Pitching Revolutionary Kyle Boddy Hired By The Cincinnati Reds, And The Swamp Is Starting To Be Drained

This is a kind of obscure story in the baseball world, but a big pretty big one nonetheless as the use of technology and science is every growing in the sport.  The days of old school coaches like Don Cooper are starting to die off while new aged guys like Boddy are being shuffled in.  In fact the Cubs employ my former HS hitting coach who teaches new age advance techniques to hitting which is probably how I wound up being a D3 bullpen catcher.

If you don’t know who Kyle Boddy is, he’s the founder and president of Driveline Baseball, which is a program in Kent, WA that specializes in pitching development by breaking down a pitcher’s “biomechanics through different data and analytically driven approaches”.  READ: they use a ton of high speed cameras, weighted ball drills, computers and other high tech shit to put a pitcher under microscope and turn him into a machine.  Chances are there are a handful of pitchers on the team that you follow that work out at Driveline in the winter and are better pitchers for it.

Now if you know the Cincinnati Reds, they have had a lot of really raw pitchers with absurd “shit” over the years.  I’m talking 6’6″ freaks like Amir Garrett who have other worldly shit that haven’t totally learned how to harness it.  Insert Kyle Boddy who’s a master at taking pitchers like this and turning them into studs.

Moral of the story is this: don’t be surprised if the Reds, in due time, have an Astros-like pitching structure and are dominating, at least on the mound.  Boddy, in my opinion, is that good with pitchers.

Now Boddy has been a kinda polarizing figure in the baseball world.  He doesn’t have a filter on social media, and while some people don’t buy into his teachings, others believe he has revolutionized the baseball to one extent or the other.  The former is dying by the day as he’s officially working for an MLB club now.  More and more people are buying into him, his program and other similar programs.

I’m not going to act like I know what all of his teachings are because they’re above my brain power, but he stresses advancing pitchers’ spin rates on all pitches. We’ve talked about it on Red Line Radio a lot – not all 95MPH fastballs are created equal.  Some look like they’re traveling 92MPH while others look like they’re traveling 98MPH.  The higher the spin, the higher the perceived velocity of a fastball and that’s what Boddy looks to enhance on a pitcher.

Boddy inking with the Reds is the start of a snowball affect IMO.  Dude’s is radically changing the game, and changing it for the better.  More and more new age, analytics driven minds are going to start filtering out the old school guys like Don Cooper for instance.  Oh, and he chose the Reds over the Cubs.  Kinda hilarious to me.