Latest / The Layback Podcast / 2025 Wake Forest Player Development Seminar Review w/ Josh Hejka Part 1 (Ep. 95)

Transcript

2025 Wake Forest Player Development Seminar Review w/ Josh Hejka Part 1 (Ep. 95) · The Layback Podcast

• 0:00
  What's up everyone, Welcome back to the Lay Back Podcast.
• 0:03
  Joining us today is now Lay Back Podcast veteran Josh Hedgeka.
• 0:08
  He formally joined us for an interview a good while ago back
• 0:13
  when he was a Mets minor leaguer.
• 0:15
  Now he is a free agent, which all of you will hear on what
• 0:19
  will be his second appearance. It hasn't come out yet at the
• 0:22
  time of this recording, but prior to us releasing this
• 0:25
  episode, you will have seen our actual panel presentation from
• 0:31
  Wake Forest. That might not be the cleanest
• 0:33
  episode ever released, but you get to see what we actually
• 0:37
  talked about at the Wake Forest Player Development Seminar.
• 0:40
  Which brings us to the actual content for today's episode.
• 0:44
  Josh was gracious enough to join us in Winston Salem to be on
• 0:48
  that panel, which we'll go into a little bit of detail on.
• 0:52
  But because of that, and because Josh is a diligent note taker
• 0:56
  and learner himself, I figured there was no one better aside
• 1:00
  from maybe Tim Campos and Josh Epstein to join us on a review.
• 1:05
  Last year, Gavin, Kipe Stroud and I went through a full review
• 1:09
  of every single presentation. Unfortunately, Gavin was unable
• 1:12
  to attend the seminar this year, so we have Josh kind of serving
• 1:16
  his normal role, mop up duty, picking up the pieces for
• 1:19
  everyone. So Josh, hopefully this isn't
• 1:21
  too foreign of a position for you and thanks for making the
• 1:24
  time to hop on today. Yeah, thanks for having me back.
• 1:27
  It was a great opportunity to speak on the panel.
• 1:29
  Really appreciate you having me out.
• 1:30
  I will apologize to any viewers who may encounter audio issues
• 1:33
  on that panel because I did accidentally turn off the
• 1:36
  microphone at one point. Adam luckily figured that out
• 1:38
  and turn the microphone back on. But maybe we'll be able to re
• 1:41
  dub some of my audio in the in in post and you won't even
• 1:45
  realize that the the audio issues existed.
• 1:47
  But I'm excited to talk Wake Forest pitching a player
• 1:49
  development seminar. Sorry.
• 1:51
  Yeah, and I guess that's a good catch because now it was once
• 1:55
  again a true player development seminar instead of just
• 1:58
  pitching, which I know this was your first year, but kind of in
• 2:01
  the past couple years it's been very, very pitcher focused.
• 2:05
  So I was glad to see some hitting stuff make it back in.
• 2:08
  To address your point about audio issues, don't worry
• 2:11
  because I don't think the mics actually even worked for any of
• 2:13
  us. Is now just a funny little prop
• 2:16
  I guess all of us were holding with those mini mics in front of
• 2:19
  our faces. They look.
• 2:20
  Professional. Yeah, we're, we're just dealing
• 2:22
  with iPad audio from across the room.
• 2:24
  And hey, I already produced it because it was like, hey, it's
• 2:27
  too far gone, there's nothing I'm going to do to save this.
• 2:30
  And you can hear what we're saying.
• 2:32
  Maybe there's that's all I meant to mumble, but yeah, we get
• 2:35
  through it. But we got a lot of
• 2:37
  presentations to get through, so I guess we might as well dive
• 2:40
  right in. And kicking off the player
• 2:43
  development seminar for 2025 was the Wake Forest coaching staff.
• 2:47
  The Wake Forest coaching staff, I generally love their
• 2:52
  presentations year to year. I think they do a great job.
• 2:55
  Normally what we expect from them is case studies on their
• 2:58
  individual players. Now, what changed this year is a
• 3:01
  completely new coaching staff. So we heard from Eric Neeson and
• 3:06
  Ezra Bai instead of Corey Muscara and then whoever
• 3:10
  assisted him in the process, normally it's Chris Lewis or
• 3:13
  Sean Fisher. Chris took a back seat this year
• 3:15
  since he's entering into a role with the Phillies, but Ezra and
• 3:20
  niece took over. So Josh, since you are the
• 3:23
  esteemed guests, I will even pass it off to you for initial
• 3:27
  thoughts. Yes, I thought this was great
• 3:29
  stuff. For those who don't know, I work
• 3:32
  even when I'm not playing, I work at the in research and
• 3:34
  development with Driveline. And so this is a lot of stuff
• 3:38
  that we also try to implement here at Driveline, just
• 3:42
  understanding the role of bio mechanics in developing players.
• 3:45
  And for me, it boils down to a couple of main things. 1 is
• 3:47
  like, obviously it's like a checkpoint in time, like fully
• 3:50
  understanding like where you stand.
• 3:52
  And then like, for example, if you gain a bunch of VLO or you
• 3:55
  lose a bunch of VLO or you gain command or this command, you
• 3:57
  can, you can look back at previous checkpoints in time and
• 3:59
  see what's changed. I really enjoy how how Wake
• 4:02
  Forest discussed this process that they use.
• 4:05
  There are a couple of big things that stuck out to me.
• 4:07
  One is this idea of like these intra athlete trends over the
• 4:10
  course of the season. And they could basically figure
• 4:12
  out for a certain guy what particular biomechanical element
• 4:16
  is most important to his success.
• 4:18
  I think they gave an example of one guy.
• 4:19
  It was, it might have been like lateral trunk flexion or
• 4:22
  something along those lines are like trunk flexion angle,
• 4:24
  something like that. And they noticed that as this
• 4:26
  was changing over the course of the season, his performance was
• 4:28
  suffering, his feeling went down.
• 4:30
  And so they're able to target a specific intervention to get
• 4:33
  them back on track. There were a couple other things
• 4:36
  I thought were really interesting. 1 is that they
• 4:37
  talked about they primarily used velocity as their predictor
• 4:41
  variable for the bio mechanics, for the bio mechanics reports.
• 4:44
  But they also talked about the role of like arm slot.
• 4:48
  And I thought this was very interesting where maybe if you
• 4:51
  pursue a change that would actually gain you velocity, it
• 4:54
  might lead to a change in your arm slot that or or some other
• 4:57
  variable in the in the kinetic chain that would actually
• 5:00
  decrease your performance on the field.
• 5:01
  I think a perfect example of this, they didn't talk about
• 5:03
  this, but just making connections is to myself, right?
• 5:06
  So like, I'm a, I'm a submarine pitcher.
• 5:08
  If I purely optimize for velocity, I would probably raise
• 5:11
  my slot drastically, but that would likely lead to a decrease
• 5:15
  in my effectiveness as a pitcher because I would now be with a
• 5:19
  less unique shapes, less unique release angle.
• 5:21
  And so it's just really important to keep the, the main
• 5:23
  thing, the main thing, which is like getting out on the field.
• 5:25
  And so that's obviously something where they, if you
• 5:28
  have a individual relationship with your players, you'll know
• 5:30
  like what makes them successful, what makes them like what, what
• 5:33
  their strengths are as a pitcher and not losing that in the in
• 5:36
  the process of optimizing your bio mechanics.
• 5:38
  Instead of just responding to the stuff that you said, I'm
• 5:42
  going to add on with a couple of things that start from me.
• 5:45
  Big point. And I think you and I probably
• 5:50
  could have intuitively gotten to this point, but it was great to
• 5:52
  see it on paper that Ezra mapped out that throwing programs take
• 5:57
  up about 70% of throwing volume, especially for their group of
• 6:03
  guys, their college athletes. So sides, lives and games are
• 6:08
  more competitive. Throwing makes up that other
• 6:10
  30%. If that's the case, where are we
• 6:14
  actually going to spend our time developing and how can we make
• 6:17
  adjustments in the process? I thought that was awesome to
• 6:20
  bring to light knowing that the game is actually played on the
• 6:24
  mound. So if that's the case, why are
• 6:26
  we? Why are we spending so much
• 6:28
  time, which is our greatest resource in an area that yes, we
• 6:33
  can build throwing fitness, stealing a word from Casey
• 6:36
  Mulholland there in the throwing program, or we can prep to get
• 6:40
  to that more competition style throwing.
• 6:43
  But it really isn't increasing our output potential for
• 6:51
  anything other than endurance, which I mean, there's so many
• 6:55
  other things. So I I was glad to see that come
• 6:57
  to light and I guess understand how Ezra on the development side
• 7:04
  and then Neeson on the execution side are able to apply those
• 7:08
  principles. Then not just the discussion
• 7:13
  surrounding utilizing velocity, not only on the performance side
• 7:17
  but also in these throwing progressions was stressed so
• 7:21
  heavily by the Wake Forest group.
• 7:23
  Yes, you and I are very familiar with the importance of objective
• 7:27
  data in not just an on ramp or a rehab, but in managing overall
• 7:33
  throwing workload and seeing how Wake Forest is able to utilize
• 7:38
  velocity and how important it is in their program not just for
• 7:42
  performance but truly for managing daily outputs.
• 7:46
  A couple other points that I wrote down, Ezra, I thought told
• 7:51
  a great story, specifically about his jazz music example
• 7:55
  with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.
• 7:58
  And the way that I internalized that was kind of the
• 8:04
  environmental constraints utilizing, I guess, discovery in
• 8:09
  a sense or a different throwing implement such as a Plio ball or
• 8:13
  different surfaces that you might throw on, giving the body
• 8:18
  or giving the individual different problems to solve.
• 8:21
  You are never encountering or you are less likely to encounter
• 8:24
  something that is going to impose a challenge.
• 8:27
  I think this probably even goes back to something that you talk
• 8:31
  about time and time again, which would be Bernstein's hammer.
• 8:35
  And so I think the the fundamental for those who don't
• 8:38
  know, Bernstein's hammer is a study from probably 50-60 plus
• 8:44
  years ago. Burstein was looking at this,
• 8:46
  this master blacksmith. And the kind of the thought at
• 8:48
  the time was that, and even this is still a thought that that
• 8:52
  resonates with a lot of coaches nowadays is that repeatable
• 8:54
  mechanics are better. It's important to break down
• 8:57
  performance into two different things.
• 8:58
  One is outputs and one is the movement that generates the
• 9:03
  output. We want repeatable outputs,
• 9:04
  right? We want to be able to
• 9:05
  consistently throw the ball where we want.
