Bauer was the first person to buy an Edgertronic camera, which slows down a player’s movements, making them easier to analyze.
#True stretch cage on craigslist plus#
By the following year, he wanted to test new methods, which he could only do with his own biomechanics lab.īut with costs into the six figures plus no experience as a scientist or engineer, there was no way for him to create one.
#True stretch cage on craigslist series#
“The MVP Machine” (Basic Books), out now, tells how a series of new tools, advanced statistics and technology are changing the game of baseball, led by innovators like Boddy.īoddy started a blog on the subject, Driveline Mechanics, in 2009. Players would throw a ball or swing a bat, and coaches watching from the sidelines would provide feedback on changes the player could make to improve. But many of the topics he was learning were foreign to most in the sport, such as biomechanics and concepts like “the kinetic chain of the athlete.”įor most of baseball’s history, player development was informal, left up to the human eye and a veteran’s judgment. “Why wouldn’t this be accepted? It’s just obvious that having the most runners on base makes the most sense,” Boddy says in the new book “ The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players” by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik.īoddy “devoured roughly 30 books and 120 papers about athletic training” in one year, intending to train baseball players. He couldn’t understand the resistance of Little League coaches - the first to shape young players - to getting kids on base as opposed to swinging for the fences and hoping for the best, the approach that was long in vogue.
He coached Little League baseball in his spare time, using a cautious approach based on drawing walks and increasing on-base percentage that earned him the derision of rival coaches.īoddy, who had pitched in school, was taken with how the old ways predominated in the sport regardless of their effectiveness and the “glaring lack of knowledge, data and objective methodology when it came to training athletes.” In 2006, Kyle Boddy was a 27-year-old college dropout who had just left a server job at the Olive Garden for one in tech.
0 kommentar(er)
