Baseball's offseason isn't what it used to be. Meet the company at the center of the transformation.

Boston Globe

29-01-2025

But now, that view has been widely turned on its head.
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'Players now view offseasons as a chance to get better as opposed to rest or stay the same,' said Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer. 'The offseasons are focused on developing a new pitch, gaining velocity, whatever it might be. Before, guys didn't come in throwing 2 miles per hour harder or with a whole new pitch. Now it happens all the time.'
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That transformation owes in no small part to the rise of independent baseball facilities that challenged traditional approaches to player development and offseason conventions. Of those, one stands out for its reputation and impact: Driveline Baseball.
Driveline has emerged, in the words of founder Kyle Boddy, as 'the best data-driven player development system in the world, in any sport.'
'Its influence is pretty profound,' said Pirates general manager Ben Cherington.
This offseason, 55 big leaguers and 175 additional professionals (minor leagues, independent leagues, foreign leagues) flocked to one of the company's three facilities — a flagship location in the Pacific Northwest, a second in Phoenix, and a site in Tampa that opened this offseason — to train.
Additional players consult with Driveline staff while training remotely.
Big leaguers pay between $5,000 and $10,000 to train at Driveline in the offseason, and spend as much as $40,000 for full-season services, while minor leaguers spend $3,000 to $6,000.
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Established stars now regularly train with Driveline. Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Clayton Kershaw, Nolan Arenado, Xander Bogaerts, Kenley Jansen, and others are past or present trainees. Meanwhile, teams regularly hire Driveline staffers as coaches and front office members.
More than 50 former Driveline staffers have been hired to work in professional baseball. The Red Sox have hired nine people from Driveline — more than any other team —
The jerseys of some of the major league players who train at Driveline Baseball are displayed at the Kent, Wash., facility.
Jason Redmond for The Boston Globe
The Kent, Wash., facility resides somewhat unassumingly next to a cosmetics supply company in an industrial park about 6 miles from the Seattle airport. But in roughly 44,000 square feet of space, it offers a training atmosphere that not merely reflects the state of the art, but defines it. Elements include:
▪ A high-performance strength and conditioning area with a combination of strength tests that Driveline has refined to identify maximum exit velocities or pitch velocities.
▪ A Dexa (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry) scan machine to measure bone, fat, muscle, and tissue density for more precise physical assessments.
▪ Numerous cages for hitting and throwing, all outfitted with technology to track exit velocities and launch angles as well as pitch velocities, movement, and locations, including the newly developed 'Intended Zone' product, which uses a touchscreen to identify a pitcher's intended location, then shows actual location on a screen behind the plate, while measuring the distance between the two.
🎯 Intended Zone Projector Bullpens 🎯
90 seconds of very good command for a high school pitcher across three pitch types.
What do you think the average miss distance was for this session? 🤔
High school average is about 22", for the record.
— Kyle Boddy (@drivelinekyle)
▪ A warehouse area where the company stocks its considerable training equipment, from weighted bats and weighted balls to Pulse monitors to track player workloads and apparel.
▪ Office space for onsite and remote meetings with players as well as Driveline's baseball operations and R&D efforts.
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▪ Screeching servers and tech stacks to power a baseball Death Star.
The Driveline Launchpad is the home of serious motion capture analysis and much more. 🚀
Our Launchpads don't solve a Sports Science problem, they solve a baseball problem.
A singular place for pitch design, biomechanical analysis, swing tracking, competitive batted ball…
— Kyle Boddy (@drivelinekyle)
▪ And perhaps the signature area of the facility, the 'Launchpad,' which features a mound and batting area with force plates, 28 motion capture cameras (16 aimed at the batter's box, 12 at the mound), eight slow-motion, Edgertronic cameras, as well as HitTrax to measure ball flight from a pitcher and hitter. The entire area is synched with an auto trigger that Boddy designed, with customized software that integrates the visual and statistical data being captured by the technology.
'It's hard to describe everything we're doing unless you see it,' said Boddy.
Driveline Baseball's Kent, Wash., facility is roughly 44,000 square feet and offers a training atmosphere that not merely reflects the state of the art, but often defines it.
Jason Redmond for The Boston Globe
Driveline comes from humble beginnings. Boddy, after coaching Little League and high school baseball, started the company in 2008, when he became frustrated by the lack of evidence-based research on how to help players improve.
Puzzled by the absence of discussion about player development in 'Moneyball' and inspired in part by 'The Art and Science of Pitching,' co-written by
Boddy discovered peer-reviewed academic research demonstrating that throwing with balls of varying weights improved velocity. He replicated both the studies and results.
While his amateur client base could be counted on one hand for his first two years, his research — along with explanations of his program's success on a blog and Twitter — started to garner notice. Struggling professional pitchers began finding their way to Boddy as a beacon.
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'When you're an outcast yourself as a player, why not choose an outcast facility?' mused Boddy.
Two of the first two minor leaguers to do so — Ryan Buchter and Caleb Cotham — broke through and reached the big leagues. Success snowballed. So did Driveline's development programs, which began drawing big leaguers while the company began expanding.
Driveline's competitive training environments shook up the monotony of baseball's offseason.
Jason Redmond for The Boston Globe
Righthander Adam Ottavino, for instance, went to Driveline after struggling to a 5.06 ERA in 2017 (a jump from his 2.84 from 2013-16). He wanted to do pitch-design work using advanced technology near his New York home in the offseason, and spent a week at Driveline to lay a foundation.
There, Ottavino received an education in how to use some of his own technologies, and worked to develop a cutter while refining the shape of his sinker and slider. The following year, he was a late-innings monster, with a 2.43 ERA and 36 percent strikeout rate.