• 9:06
  We want to be able to throw as hard as we can and we want to be
• 9:10
  able to, you know, throw it with the shape that we always start
• 9:12
  with. But the mechanics that get us
• 9:14
  there are not necessarily going to be repeatable, and in fact,
• 9:17
  they're very much not going to be repeatable.
• 9:18
  The study found that the master blacksmith was very, very good
• 9:22
  at hitting the nail on the head, obviously, but because of the
• 9:25
  way that the hammer deflected off the nail each time, there's
• 9:28
  some variability. And so he couldn't just use the
• 9:31
  exact same swing of his arm every single time to hit the
• 9:33
  nail. He had to be able to make these
• 9:35
  micro adjustments and adjust for that variability in order to hit
• 9:39
  the nail on the head. I think the thing that they
• 9:41
  analogy that I always go back to some of the guys here at
• 9:43
  Driveline go back to is this idea of you don't want to
• 9:46
  memorize or rehearse a solution. You want to be able to
• 9:49
  understand the underlying like the fundamental function that
• 9:54
  allows you to generate a solution.
• 9:56
  So if I'm just memorized 9 * 763, right, Adam, if it's 63,
• 10:02
  good call back. Okay, great.
• 10:03
  If I ever see that math problem pop up on a test, that's great.
• 10:07
  But if I don't know how to do multiplication, if I ever see a
• 10:10
  problem that's not 9 * 7, I'm gonna be screwed.
• 10:13
  And so the same thing with moving.
• 10:15
  There's so many different variations, whether it's in
• 10:18
  temperature, whether it's the way the mound is that day, the
• 10:21
  weather. All these little things affect
• 10:23
  how the movement solution required in order to have what I
• 10:26
  just said is like a consistent output that we have to be able
• 10:29
  to make these little adjustments, even pitch to
• 10:30
  pitch, you know, like my fatigue level is different.
• 10:32
  Boiling down to it, at the end of the day, it's like it's being
• 10:34
  able to like not just memorize a certain solution, but being able
• 10:39
  to approach a new problem and find a solution that works.
• 10:42
  That's what actually represents skill and mastery over a certain
• 10:46
  topic. And maybe to kind of round out
• 10:50
  this, unless we want to keep hammering away at it.
• 10:53
  Sorry to use hammer there, but it but it only seemed natural.
• 10:57
  There are another couple pieces that I enjoyed hearing.
• 11:01
  We began to understand what's actually important to the
• 11:04
  coaching staff and how they make decisions.
• 11:06
  One of which was continually stressed and that was chasing
• 11:10
  faster feedback loops. Wake Forest is very much a
• 11:14
  data-driven player development system.
• 11:17
  They have the lab, they have 20 plus student analysts that can
• 11:22
  support what they do, which is amazing.
• 11:25
  I understand not everybody is going to have that, professional
• 11:28
  organizations that don't have as much manpower to create that
• 11:33
  type of high level decision making.
• 11:36
  But what Wake Forest has done is identified on their competitive
• 11:41
  advantage and their identity by having that information.
• 11:46
  Because yeah, it's great to have information, it's great to have
• 11:49
  data. But what they can now do is
• 11:52
  weaponize that by turning it over quickly and putting it in
• 11:56
  the hands of people that can make decisions.
• 11:58
  They can all speak the same language.
• 12:01
  Not every player needs to have the same aptitude for the data.
• 12:05
  And to be fair, not every coach does either.
• 12:08
  I know I'm kind of getting into some of our discussion.
• 12:11
  I guess I'm foreshadowing a tad. But knowing how important that
• 12:16
  feedback loop is for Wake Forest, and then they
• 12:19
  specifically highlighted collaboration, autonomy, and
• 12:23
  then ultimately autonomy being ranked higher than dependency.
• 12:27
  That's kind of how they looked at it.
• 12:29
  They, they want to create this system where players, they can
• 12:33
  collaborate with the coach to learn what they need to do.
• 12:35
  So then they can do it on their own, not have to say, hey,
• 12:39
  coach, look at me, look at me. I'm doing my drill, but giving
• 12:41
  them the tools to do what they need.
• 12:44
  And then the coach can go back and look at the output.
• 12:46
  So whether it's the velocity, whether it's the Trackman plot,
• 12:49
  whether it's edge or video, biomechanical assessments, flex
• 12:52
  pro numbers, shoulder dynamometry, anything.
• 12:55
  So then they can go back and make the decision necessary to
• 12:59
  put the player in the best spot possible.
• 13:01
  Yep, and I think that's an important feedback loop that
• 13:04
  like you want to have as a player in season 2, like you
• 13:06
  want to be able to, you don't want to have to like wait till
• 13:08
  you go in the dugout between innings for your coach to tell
• 13:10
  you what you did wrong. Like you want to be able to like
• 13:12
  recognize that in yourself and have this really, really tight
• 13:14
  feedback loop so you can make adjustments on the fly.
• 13:16
  It's a concept in motor learning known as like KR knowledge of
• 13:19
  results and especially for elite athletes, elite performers, that
• 13:24
  quicker feedback loop is correlated with a higher higher
• 13:27
  learning effect and higher performance.
• 13:28
  So that makes complete sense. And my final piece with the Wake
• 13:31
  Forest group is one word that they used a few times, and that
• 13:37
  was the nudge. I don't know if they created the
• 13:40
  phrase the nudge. I can only assume they did not
• 13:42
  and they brought it in from somewhere.
• 13:45
  But the nudge was the way that pitching coach Eric Neeson
• 13:49
  talked about, I guess going from that moment of gaining trust
• 13:54
  with a player to pushing them towards a decision that the
• 14:00
  staff might want them to make or a suggestion that they feel best
• 14:04
  suits the player in the long run.
• 14:06
  And part of the reason I'm calling that out, one, I always
• 14:10
  like hearing the languages that get created for these different
• 14:14
  cultures. Obviously, each team is going to
• 14:16
  have its own culture. I like those kind of
• 14:21
  sociological dynamics and understanding the communication
• 14:25
  style, but that really kind of alludes to the conversation that
• 14:30
  we later had on Saturday morning.
• 14:33
  And you can't really force people to do anything at this
• 14:36
  point. You can encourage it, but even
• 14:38
  the point of encouragement is going to require a baseline
• 14:42
  level of trust or a mutual understanding of the ultimate
• 14:46
  objectives. And sometimes those tight
• 14:49
  feedback loops allows you to build that trust very rapidly
• 14:51
  because you can show, if you can show a player that he's going to
• 14:53
  get better if he buys into your system, like he's going to be
• 14:55
  more willing to continue buying into your system rather than
• 14:58
  like, all right, like trust me for the next 6 months.
• 15:00
  And it's like, how am I supposed to really know that I'm like,
• 15:04
  actually getting better? This boils down back to the test
• 15:06
  retest cycle, which I'm a big believer in.
• 15:08
  You test something, you make a plan for improving it, You
• 15:12
  retest. Did it improve it?
• 15:13
  Yes. OK, great.
• 15:14
  Should we keep doing that? Maybe, maybe not.
• 15:16
  Did it improve it? No.
• 15:17
  OK, let's try something else. But it's you.
• 15:18
  You can't really get anywhere without those that without that
• 15:21
  feedback and and a plan of attack.
• 15:24
  That's an excellent point because maybe from the way I
• 15:27
  phrased it, the nudge sounds like it has to be an arm around
• 15:30
  the shoulder and a conversation in relationship building, which
• 15:35
  yes, it can be. But when you have data or in
• 15:38
  this Wake Forest instance where you have a tighter feedback loop
• 15:42
  and you're weaponizing the data or you're using it to create a
• 15:44
  development plan, that can be a nudge.
• 15:47
  If I can look at a Stuff Plus model or I can pull up pitch
• 15:52
  plots or results on sinkers thrown at 92 mph to off handed
• 15:57
  hitters and show you that those get slugged like crazy.
• 16:01
  Maybe not for other people, but for you they did.
• 16:05
  That's all the nudge you need, right?
• 16:06
  Like 'cause you don't want to perform badly, it doesn't take
• 16:10
  much. You don't need a coach to then
• 16:12
  create this crazy relationship because the numbers don't lie.
• 16:16
  Like you can't fudge that data if you got slugged.
• 16:20
  I don't know, 700 against on on. Did you see my stats from last
• 16:25
  year or something? I don't know.
• 16:27
  Well, what they actually gave the example of was Blake Morning
• 16:30
  Stars to seem against lefties, which he did not have a single
• 16:35
  swing and miss on the entire 2025 season 4.
• 16:40
  No comment. Yeah, that sounds like my.
• 16:41
  That sounds like me. Which is why you were developing
• 16:45
  something new and lowering the arm slot again.
• 16:47
  But yeah, overall love this presentation.
• 16:50
  Yeah, 5 out of 5, right. Or whatever, whatever system
• 16:53
  that that's a rookie score. So I, I don't know.
• 16:56
  We're not going to score everyone, but I don't know, 8.6
• 17:00
  out of 10. Sure.
• 17:03
  Yeah, these are all theoretical scores.
• 17:06
  We're going to change the scale after every presentation.
• 17:08
  Maybe that's what we're going to do.
• 17:10
  We're going to require some sort of assessment piece where we
• 17:14
  make up. But first one, 8.6 out of 10.
• 17:17
  Also, I did like their theme of data to coach to dirt.
• 17:22
  I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that, but I just thought
• 17:24
  that was a good presentation theme.
• 17:26
  With every single thing they produced.
• 17:28
  They first talked about the data, then they talked about how
• 17:31
  they coached it, and then they talked about how they applied
• 17:33
  it, which was the dirt or the competition.
• 17:37
  So now moving on, which if I'm not mistaken was labeled your
• 17:42
  favorite presentation from the weekend.
• 17:44
  One of my favorites for sure. Yeah.
• 17:45
  So one of, OK, so maybe maybe you're walking back or maybe I I
• 17:49
  just made it too sensationalized to call it your number one
• 17:53
  favorite. But JD Facone's hitting bio
• 17:55
  mechanics presentation once again.
• 17:58
  Would you like to take it away? Yeah, I think the JP, his former
• 18:02
  Driveline hitting coach, he's now a coordinator, hitting
• 18:06
  coordinator with the Red Sox. He had a bit of an interactive
• 18:09
  presentation and I think for me, the big theme was understanding
• 18:14
  this kind of idea that the aesthetics of the swing, the
• 18:17
  aesthetics of the throw don't matter.
• 18:19
  What matters is the end goal, right?
• 18:22
  So it's like people tend to the hitting example he gave, people
• 18:26
  tend to go One Direction. It's like look at the bio
• 18:27
  mechanics. How do the bio mechanics affect
• 18:29
  the swing? How do they swing affect the
• 18:31
  results? What he what he suggested is a
• 18:33
  framework that actually goes the other way.
• 18:35
  Let's look at the results, the actual on field production.
• 18:38
  And when we say, OK, this is something that we've noticed in
• 18:41
  his on field production that we want to change.
• 18:43
  What about the swing is causing that on field production, that
• 18:46
  lack in on field production or whatever?
• 18:48
  And then what about the bio mechanics is causing that in the
• 18:50
  swing? And so I think the example he
• 18:52
  gave was this guy who he tended to hit the ball really hard, but
• 18:57
  he hit it really low. So he'd be hitting ground balls
• 19:00
  rather than double s and home runs.
• 19:01
  And then he also tended to have this ability to miss hit balls
• 19:05
  and hit like a lot of infield pop ups.
• 19:07
  And so I actually don't remember the exact specifics of the swing
• 19:11
  in the the biomechanical things that he noticed, but he
• 19:13
  basically said, OK, this is the actual on field thing that we
• 19:15
  want to, we want to effect change in.
• 19:17
  There's something about a swing that is causing this.
• 19:20
  OK, great. Now when we go back, we say,
• 19:23
  what about his bio mechanics is causing that in his swing?
• 19:26
  And then this goes back to the test retest cycle, right?
• 19:29
  We can say like, OK, let's maybe work on this specific drill,
• 19:31
  this specific thing that that smooths out this aspect of the
• 19:34
  bio mechanics in order to affect this part of the swing, in order
• 19:36
  to actually improve performance and output on the field.
• 19:39
  And so they did this change and what they noticed that the bio
• 19:42
  mechanics didn't actually change substantially.
• 19:44
  The swing had a little bit of a difference, but the on field
• 19:47
  performance actually improved. And at the end of the day,
• 19:49
  that's what matters. It's not about this part of the
• 19:51
  swing doesn't look right, this part of the swing, it's not
• 19:54
  lining up with what other people do.
• 19:56
  This part of the throw, the pitching delivery does not look
• 19:58
  good or match up with what other people do.
• 20:00
  Chris Bassett, Tyler Rogers and Geraldus Chapman have very, very
• 20:04
  different throwing mechanics and all three of them are extremely
• 20:06
  effective at getting outs. And so at the end of the day,
• 20:08
  it's like starting with what matters, the actual on field
• 20:11
  production and like using the swing or bio mechanics.
• 20:15
  As a tool to actually affect that, rather than starting at
• 20:18
  the aesthetic and like working towards some other nebulous idea
• 20:22
  of of what's good and what's bad.
• 20:24
  And that's because you will always find what you're looking
• 20:27
  for. I, I was so excited to hear that
• 20:30
  as a reoccurring theme in the presentation, when JD had his
• 20:35
  interactive components there, there was something along the
• 20:38
  lines of what what can go wrong with the hitting biomech
• 20:43
  assessment and the little anonymous thing that I put out
• 20:48
  there is your biases will shine through.
• 20:51
  So I felt good. I felt vindicated that I put
• 20:54
  that on. Yes, back in the day I did a lot
• 20:57
  on the hitting side. I was a hitter myself.
• 20:58
  So I'm very passionate about that.
• 21:00
  I know I just happen to work in the pitching world currently.
• 21:03
  I'm a firm believer in that really any biomechanical
• 21:06
  assessment or any sort of assessment you do, you have to
• 21:09
  find a way to remove your biases from that assessment.
• 21:13
  So if you don't really understand the purpose of why
• 21:16
  you're doing something, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
• 21:19
  Because if we go into that biomechanical assessment or if
• 21:22
  we go to apply that concept to anything, if we go into decision
• 21:28
  making and we are looking for a result or we are, we are trying
• 21:33
  to chase a specific detail, we'll be able to find that what
• 21:38
  we need to be open to or what we need to accept or we need to be
• 21:43
  able to label what ultimately matters what what you were
• 21:46
  saying. And that is the outcome.
• 21:48
  The outcome is what ultimately matters.
• 21:50
  Would we care if this hitter in this case stood on his head?
• 21:54
  No, we wouldn't. Would we care if the hitter hit
• 21:57
  with a cross grip with his left hand over his right hand?
• 22:01
  No, we don't. What we care is greater on field
• 22:04
  outputs because that's ultimately going to win games or
• 22:07
  maybe help this player advance in the system.
• 22:09
  So I wrote that down as a major take away.
• 22:11
  Then following that point up, which I liked a lot, kind of the
• 22:17
  bird's eye view approach, the farther away you get from the
• 22:21
  result, the less concrete we have to be.
• 22:24
  I don't know if you like how you interpret that, or I guess it's
• 22:28
  kind of like a general statement anyway, so anybody can take it
• 22:31
  however they want to. But when we are problem solving,
• 22:35
  I think that's a good way to frame things from the beginning
• 22:39
  for true problem definition. Because of course, if we go down
• 22:43
  and we look at this guy's swing, I might not like the way his
• 22:47
  front foot is making contact and then ultimately weight bearing
• 22:52
  in the swing. But if I zoom out, for instance,
• 22:56
  for a hitter, I can go back and label what do I care about his
• 23:00
  hard hit rate in the air? Or maybe I can label like the
• 23:04
  three or four things that I really care about, and none of
• 23:08
  those have to do with the way he moves, the way his bat enters
• 23:13
  the zone, the way he finishes. I might have my preferences, and
• 23:18
  that's OK because I've had experience with them.
• 23:20
  Or maybe I can look longitudinally and see that
• 23:24
  there are players that have done similar things that have had
• 23:28
  positive results. But why should I have that for
• 23:32
  my thinking? I should have the desired
• 23:35
  outcome for my thinking. Yeah, I feel like you see this a
• 23:38
  lot in the hitting world. I don't know why specifically,
• 23:40
  but it also happens in the pitching world.
• 23:41
  But in the hitting world, it's like everyone has like their
• 23:44
  swing, right? It's like I'm going to teach
• 23:45
  them my swing. And I think that's just
• 23:48
  fundamentally starting at the wrong part of the of the
• 23:51
  equation. And it's with throwing, it's I'm
• 23:53
  going to teach them my throw. A lot of times what happens is
• 23:55
  that these pitching coaches who maybe aren't being informed by a
• 23:58
  motion capture report or not being informed by like composite
• 24:01
  scores or like these things that are actually valuable tools that
• 24:03
  kind of narrow, which I view them as like Agps in the search
• 24:07
  space, right? Like you're not going to tell
• 24:09
  you exactly where to go or exactly what to do, but it kind
• 24:11
  of gives you a good idea of where to start looking.
• 24:12
  And a lot of people, what they tend to do is like what I tell
• 24:16
  athletes to do is what works for me as an athlete.
• 24:19
  And so I have these individual constraints about me that are
• 24:22
  different than you do, that are different than every other
• 24:24
  picture on the planet, right? We all have these unique set of
• 24:26
  individual constraints. And so like, what worked for me
• 24:29
  as a pitcher might not work for Edwin Diaz or Edwin Diaz.
• 24:32
  What works for him might not work for me.
• 24:35
  And so when you start with this idea of like the aesthetics of
• 24:38
  the swing, the aesthetics of the throw, you kind of put people in
• 24:40
  a box and often times they may not fit in that box.
• 24:43
  It's not going to be the solution that's actually optimal
• 24:45
  for them to get unfilled results.
• 24:47
  And I think it's unfortunate when that's the case because it
• 24:49
  could lead to people going down the path that's actually not
• 24:51
  going to help them improve. Something that I think offered
• 24:56
  reassurance as well to me is I at least know J DS approach to
• 25:02
  coaching or problem solving is very similar to how problem
• 25:08
  solving and planning was discussed in Business School for
• 25:12
  me and that was through backwards planning.
• 25:15
  JD reiterated time and time again starting with the end
• 25:19
  result and working back from there.
• 25:21
  So then if we start with the end result, we are able to create a
• 25:25
  road map back to our starting point as opposed to starting
• 25:30
  where we are and having no clue where our ultimate destination
• 25:35
  is. This is this is truly the
• 25:37
  equivalent of me telling you to get in a car and come drive to
• 25:41
  me, but you have no idea where I am.
• 25:44
  This is giving a player the feedback in a development
• 25:49
  meeting saying like hey, we want you to be a big league All Star.
• 25:54
  Awesome. I want to be a big league All
• 25:55
  Star too, but you have not given me any tools or any path to
• 26:00
  actually get there versus if if we start with, we need you to do
• 26:06
  these things like objective measures.
• 26:09
  We we think you can get to this zone percentage, this wiff rate
• 26:13
  on this pitch. You are so much better at data
• 26:17
  and statistics than I am in the baseball world.
• 26:19
  So you could probably correct me and say what would actually be a
• 26:21
  better example here. But if if you start with that,
• 26:25
  then as a player you at least know the benchmarks you need to
• 26:28
  hit along the way to ultimately achieve the goal of being a big
• 26:32
  league All Star. Yeah.
• 26:33
  So it's like the hitting side we talked about, it's like you want
• 26:35
  to hit, you want to hit, pull side hard, hit balls in the air
• 26:38
  so you can do damage like double s and home runs.
• 26:40
  Ideally you wouldn't swing and miss very often.
• 26:41
  Like obviously there's a trade off there with probably the
• 26:43
  damage aspect from a pitching perspective.
• 26:45
  It's like, all right, I want to like to get out.
• 26:47
  You have to like limit damage. You can't put guys on for free.
• 26:51
  And like ideally you'd strike guys out, but like you can
• 26:53
  probably get away with that, like not striking out a ton of
• 26:56
  guys if you're not walking guys and you're getting a lot of weed
• 26:58
  contact, right? So we start with like the end
• 27:00
  result of like the actual, the actual like batted ball outcomes
• 27:03
  or like at bat outcomes we want to see.
• 27:05
  And then, yeah, you have these like you start getting back.