'The atmosphere at the time was a little bit hard to explain — loud music, people really getting after it, kind of underground. But you could tell that people were really bought into what was going on,' said Ottavino. 'They were measuring everything. That was the first exposure I really had to that.'
Driveline's competitive training environments shook up the monotony of the offseason. Instead of going through the motions, players competed with each other and themselves to post personal records in any number of statistical measures — strength gains, fastball velocity, or running pull-down throws into nets.
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'Competition is a massive aspect of everything we do,' said Driveline director of hitting Tanner Stokey. 'It's really important for gym culture. It's really important for results.'
Driveline Baseball was founded in 2008 when Kyle Boddy became frustrated by the lack of evidence-based research on how to help players improve.
Jason Redmond for The Boston Globe
Driveline offered not merely technology but a sense of possibility that drastic improvement was within reach. Players are fueled by the ambitions, intellect, and round-the-clock work ethics of employees who were pushed by Boddy to seek new ways to propel player development and to translate data-fueled findings into easily digested information.
There have been disappointments and there are skeptics. Boddy and others affiliated with Driveline weren't shy about critiquing conventional development methods and pitting themselves against the establishment.
'We don't try to be [an affront to traditional baseball], but yeah we are. That's just how it is,' said Boddy. 'Progress doesn't start inside the teams. It has to be an external force, because baseball is hard to change. Baseball's greatest strength is its history and its tradition, and its greatest weakness is its tradition and its history.'
Such claims weren't well received, and because Driveline became known for velocity development, many blamed it as an accelerant in the game's injury epidemic.
Boddy counters that — those who train at Driveline have lower injury rates than those who don't — but doesn't revel in the fact.
'The injury rates of players that train here is significantly lower than the average player. That's no notable goal,' said Boddy. 'That's like dunking on a 6-foot hoop.'
Over time, the success stories — backed by reputable and replicable research — began to overtake skepticism, particularly as Driveline pushed forward with new programs and findings that helped dozens and then hundreds of players.
The demand for and clientele seeking Driveline grew. Front office members and established big leaguers were drawn to the facility, leading to contracts with teams (notably including the Dodgers), a move to the cavernous facility in Kent in 2020, and new locations in Arizona and Florida.
When strength tests in the high-performance area identify gaps between a player's peak fastball or exit velocity, biomechanical reviews — drawn from the Launchpad — identify delivery or swing inefficiencies. Driveline coaches introduce drills or strength programs designed to address those deficiencies. The integration of strength programs, baseball practice, and biomechanical coaching instruction produced results that became too compelling to ignore.
Baseball player and former Driveline employee Jairus Richards (right) talks with trainer Eric Kozak during a batting session.
Jason Redmond for The Boston Globe
Driveline employees were hired around the sport — including a gig for Boddy as a consulting scout for the Astros in 2014, and later a full-time position as the Reds' director of pitching for the 2020 and '21 seasons. Their practices spread.
'Every single thing that they were doing [years ago] has been adopted in one way or another, by major league teams,' said Ottavino. 'They were ahead of their time.'
With so many teams embracing many of the methods employed by Driveline, those who had not — including the Red Sox — worried they'd be behind the times if they failed to do the same, particularly as they overhauled player development staff and practices following the 2022 season.
'Were we actually pushing forward as much as we should have been or could have been?' Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham wondered. 'I think the biggest thing for me [about Driveline] was just the willingness to push the boundaries of what has been done and how we do things, and trying to do things better than the year before, better than the day before.'
Paul Toboni, who was elevated to Red Sox VP of player development and scouting that offseason, and Abraham sought new voices for the organization to introduce scalable, data-driven, year-round programming. Driveline became a natural recruiting ground.
'I always just thought the best relationship with these facilities — not just Driveline but all facilities — is to try to get in bed with them and learn what they're doing and try and use that to best leverage the development of players,' said Toboni.
The Red Sox took the plunge after the 2022 season. Jason Ochart — formerly Driveline's hitting director, who'd just been let go by the Phillies after four years as minor league hitting coordinator — was hired by the Sox as director of hitting development and program development.
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That first drop became a flood. The Sox followed by bringing aboard another hitting instructor, Jon Soteropulos, from Driveline and hiring David Besky (a Driveline data scientist and pitching trainer) to the player development staff.
The Red Sox have been thoroughly Driveline-ified, as reflected by significant shifts in how prospects train in the offseason. What had been an every-player-for-himself diaspora at the end of the year has been replaced by roughly 60 minor leaguers training in Fort Myers, where the team has staffers and support programs (nutrition and housing).
'We view development as a year-round process,' said Abraham.
That approach has already seemingly had considerable impact. Kristian Campbell spent the 2023-24 offseason in Fort Myers, where the team conducted Driveline-like training. That contributed to the overhauled swing and training that turned him from a little-known fourth-round draftee into one of the top prospects in the sport.
Such a development could be seen by Boddy and others at Driveline as a marker of accomplishment. But those who work there are uninterested in victory laps while continuing their efforts to find the next big thing.
'We don't have a World Series to win. We have to solve baseball. That's what we call it, solving baseball,' said Boddy.
Will that happen?
'No, that's the best part,' said Boddy. 'The goal is no good if you can do it, but we'll get closer than anyone else. So that's pretty damn awesome.'
Alex Speier can be reached at