• 27:07
  It's like, OK, well, maybe a way I can do that is by getting a
• 27:10
  higher zone percentage drilling counts or by getting more
• 27:12
  swinging miss on my slider. How do I get more swinging miss
• 27:14
  on my slider? OK, I increase the stuff plus on
• 27:16
  my slider. How do I increase the stuff plus
• 27:17
  on my slider? Maybe it's a different grip,
• 27:19
  right? And so like there's different,
• 27:20
  like you can work backwards, but working forward and saying like,
• 27:23
  oh, I want to change the grip on my slider, but without knowing
• 27:25
  where you're going, it's exactly what you're saying.
• 27:27
  You just kind of get lost. Error propagates through the
• 27:29
  system, and there's just no real.
• 27:32
  It's not an efficient path of of making players better.
• 27:35
  Well, the direct example is here I I have it written down.
• 27:38
  Actually. I'm assuming this is both JD's
• 27:41
  and the Red Sox system. The core 4 is, he phrased it bat
• 27:46
  speed, bat to ball, ball flight in swing decisions, sure.
• 27:52
  So if we know that as a player, if we can optimize for those
• 27:55
  four things, it can guide our decision making in the process.
• 27:59
  Maybe in order to make better swing decisions or optimize for
• 28:04
  bat speed, we do need to change our stance or we do need to
• 28:07
  change the way the bat enters the zone.
• 28:10
  But those shouldn't be the drivers.
• 28:13
  Those should be a possible change or alteration we make in
• 28:17
  the process that lead us back to the core 4 that ultimately
• 28:20
  affect how successful we can be. Yep, couldn't agree more.
• 28:24
  Overall love this presentation from from JP.
• 28:28
  The Red Sox are really building. JP and I've been calling him JD.
• 28:31
  Yeah, You know, JD Martinez, it's a Red Sox.
• 28:34
  You know, that's all right. We can we can dub it over in
• 28:37
  post. I don't know about that.
• 28:40
  I don't. I don't quite have that skill so
• 28:43
  no, but it's mid fault. Here and I'm going to blame it
• 28:45
  on my DS and PS look too similar on the way I wrote it down, but
• 28:49
  I'd written down I actually do have it as JD, so I just added a
• 28:52
  little length there you go for that D on here.
• 28:56
  So now it officially is AP in my notes.
• 28:59
  So you are going to be in charge of giving this a final rating.
• 29:03
  If if this presentation were a pizza, what pizza order would it
• 29:07
  be? Definitely.
• 29:10
  Wouldn't have pineapple on it. I think it would just be like a
• 29:13
  classic, like Sicilian slice from LMB Spamoni Gardens in
• 29:17
  Brooklyn. That's what I'm giving.
• 29:19
  OK, excellent. Very specific rating system, but
• 29:22
  I trust that's extremely good. It is.
• 29:24
  It's very good. So then it looks like our next
• 29:27
  presentation is capping off night one with the college
• 29:31
  pitching coach panel that included that included Volts
• 29:35
  from Notre Dame, Dorman from Oregon State, De Royne formerly
• 29:39
  of Arizona, now of the now of the Mets, Mets and Mangram of
• 29:43
  Ole Miss. Ole Miss, I don't have a ton to
• 29:46
  add about this panel specifically.
• 29:48
  I don't know if you have a lot of notes that you stuck out to
• 29:50
  you. I think the big thing for me is
• 29:51
  just it was cool hearing them talk about the different
• 29:53
  deliverables they use, how they talk about some of the stuff
• 29:56
  with their athletes. But yeah, generally thought it
• 29:58
  was just really cool to hear from these these coaches.
• 30:00
  But nothing like crazy stuck out to me.
• 30:02
  I don't know if there's anything in in your mind.
• 30:04
  Yeah. I'll just run through the notes
• 30:06
  and maybe you stop me at any point if there's a, if there's
• 30:10
  something you want to get into first bullet point I have here I
• 30:13
  know is from Volts at Notre Dame.
• 30:15
  Player reports should present controllable metrics, and I I
• 30:20
  thought that was incredibly important, especially at the
• 30:22
  college level. If you are going to present
• 30:24
  something to a player, there's no sense presenting something
• 30:27
  that is completely out of his control.
• 30:29
  Because sure, let's face it, you cannot control something that is
• 30:33
  uncontrollable. So why even address it?
• 30:36
  Why make someone feel bad about it?
• 30:38
  They had no say in what ultimately happened.
• 30:41
  Well, a lot of the the reports I've got in pro ball remove
• 30:44
  basically like earned runs from the report for that exact
• 30:47
  reason, right? It's like, how much did you get
• 30:49
  ahead? How many strikes did you throw?
• 30:51
  Like what were your missed distances?
• 30:53
  What was the like the shapes of all your pitches and like maybe
• 30:56
  these more process oriented goals.
• 30:58
  But yeah, it a lot of these reports I've gotten like earned
• 31:00
  runs wasn't even on the on the report because there's a lot out
• 31:02
  of your control. I can go into that.
• 31:04
  The the next point I actually want to push back on a little
• 31:07
  bit and that's why I wrote it down.
• 31:09
  I I put a little question mark on it, but it was players want
• 31:13
  colors, players want something simple.
• 31:16
  And I think simple works if you are just trying to get immediate
• 31:20
  feedback. But what I think was a
• 31:25
  resounding take away from our talk the next morning, literally
• 31:29
  kicking off Saturday, was something that really runs
• 31:34
  counter to that point. If players are given the
• 31:37
  information, they can make decisions for themselves.
• 31:40
  For the most part, yes. There's some sort of education
• 31:43
  that needs to be had in the process so players can make
• 31:47
  sense of what they're being handed.
• 31:49
  So yeah, players probably want something simple if they've
• 31:52
  never been exposed to something more.
• 31:54
  It's almost like the allegory of The Cave for me, in the sense
• 31:57
  that if you keep players in the dark, any little bit they get,
• 32:01
  it's going to feel great. But as soon as you turn on that
• 32:04
  light or you take someone out of The Cave and you show them what
• 32:08
  this world can be and what this information can do to empower
• 32:12
  them, I think you're going to have guys that are going to
• 32:15
  start to want more and more. Don't get me wrong, like you can
• 32:17
  hit a point of being overwhelmed, but I would rather
• 32:21
  work towards that point of being overwhelmed and step back
• 32:25
  rather. Than withholding.
• 32:27
  I think it also depends on like performance versus development
• 32:30
  settings, right? Like a performance setting, you
• 32:31
  probably want to keep things very simple.
• 32:33
  You don't want them thinking like about random stuff when
• 32:35
  they're on the mound or that like you want them to be like
• 32:37
  very, very actionable and like a more development setting.
• 32:40
  Like this is what we want to work on and why.
• 32:41
  And like, here's all the information that shows that.
• 32:43
  I think you can definitely have have more information.
• 32:46
  I'm definitely someone who is on the side of like using as much
• 32:49
  information as possible to kind of like feed into the back end
• 32:52
  of things and like on the front end.
• 32:54
  Like even if it's something like knowing what I got to work on,
• 32:57
  knowing very simply and actionably like what that is I
• 33:00
  need to do is really important. And then maybe digging into the
• 33:03
  reasons why I, I can dig into some of these more complex
• 33:06
  reasons and understanding, but like, I also, I, I, I also agree
• 33:09
  with what you're saying. I think there is like an
• 33:10
  appetite for players to like, want all this information, to
• 33:13
  like to like, truly understand where they stand and take
• 33:16
  ownership of their own careers, which I think is really
• 33:17
  powerful. So maybe if we can provide an
• 33:20
  actionable take away on that point is creating a fall report
• 33:25
  versus a spring report or yeah, maybe development report versus
• 33:29
  a competition? Report definitely pregame and
• 33:31
  post game should be different as well, right?
• 33:32
  Like pregame of like the advanced scouting report like
• 33:35
  should be very, very simple, actionable.
• 33:36
  Maybe the post game reports a little bit more in the weeds of
• 33:38
  like here's kind of your trends and like what you should be
• 33:41
  working on and stuff like that. Like there's all these like
• 33:43
  little nuances of like different settings that maybe have
• 33:45
  different types of there are different levels of information.
• 33:48
  And knowing that these are the college coaches, starters are
• 33:52
  throwing once a week. That's it.
• 33:53
  They're going to throw on the same day every single week for
• 33:56
  the year unless they're in a conference that's on TV and
• 33:59
  their games get pushed around a little bit.
• 34:01
  But that means every week there is a true development segment to
• 34:07
  the schedule. It's not like these guys are on
• 34:09
  some controlled free fall like in pro ball and you're just
• 34:12
  trying to stay afloat and make sure you feel healthy each time
• 34:15
  you get handed the ball. These guys have a chance to get
• 34:18
  better during the week, which I think for me it leans back into
• 34:23
  my personal bias of wanting more instead of it being as simple as
• 34:28
  possible. Yep, I agree.
• 34:31
  I agree. I think that's, I think that's
• 34:33
  it's powerful to like have an athlete take ownership of what
• 34:35
  they what they want to do with their career and sometimes the
• 34:38
  information is needed. The next bullet point I have
• 34:40
  here is something that I think speaks volumes of the culture at
• 34:45
  old Miss You. You guys heard me say earlier.
• 34:48
  I really like seeing the sociology within these various
• 34:52
  teams. But Mangram said that the
• 34:56
  pitching staff votes on their pitching pillars every year.
• 34:59
  Now, does that mean it's going to be the most specific thing
• 35:02
  that impacts performance in the end?
• 35:05
  Maybe not. But what I love there is that
• 35:08
  the players have a say in what they deem it is important.
• 35:13
  And if the players assess what's important, the likelihood that
• 35:18
  they adhere to those requirements to me is going to
• 35:22
  go going to go sky high. It's.
• 35:23
  Going to shoot without a doubt I.
• 35:26
  Completely agree. Let's see, it looks like I have
• 35:28
  a couple quotes here. I'll see if anything really
• 35:31
  stands out to me. I apologize, listeners, as I
• 35:35
  just kind of fill dead air as I read my notes.
• 35:40
  Big point here. I forget who made it, but on the
• 35:42
  pitch design side, hedge code, this is all too familiar to you,
• 35:46
  but somebody on the panel said learn the miss, especially in
• 35:50
  development. Get comfortable doubling up on
• 35:52
  it to enable corrections. Yeah, I'll hand it over.
• 35:55
  To you, since you are the pitcher.
• 35:56
  Well, I will say this, I think people, especially in a pitch
• 36:00
  design setting, so I think a lot of times people, a big mistake I
• 36:04
  see with pitchers is that they throw 10 sliders in a row to
• 36:08
  like really find it and make it feel good, right?
• 36:10
  And I think that's OK early in an offseason, maybe when you're
• 36:13
  first learning a pitch, right? This idea of, of like, let's
• 36:16
  let's block out some time of only throwing this pitch and,
• 36:19
  and like really develop a feel for what I'm trying to
• 36:22
  accomplish here. But the ultimate goal and the
• 36:24
  ultimate usage in game is almost always within a random context.
• 36:28
  I'm never throwing ten straight sliders in a game.
• 36:31
  And, and to find it right, that's just something I never
• 36:34
  have the opportunity to do. And so if it takes me 10 sliders
• 36:37
  to feel like I can throw a good one, I've lost the plot, right
• 36:40
  in a game, I need to throw my change up my change up my
• 36:43
  fastball and then go to a slider in a 12 count and put the guy
• 36:46
  away. Then I can't throw three more in
• 36:48
  a row to make sure that I throw a good one.
• 36:50
  And so our training should reflect that, especially as we
• 36:53
  approach the season where you should practice going from your
• 36:57
  other pitches to your other pitches because that's how
• 37:00
  they're going to be used in the game.
• 37:01
  That's going to challenge you to get better.
• 37:03
  And it might be harder to do it right.
• 37:05
  Like it's going to be hard to do this in practice.
• 37:07
  It's going to be hard to throw a good slider immediately after
• 37:09
  throwing three other pitches. But the idea isn't being good in
• 37:11
  practice, It's being able to access that ability in the game.
• 37:14
  And if you're just never training that in practice,
• 37:16
  you're never going to be able to do that.
• 37:17
  So I do think maybe this is a little bit of a tangent.
• 37:19
  I just generally think that there should be some higher
• 37:21
  level of variability and like this kind of like replicating
• 37:25
  how the pitch is actually going to be used in the game.
• 37:26
  But whether that's through a pitch design session or like
• 37:28
  just general bullpen sessions. But that's that's my that's my
• 37:32
  my rant. I've got a question now directly
• 37:35
  for you on that specific rant you made, so forget about
• 37:39
  anything that's going to be on our notes.
• 37:40
  This is more a concept that I was told in professional
• 37:45
  baseball development. So a former minor league
• 37:48
  pitching coordinator who now is I believe a big league assistant
• 37:52
  is what his title is. I could be wrong on that, but I
• 37:56
  I know he has some sort of big league role at this point.
• 37:58
  Don't know the official title. One of the things that he told
• 38:01
  me in a minor league pitch design session.
• 38:05
  So actually at the complex, not necessarily like a true
• 38:08
  offseason or like in a driveline type setting.
• 38:12
  What he told me was that he wants an individual to pick 1
• 38:18
  grip, stick with it for a full session, and spend at least 50%
• 38:23
  of the time if not more throwing that specific pitch.
• 38:27
  His idea was at least at that point when the guy goes into a
• 38:31
  game he doesn't care if the result is shitty.
• 38:35
  At least the player has 1.1 feel.
• 38:39
  I'll step back and phrase this better.
• 38:42
  He has burned the boats at that point.
• 38:44
  There is no going back to another grip.
• 38:47
  There is no like I'm going to make this adjustment or maybe
• 38:50
  I'll try that other field that I was messing around with.
• 38:53
  So if you. Go with one feel, although the
• 38:55
  results might not be great, you at least have an objective for
• 39:00
  that session. So this comes back to this idea
• 39:02
  of like skill periodization, right?
• 39:03
  Like early on when learning a skill.
• 39:06
  And so this idea that I'm talking about of like this block
• 39:09
  practice of like 15 sliders in a row versus random practice of
• 39:12
  like bouncing back and forth between pitch types, that's an
• 39:14
  idea called contextual interference, which has like a
• 39:16
  lot of research backed up on it. I'd highly advise people
• 39:19
  listening, if they're curious, like to look up this concept
• 39:21
  called contextual interference to learn more.
• 39:24
  And So what we actually find is that for beginners, less
• 39:28
  contextual interference is good. So it's exactly what you're
• 39:30
  saying. If I'm first learning a pitch
• 39:31
  for the first time, I shouldn't be doing what I'm talking about.
• 39:35
  I should be doing exactly what this coach talked about, right?
• 39:37
  I should be throwing it a ton to basically learn a feel and find
• 39:41
  some stability in the pitch that I'm trying to throw.
• 39:45
  The point is once you have that stability, right, like once I
• 39:48
  know what a good pitch is, I should be challenging it with
• 39:51
  some of this randomness and variability because that's going
• 39:53
  to allow me to apply it in a game context more easily.
• 39:56
  And so athletes with who are beginners have need lower levels
• 40:00
  of contextual interference. Athletes who are experts or have
• 40:03
  like a lot of stability and need more levels of contextual
• 40:05
  interference. And so.
• 40:07
  The problem is when we don't bridge that gap, when we only
• 40:09
  give a guy low levels of contextual interference, only
• 40:11
  throw 10 sliders in a row to find it, and we never actually
• 40:14
  challenge them with these high levels of contextual
• 40:16
  interference. So I actually completely agree
• 40:17
  with what the coach was saying, especially for a guy just noting
• 40:19
  a pitch. But it's like as the season's
• 40:22
  going on and you're going to want to apply in the like in a
• 40:24
  game setting after throwing four different other pitches, that's
• 40:27
  when you really need to start challenging it with the
• 40:29
  variability. That makes sense and I
• 40:31
  appreciate you digging a little bit deeper on that.
• 40:34
  So I I guess once again, there's no right, there's no wrong, it's
• 40:38
  just all within the context of the problem at hand.
• 40:42
  For sure. It's another idea called like
• 40:44
  the the point of optimal challenge.
• 40:45
  Well, we actually, we don't want to incentivize people to be
• 40:48
  really good in practice. We want it obviously we want
• 40:50
  them to be good in game. And sometimes that requires
• 40:52
  failure in practice because that's going to allow you to
• 40:54
  learn and actually be better in the game.
• 40:57
  If the only time you study for the test is on the flash cards
• 41:00
  that you already know the answer to, that's great, you succeeded
• 41:03
  at studying, but like, you're going to fail the test.
• 41:05
  And so you have to fail in studying sometimes in order to
• 41:08
  actually do better on the test, which is the game, the test
• 41:10
  game. Yes, which I think the point you
• 41:14
  just made actually relates back to JP's presentation a little
• 41:19
  bit. You mean JD?
• 41:21
  What, what is the end result that we, what is the desired end
• 41:25
  result? And like, yes, you can succeed
• 41:28
  at those things along the way, but if those things that you're
• 41:31
  succeeding at along the way don't support the outcome that
• 41:35
  is actually going to enable you to be successful, then what's
• 41:39
  the point? Now I'm going to share a little
• 41:40
  opinion here about this panel. I've got a couple other notes
• 41:45
  here that I don't think add a ton of context to the
• 41:48
  discussion, so I'll leave them on my sheet of paper.
• 41:52
  But I think going forward if this if this could be improved
• 41:57
  in future years. So I apologize to be armchair
• 42:00
  quarterback here saying like, oh, it would be better for this
• 42:02
  reason. But my take away or my opinion
• 42:06
  would be I would like to see coaches with different budgets
• 42:11
  or environmental constraints on that panel.
• 42:16
  Again, those schools were Notre Dame, Oregon State, Arizona and
• 42:20
  Ole Miss. Yeah, let's face it, like those.
• 42:23
  Guys AD 3 coach in there. Yeah, D3, NAIA, JUCO, even a mid
• 42:28
  major D1 in the sense that you are dealing with very different
• 42:32
  problems. Deroyne, who who's now with the
• 42:35
  Mets, mentioned that the team is playing Thursday, Friday,
• 42:40
  Saturday in the fall and then he's going to give each pitcher
• 42:43
  a three page report and have a 15 to 20 minute meeting with
• 42:48
  each pitcher on staff across Monday and Tuesday.
• 42:51
  Now that is amazing. I am so jealous of that
• 42:54
  situation that he was in at Arizona.
• 42:58
  That's an amazing problem to have to have that much data and
• 43:01
  that much time to dedicated to your players to go through
• 43:05
  development. But that doesn't happen at the
• 43:09
  D2. Level at the D3, Yeah.
• 43:10
  That wasn't happening at Johns Hopkins.
• 43:12
  Yeah, it like what one, you're not getting an action report.
• 43:16
  Your action report is maybe your charted inning.
• 43:21
  Bob Babb was handwriting the Yeah, our charts.
• 43:23
  So yeah, we got it. We got those.
• 43:24
  We got those handwritten charts handed over to us.
• 43:27
  Yeah, I mean, ours was a handwritten scorebook with your
• 43:31
  with your top and bottom velocity for each inning, like
• 43:35
  sick. What are pitchers going to do
• 43:37
  with that? Like, yeah, I suppose it's
• 43:39
  better than nothing. So at least know what your
• 43:41
  results were. You can call back on them.
• 43:43
  I don't really know what else to say on that of just like I would
• 43:45
  like a different perspective, like how are these problems
• 43:48
  being solved? Because the problems, the
• 43:50
  problems for those four and not just those 4, but any power for
• 43:54
  school for the most part versus any non power for school across
• 43:59
  any other level are going to be very different.
• 44:02
  And I I'd like to know how others solve the time constraint
• 44:06
  or solve the budgetary constraint.
• 44:07
  Yeah. I think that'd be very
• 44:09
  interesting, especially for like a future presentation.
• 44:11
  I think that makes a lot of sense having it having a wide
• 44:13
  variety of of like use. I think the term use is
• 44:16
  environmental constraints, like different constraints on your
• 44:18
  program that you have to adapt around.
• 44:19
  I think that'd be. Cool.
• 44:21
  So we will refrain from reviewing the after hours social
• 44:26
  on Friday night. We'll just say it was tremendous
• 44:29
  presentations, good food, I enjoyed myself.
• 44:32
  I mean, that's where a lot of the connections are made.
• 44:34
  So if anyone, maybe maybe we'll just say this is a piece of
• 44:38
  advice. If anyone goes to any
• 44:40
  conventions or seminars, get involved in the social.
• 44:45
  It doesn't mean get hammered and drink with all the boys.
• 44:48
  Go out, talk to people, learn people's experiences, hear their
• 44:52
  stories. I mean, from that I developed
• 44:55
  friendships with these people. I developed working connections
• 44:58
  where maybe we can collaborate on a future project, or at least
• 45:01
  know that if something is up somebody's alley, I can lean on
• 45:05
  them in the future. Yep.
• 45:06
  No, no, couldn't agree more. All right, then we had a we had
• 45:09
  a bright and early wake up call. That's right.
• 45:12
  What's our you want to go into our panel or should we just
• 45:14
  wait? Or should we, since that's going
• 45:15
  to be its own episode, should we just let that?
• 45:17
  Quick highlights. So I know that's gonna come out
• 45:20
  before this. At least that's my intention.
• 45:22
  Now if that fails, I apologize everyone for how I intro this
• 45:26
  episode and you're just gonna have to deal with it cuz I'm not
• 45:28
  gonna, I'm not gonna revise it. We're just gonna ride.
• 45:31
  But yeah, our, our player panel, we, we talked a little bit about
• 45:35
  it with what Wake presented on and then what this college panel
• 45:39
  presented on. I guess we didn't mention too
• 45:41
  much of it, but how they communicate with players, I
• 45:44
  guess kind of the ethos in a sense behind our presentation.
• 45:49
  Shout out my junior year high school English teacher for ethos
• 45:52
  pathos, good memory. Thank you Darren Broadway.
• 45:55
  But the motivator in our presentation and what we kind of
• 46:01
  anchored everything in was giving the power to the players
• 46:05
  to actually tell coaches, clinicians, trainers, whoever
• 46:10
  has a say in a player's development or their career, how
• 46:15
  a player actually interprets and utilizes data, information and
• 46:20
  the stories that are being presented to them.
• 46:23
  Yeah. And it was, it was just, it was
• 46:24
  me, three other guys and yeah, we.
• 46:27
  Don't worry Blake Morningstar, Dawson Nets and Aiden May, I'll
• 46:32
  be the one to say the names cuz I know you're not a names guy,
• 46:34
  you're a numbers guy. Yeah, that's a we'll go with
• 46:36
  that. But I, yeah, it was great.
• 46:38
  It was it was a wide variety of perspectives.
• 46:39
  And honestly, what we kind of went into it approaching, it is
• 46:41
  like, let's say, how we really feel like, let's not find this
• 46:44
  like artificial convergence to the same opinion.
• 46:47
  Because I think sometimes that happens on these panels where
• 46:49
  people don't want to rile the boat.
• 46:50
  They don't want to like disagree with other people that it's
• 46:52
  like, oh, like, yeah, what he said, what he said.
• 46:54
  And so we kind of went into it and we weren't really afraid to
• 46:57
  disagree with each other, which I thought was very impactful.
• 46:59
  And yeah, I think overall I haven't watched back the video,
• 47:02
  but I think we we shared some pretty cool insights that
• 47:05
  coaches probably don't often get to hear from from players.
• 47:09
  Well, that, that video is going to be our holiday present to the
• 47:13
  masses. It's coming out on Thursday,
• 47:16
  Christmas Day. So it, it will be out prior to
• 47:19
  this, at least it's already scheduled in the YouTube.
• 47:21
  So we're, we're ready to rock with that.
• 47:23
  If people haven't listened to it and they're listening this
• 47:26
  episode, I highly suggest going to YouTube for it cuz I actually
• 47:30
  think the YouTube quality is better than the podcast quality.
• 47:34
  So there, there's a little wreck, I guess from the future
• 47:38
  to the past or from the past, future, whatever.
• 47:41
  All right, so then we move into the regularly scheduled
• 47:44
  programming with the Cubs player development presentation, maybe
• 47:49
  the most appealing presentation for like an actual engagement
• 47:56
  factor. Engagement factor.
• 47:58
  At least that's what I would say.
• 48:00
  We forgot to give ratings to everything.
• 48:02
  Whatever, we'll move on. So it was fun while it lasted,
• 48:05
  but the beauty of bolognese's flavor development for player
• 48:10
  development. But that's our title, Josh.
• 48:13
  I'll kick it back to you to start off with this one.
• 48:16
  Yeah, so the general idea here, and he was talking a lot about
• 48:19
  pasta and I'm just like, what in the world is going on?
• 48:22
  Yeah, I think he did a very nice job of building it up and
• 48:24
  identifying the problem, which is that a lot of times is that
• 48:28
  there's this kind of like quality quantity trade off.
• 48:30
  And often times they're primarily looking through a
• 48:32
  hitting lens. But a lot of times there's this
• 48:34
  issue where like if you have a guy participate in a large
• 48:38
  quantity of reps, often times the quality diminishes and it's
• 48:42
  just you kind of lose some, you lose some work.
• 48:44
  And like sometimes it's not even possible to get a large quantity
• 48:46
  of reps in due to certain time constraints in the schedule or
• 48:49
  how the schedule is even structured.
• 48:50
  And so this idea of boulignaise is a combination of Bulgarian
• 48:54
  and Japanese. The the pronunciations don't
• 48:57
  line up exactly. That's kind.
• 48:59
  Of Bulganese to bowling, yeah. Yeah, it's close enough.
• 49:02
  And so the Bulgarian schedule, they talked about where these
• 49:04
  Bulgarian weight lifters from the Soviet bloc who basically
• 49:07
  had like 3 or 4 high intensity lifting sessions in a single
• 49:10
  day. And they also talked about the
• 49:12
  Japanese, I believe it was like a screenshot from like the
• 49:14
  Little League World Series, kind of talk about like the some of
• 49:16
  the practices these U teams go through, which are very, just
• 49:18
  like very long whole day affairs.
• 49:20
  And so the Cubs basically talk about how they Jason Kansler,
• 49:24
  they talk about how they implemented a schedule in the
• 49:27
  Dominican Republic with the primary purpose of increasing
• 49:30
  the quantity of reps and maximizing the quality of reps
• 49:33
  wherever they can. And the way they did this is
• 49:35
  shorter, higher intensity sessions throughout a day.
• 49:39
  So more sessions rather than like here's your warm up block
• 49:43
  and then here's your hitting block and then here's your
• 49:45
  strength and conditioning block. They had smaller sessions,
• 49:47
  shorter sessions with rest in between and a very, very high
• 49:51
  quality of Rep in each of those sessions.
• 49:54
  Whether that's they have like a very short weightlifting block
• 49:56
  to start the day and then they go do a short hitting block and
• 49:59
  then they go do something else and they do another short
• 50:01
  hitting block and then they do another lifting block.
• 50:02
  It'll allow them from their perspective to get a higher
• 50:06
  quantity of reps and then from their subjective perspective, a
• 50:08
  larger quality of Rep as well. 11 Interesting take away I had
• 50:13
  was this kind of idea of when you're preparing an athlete,
• 50:16
  like the fitness of building up the chronic work of the fitness
• 50:18
  of an athlete, you don't necessarily want to build them
• 50:21
  to prepare the demands of the game, which is kind of how I
• 50:24
  always thought about it, at least from an injury
• 50:25
  perspective. But from a development
• 50:27
  perspective, you're not preparing A hitter to take 15
• 50:29
  swings a day or 10 swings a day. What you actually need to do is
• 50:33
  build the player up to handle the demands of the practice.
• 50:37
  They need to get better. If a guy needs to do a ton of
• 50:41
  training because he's like bottom of the roster guy and
• 50:43
  he's going to need to get a lot better.
• 50:44
  You need to be able to build this guy up to prepare to handle
• 50:47
  203 hundred 400 swings a day. Maybe that's, I don't know what
• 50:50
  hitters do, maybe that's too much, but a lot of 50 is.
• 50:53
  Usually going to be our absolute peak.
• 50:55
  So a lot of swings, way more than they would experience in
• 50:57
  the game. Same thing with the pitcher,
• 50:58
  right? Like, if I don't throw very hard
• 51:00
  and I'm going to get cut next year, I shouldn't just prepare
• 51:03
  to handle the 20 pitches in a relief ending that I'm going to
• 51:05
  need to experience in a game. I probably need to build up way
• 51:07
  more than that so I get way more reps and opportunities to work
• 51:11
  on the things I need to work on, which I thought was a very
• 51:13
  powerful idea. That's the one that stuck with
• 51:15
  me the most from that presentation.
• 51:16
  Kind of along the same lines is I wrote down the continuum that
• 51:21
  they kind of anchored the presentation in of no effect or
• 51:26
  no effective dose like we're doing nothing then we have our
• 51:31
  minimum effective dose to the tolerable dose in this larger
• 51:35
  window and then above that is the maximum dose possible or
• 51:39
  basically doing way too much. Often times in pro ball or in
• 51:44
  development we talk about reaching that minimum effective
• 51:47
  dose. You kind of hear it from our
• 51:49
  presentation. This is something Dawson Nets
• 51:51
  talks about routinely. He talked about it on his
• 51:54
  podcast that he did for Lay back is finding what is minimally
• 51:58
  effective so then he can recover and then be at his best the next
• 52:02
  day. That's the stage of his
• 52:04
  development that he is in. Define what he minimally needs
• 52:08
  to get as much return as possible to then step away.
• 52:13
  The difference is Dawson is a 25 year old, the Dominican.
• 52:18
  We are often working with 16 to 19 year olds.
• 52:22
  Thus we flip the minimum effective dose and do more.
• 52:27
  What you said, identify the tolerable dose or what is
• 52:31
  ultimately needed to make improvements.
• 52:36
  Not just expose yourself to a stimulus, but put in the
• 52:40
  necessary work, or as much work as you possibly can to be as
• 52:44
  good as you can be, and then still come back the next day and
• 52:48
  repeat it. Even within a single person,
• 52:49
  these can be different things, right?
• 52:51
  If I'm a guy who has like a ton of lean muscle mass, I'm
• 52:53
  incredibly strong in the weight room.
• 52:55
  I probably just need the minimum effective dose in the weight
• 52:57
  room because like any additional gains, they are going to have
• 53:00
  very, very marginal utility. Like it's going to be
• 53:02
  diminishing returns and I want to spend my training economy
• 53:05
  elsewhere on the throwing side, for example.
• 53:07
  And so I'm going to actually go up to my maximum tolerable dose
• 53:09
  on the throwing side and use my minimum effective dose on the
• 53:12
  lifting side if if that's the type of person I am.
• 53:15
  And so these different traits can exist within the same guy,
• 53:18
  even it's not necessarily one guy has to always use the
• 53:20
  minimum effective dose. One guy always has to use the
• 53:22
  maximum tolerable dose. Another thing they outlined,
• 53:25
  which I very much appreciated seeing on some slides, is what
• 53:29
  obstacles really exist. People create these ideas of
• 53:33
  false constraints, or that's what they labeled this as.
• 53:37
  The real constraints, at least from the player development
• 53:39
  side, are roster pressure and recovery.
• 53:44
  Like what else? Like, yeah, time, that's a real
• 53:47
  constraint, but everyone has to deal with the time problem.
• 53:50
  So why even throw that in there versus the the other things that
• 53:55
  people throw in the weather? You can find a way around the
• 53:59
  weather. I don't know field quality.
• 54:01
  You can find a way around field quality or coaches available.
• 54:06
  You can find ways around that stuff.
• 54:08
  Even the ties back to some of the previous presentations.
• 54:11
  A false constraint of player development is the aesthetic of
• 54:14
  a swing or throw. That's not actually a real
• 54:17
  constraint. I don't have to look a certain
• 54:18
  way, whatever, right? As long as I'm getting the
• 54:21
  results. And so like, I think this idea
• 54:23
  of really separating, like what are the real things I'm
• 54:26
  constrained by versus like, what are these fake constraints I'm
• 54:28
  putting on myself because I have a preconceived notion.
• 54:31
  One example of this is when my friends was talking to me and
• 54:33
  he's like, you know, when I throw my plios before I go play
• 54:35
  long toss, it doesn't feel right.
• 54:37
  You know, I just don't feel like I'm getting a lot of these plios
• 54:39
  and I'm like, well, why do you do your plots before you're
• 54:41
  throwing? It's like, well, that's what
• 54:42
  everyone does, right? And I'm like, why don't you go
• 54:44
  long toss and then come back in and throw your plows Now is
• 54:47
  updated his routine because he finds that so much more
• 54:49
  effective for him rather than this like fake constraint of
• 54:52
  like, oh, you have to do your plows before you do your long
• 54:54
  toss. So I think it's a really
• 54:56
  powerful idea. I'm a big fan of this idea
• 54:57
  Which. The exact point you just made
• 55:00
  leads to the next quote that I was going to bring up.
• 55:03
  Hopefully wrote this down exactly as they said it.
• 55:06
  But different isn't better, but different is where better lives.
• 55:10
  I thought it was a very powerful quote.
• 55:12
  You don't need to just chase being different, but maybe this
• 55:16
  quote empowers you to step away and better determine why you
• 55:21
  would do something differently for the exact example you just
• 55:25
  gave. Whoever that athlete was was so
• 55:28
  concerned with the status quo that they they just
• 55:33
  misinterpreted why they even utilize Plios or like, what is
• 55:37
  the purpose of a PLIO? And yes, there there are general
• 55:41
  purposes of doing these things. Maybe the most general is I do
• 55:45
  it to help me on the mound. Great.
• 55:47
  But then determine why it helps you on the mound.
• 55:50
  But nowhere in that does the order in which you throw a PLIO
• 55:54
  in your own throwing program matter.
• 55:57
  Yep, couldn't agree more. Let's see if there's anything
• 56:00
  else in the notes that I think is really worth labeling.
• 56:02
  They did get in the details of how they structured this system.
• 56:05
  I did find that interesting, them labeling on kind of a
• 56:09
  volume intensity chart. What is A1?
• 56:12
  What is A2? What is a three?
• 56:13
  What is a four? Now I'm going to do poor
• 56:16
  podcasting because no one can see what my hands are doing.
• 56:20
  But one would be closest to the XY axis.
• 56:24
  The the origin point A2 would be higher on the volume with no
• 56:30
  real increase in intensity. A three would be an increase in
• 56:33
  intensity but no real increase in volume, and a four would be
• 56:38
  an increase in both volume and intensity.
• 56:42
  That's, that's an extremely, I think powerful idea that they
• 56:44
  talked about too, is kind of living in the corners, right?
• 56:47
  You want to be like really high intensity, really low volume or
• 56:49
  really high volume, really low intensity.
• 56:51
  And they talked about how they also do just general athletic
• 56:54
  development, like, oh, let's go play spike ball or let's go like
• 56:57
  do these like different things And that kind of lives in the
• 56:59
  middle. But it's like it's not too
• 57:01
  taxing that you're going to be too tired for the session the
• 57:03
  next day. But it kind of allows you to
• 57:05
  build some of these more general athletic traits that can maybe
• 57:07
  be applied in other areas. And what they are doing is
• 57:12
  educating the player on, I guess that physical literacy.
• 57:16
  I don't know what that was, the phrasing they used.
• 57:18
  Maybe they did and I just didn't write it down.
• 57:20
  Now it's cemented in my brain. But I'm going to choose to say
• 57:24
  that's a good way of saying sounding smart.
• 57:26
  They are educating the player on what fatigue they might be able
• 57:31
  to expect from a different activity.
• 57:33
  Or maybe if a player doesn't know or they don't know how hard
• 57:36
  to go or what this looks like like for their total development
• 57:41
  and recovery schedule. If they're educated on it, they
• 57:45
  can make a better decision on their energy expenditure or if
• 57:49
  they are in a place of whatever the these guys are in the
• 57:54
  Dominican complex, they, they have other constraints that we
• 57:57
  might not know. They have English class that
• 57:59
  they have to go to. They, they have these different
• 58:01
  things that they have to do. Maybe they have to spend more
• 58:04
  time in English class on a given day.
• 58:06
  It means that they are missing the team stretch.
• 58:09
  I don't know, like I, I don't know the lives of these guys.
• 58:11
  And if that's the case, then the player at least knows like, OK,
• 58:14
  I miss my one activity for the day.
• 58:16
  If I miss my one activity for the day, what can I do to ensure
• 58:20
  that I checked the box on that workload expenditure?
• 58:23
  Yep, I think it's, I think, yeah, just like the holistic
• 58:26
  view of the athlete and like sometimes maybe it's like the
• 58:29
  guys issues going on at home, he's breaking up with his
• 58:31
  girlfriend or like in college, in the college setting, he's
• 58:33
  like studying for finals. Like maybe we actually do need
• 58:36
  to dial it back a little bit on the training side because he's
• 58:37
  got all this extra stress in his life that he has to deal with as
• 58:40
  well. That's you can't remove.
• 58:42
  You can't remove that stress from of taking a final, for
• 58:44
  example. This is going to be a challenge
• 58:46
  for the industry now because you said the break up with a
• 58:49
  girlfriend example. I have certainly said that every
• 58:51
  time when we talk about fatigue or other stimuli that can impact
• 58:56
  total outputs, Maybe you maybe we need to convene at the next
• 59:00
  convention or summit and just determine what other non
• 59:05
  physical. That's everything.
• 59:07
  The answer is everything. Yes, everything answers
• 59:10
  everything. Yeah, it's all the same to the
• 59:13
  central nervous system. It just it is.
• 59:14
  It is. Work is work in fatigue.
• 59:17
  Stress. Yeah, yeah, stress is stress.
• 59:20
  So, yeah, I think with that, we're probably good on the Cubs
• 59:24
  player development presentation. So if we're going to go back to
• 59:27
  our ratings, it was a very good bowling.
• 59:29
  Yes. They they presented a concept
• 59:32
  that is near and dear to all of us.
• 59:34
  Meat sauce. I love eating meat sauce.
• 59:37
  At the end of the day, it's going to make me happy if
• 59:39
  someone is hitting me with meat sauce or meatballs or some
• 59:42
  equivalent of that. So I have no problem saying that
• 59:45
  on my Italian foods rating system.
• 59:49
  I'm assigning this Bolognese presentation as Bolognese on the
• 59:53
  rating scale. Fantastic.
• 59:56
  That brings us to balling on a budget with Denton McNamee,
• 1:00:00
  pitching coach at Lindenwood University, and Jacob Buffa, the
• 1:00:03
  now director of International Scouting for the Saint Louis
• 1:00:07
  Cardinals, former farm director and probably another like 6
• 1:00:12
  fancy titles with the Houston Astros.
• 1:00:14
  I will just say that I just wanted to add in that they have
• 1:00:16
  a, so they call it Elite Baseball Academy.
• 1:00:18
  That's what they were. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:20
  I, I guess I, I should have added that in the title because
• 1:00:24
  so much of their presentation was actually on Elite Baseball
• 1:00:27
  Academy. So balling on a budget.
• 1:00:29
  No, the Cardinals probably aren't operating with the same
• 1:00:33
  budgetary constraints that most of us are.
• 1:00:35
  But maybe in terms of player development and Major League
• 1:00:39
  Baseball, they are certainly not operating with the heaviest of
• 1:00:42
  hitters. Could they?
• 1:00:43
  Maybe. But compared to Yankees,
• 1:00:46
  Phillies, Dodgers, they're not spending on that level by any
• 1:00:51
  means. And then Denton at Lindenwood
• 1:00:54
  and prior to Lindenwood, Maryville University, I'm
• 1:00:57
  assuming most people on here, unless they have followed
• 1:01:00
  Denton, what we've talked about with him, they're not spending
• 1:01:04
  money at the schools. The only time they're spending
• 1:01:06
  money is that they definitely need to or if something ranks
• 1:01:10
  high on their wants list and they deem it as a need, which
• 1:01:16
  probably decently sets up this presentation.
• 1:01:20
  When you don't have a lot of money, you are in a position
• 1:01:24
  where you need to make calculated gambles.
• 1:01:26
  I underline the word calculated because you have to mitigate
• 1:01:30
  risk in the process. The way that these guys define
• 1:01:33
  this was by anchoring everything in the how and the why.
• 1:01:37
  Yeah, we can talk about the how and the why as buzzwords all the
• 1:01:41
  time. But kind of going back to what
• 1:01:44
  we've heard in other presentations is define the
• 1:01:48
  problem that you are wishing to solve.
• 1:01:50
  Determine how you can solve that problem.
• 1:01:53
  And if you do not have the tools in house to solve that problem
• 1:01:57
  or within an arm's reach, determine in what manner you are
• 1:02:02
  going to go outside, what purchase you might make, to what
• 1:02:05
  level of purchase you ultimately need to make and then be able to
• 1:02:09
  clearly define why that purchase is necessary.
• 1:02:12
  So we saw that with force plates specifically with EBA or Elite
• 1:02:18
  Baseball Academy and then we saw that with Flexpro cool enough to
• 1:02:23
  to say Flexpro for Lindenwood University.
• 1:02:25
  So I will, I will dish it back to you now.
• 1:02:29
  That's my initial overview. Hedgecoe, please take it away.
• 1:02:32
  Yeah, I mean, the thing that got to me the most, which I actually
• 1:02:34
  learned in this presentation, which I thought was pretty cool,
• 1:02:37
  which also this presentation I think is a good kind of
• 1:02:39
  manifestation of what you were talking about earlier with maybe
• 1:02:41
  trying to get some, some more representation with like lower
• 1:02:45
  budget facilities or teams. And this kind of idea of the, I
• 1:02:48
  think it's called like the quadrant of innovation.
• 1:02:50
  And they're talking about this idea of the quadrant of
• 1:02:54
  innovation. It's you have new existing
• 1:02:56
  technology to new technology on one axis, and then you have
• 1:03:00
  existing market to new market on the other axis.
• 1:03:02
  And so an example of an existing technology an an existing
• 1:03:06
  market. The first thing that came to my
• 1:03:07
  head was like, OK, we already use radar guns in in baseball
• 1:03:11
  and it's an existing technology, but now people are starting to
• 1:03:13
  use it throughout the return to throw process in rehab.
• 1:03:15
  So it's an existing tech, an existing market, but it's still
• 1:03:18
  an innovation. Next, if you have an existing
• 1:03:19
  technology but a new market, that's so the first thing is the
• 1:03:23
  first one is called an incremental innovation.
• 1:03:25
  If you have an existing technology and you're
• 1:03:27
  introducing it to a new market, it's called an architectural
• 1:03:29
  innovation. And so an example of this that I
• 1:03:31
  believe they gave was the electronic camera, which was
• 1:03:33
  used in like bird watching, right?
• 1:03:35
  Or like these like crazy like niche hobbies people realized.
• 1:03:39
  So the frame rate is extremely high.
• 1:03:40
  It has these uses in baseball. It's an existing technology, but
• 1:03:43
  as a use in a new market. On the new tech side, if you
• 1:03:46
  have an existing market but you have new technology, that it's
• 1:03:48
  called a radical innovation. I believe the example they gave
• 1:03:51
  was Flex pro grip if I'm not mistaken.
• 1:03:52
  New tech, new market was. Sorry, new tech, new tech
• 1:03:56
  existing market. That is disruptive.
• 1:03:59
  Well, I had it backwards and unfortunate.
• 1:04:01
  So that was actually OK disruptive and then the radical
• 1:04:03
  innovation, which would be the new tech new market.
• 1:04:05
  An example I think they gave was like track man, basically
• 1:04:07
  creating the entire field of ball flight physics, right,
• 1:04:11
  right. We didn't even know this was a
• 1:04:12
  thing. Now we have like teams have like
• 1:04:14
  dozens of people dedicated to analyzing this data and and and
• 1:04:18
  making decisions and evaluating players on this data.
• 1:04:20
  So it's a really interesting concept that I hadn't heard
• 1:04:22
  before and I think it's just a very valuable idea.
• 1:04:24
  And I think they said from their perspective as a as a low budget
• 1:04:28
  facility that they tried to focus on kind of this like
• 1:04:30
  existing technology column of like they're not going to have
• 1:04:34
  this resources to build new technology or develop their own
• 1:04:37
  new technology. So they have to kind of rely on
• 1:04:39
  on some of this existing technology and implement in the
• 1:04:42
  scales of their system. And probably digging a little
• 1:04:45
  bit deeper on that, part of the reason they felt they could go
• 1:04:48
  the existing tech existing market world is because the
• 1:04:51
  problem that they were looking to solve was answered by
• 1:04:55
  technology that was in that space.
• 1:04:58
  Because their their goal or what they talked about with EBA was
• 1:05:04
  creating higher swing speeds or increasing eggs velocity, I
• 1:05:07
  think was the the term that they use for batted ball metrics.
• 1:05:11
  But to even get to that point, we then were taken through the
• 1:05:15
  decision trees that they used and ultimately how those
• 1:05:18
  decision trees led to the decision to invest in force
• 1:05:24
  plates. Same kind of thing.
• 1:05:25
  Then with Denton at Lindenwood in deciding to get Flex Pro
• 1:05:29
  Grip, he knew that the best ability is availability.
• 1:05:34
  Shout out in May for that phrase because I think he butchered it
• 1:05:36
  about 7 times during our presentation.
• 1:05:39
  So now I'm doing the same thing. But.
• 1:05:42
  At a mid major where you might not have a deep roster,
• 1:05:45
  especially on the pitching staff, you need your horses to
• 1:05:48
  be available. If that's the case, you need to
• 1:05:50
  assess readiness. If you were going to assess
• 1:05:52
  readiness, you need to determine how to assess readiness.
• 1:05:56
  What tools can you use? Then you begin to look at what's
• 1:05:58
  on the market. If nothing that is publicly
• 1:06:00
  available or that you have in your graphs can do that, you
• 1:06:05
  need to look elsewhere. Enter the disruptive innovation
• 1:06:09
  of Flexpro Grip. That was really cool to see.
• 1:06:12
  I knew Denton was going to mention Flexpro Grip, but I
• 1:06:14
  didn't know in what capacity and how he was going to label it
• 1:06:17
  that. I felt really good, not gonna
• 1:06:19
  lie. But then on the EBA side, they
• 1:06:22
  were going through how much the weight room can impact batted
• 1:06:27
  ball metrics. And great, like you can give a
• 1:06:30
  kid a training program, but how effective is that training
• 1:06:33
  program? And just because you lift more
• 1:06:35
  weights doesn't mean you can hit the ball harder.
• 1:06:37
  You need to apply force, transfer force, all these
• 1:06:40
  different things that ultimately go into putting a bat on a
• 1:06:44
  baseball. And yes, they can do swing
• 1:06:46
  mechanics and all these things, but where EBA was made or
• 1:06:51
  they're nuts and bolts was the strength component or the
• 1:06:54
  physical preparation component. And then tying in that into the
• 1:06:58
  baseball world doesn't force plates fit perfectly with their
• 1:07:03
  own niche. And it makes sense how they got
• 1:07:06
  to that point in the decision tree.
• 1:07:09
  So although decision trees might not have been the crux or the
• 1:07:15
  intended crux of this presentation, I believe, at
• 1:07:18
  least for me, that was the most powerful part in encouraging
• 1:07:24
  coaches or decision makers to create a decision tree.
• 1:07:28
  So then you can actually determine what you can affect.
• 1:07:33
  Yep. I thought that was a really cool
• 1:07:34
  concept as well. Yeah, I, I, I agree.
• 1:07:37
  Are those very powerful, breaking things down as a
• 1:07:39
  constituent, like atomic parts that you can build back up and
• 1:07:44
  knowing, knowing exactly where those branches terminate I think
• 1:07:47
  is extremely important. And then as a follow up or the
• 1:07:51
  secondary piece on those decision trees, Jacob Buffa
• 1:07:56
  answered this during the Q&A, is you have to have some tolerance
• 1:08:02
  to being wrong. In our world where we're trying
• 1:08:04
  to impact player performance, there's going to be some extent
• 1:08:08
  that you could be wrong or there's some risk involved.
• 1:08:11
  Someone might get hurt, you might present a poor outcome.
• 1:08:14
  So every decision you make can come with inherent risk, and you
• 1:08:19
  have to be the one that determines how much of that risk
• 1:08:22
  you are willing to incur. This is such a phenomenal idea.
• 1:08:26
  And this this exists in so many different aspects.
• 1:08:30
  I think I've heard this before of like NBA players, right,
• 1:08:33
  where it's like if you're, if you're shooting 90% from the
• 1:08:35
  field, that means you're not shooting enough.
• 1:08:38
  Yes. Because like there's at some
• 1:08:40
  point. And so like, I mean, there's
• 1:08:41
  many million applications of this.
• 1:08:43
  If you're never getting rejected at the bar when you approach a
• 1:08:45
  woman, you're not asking out enough women.
• 1:08:48
  Like you're not asking out a high enough.
• 1:08:50
  Like, you know what I'm saying? Like you have to go above your
• 1:08:53
  your league then like you have to keep going up.
• 1:08:55
  Yeah, the the whole point is like you shouldn't be getting,
• 1:08:58
  you shouldn't be right every time, like you should be taking
• 1:09:01
  calculated risks that have a higher payoff.
• 1:09:04
  And so if you're only ever doing the things that you know are
• 1:09:06
  sure things, you're not actually optimizing for long term
• 1:09:09
  success. The Guardians did this
• 1:09:12
  specifically with Stephen Kwan on the hitting side a couple
• 1:09:17
  years ago. I believe he had, I think, the
• 1:09:20
  second lowest swing and miss rate in the entire league behind
• 1:09:25
  Luis Arise. If you're second behind Luis
• 1:09:28
  Arise, you're probably in a pretty good place.
• 1:09:30
  But they showed that Quan was incredibly effective when he had
• 1:09:35
  like a certain amount of slug or expected slug in games.
• 1:09:40
  But the problem was he was just taking so many pitches and then
• 1:09:44
  when he swung, he made contact literally every single time.
• 1:09:48
  So they wanted him to just swing more and get comfortable
• 1:09:54
  swinging harder, not focusing as much on contact.
• 1:09:58
  The problem is he is such an elite contact tool that he
• 1:10:03
  didn't decrease his swinging or he didn't increase his swinging
• 1:10:07
  miss rate at all. But what was crazy his contact
• 1:10:10
  skill was so high it's still resulted in more total hits as
• 1:10:16
  opposed to chasing a walk or chasing on base.
• 1:10:19
  So even though that wasn't the intended positive consequence,
• 1:10:25
  it's still resulted in a positive outcome, which I I find
• 1:10:29
  really interesting. Like, just because you make a
• 1:10:31
  decision doesn't mean it's always going to be A + B = C in
• 1:10:36
  our world of extreme variability, but it doesn't mean
• 1:10:38
  just because it doesn't equal C that you're not always going to
• 1:10:41
  immediately have a negative. You could still have some
• 1:10:45
  extraneous positive result in the decisions that you make.
• 1:10:49
  Like I I'm sure these guys doing all the force plate work, not
• 1:10:53
  only did they swing harder or have higher exit V lows, I'm
• 1:10:58
  sure it resulted in faster athletes as well.
• 1:11:00
  And although they didn't care about guys 60 times, they
• 1:11:04
  probably improved their sixty times in the process.
• 1:11:07
  Yep. No, I think it's, I think it's
• 1:11:08
  great. I can talk about this the exact
• 1:11:10
  topic for hours and. Hours.
• 1:11:11
  Yeah, yeah, we could do a podcast on this theory.
• 1:11:14
  I probably need to like write something down about this
• 1:11:15
  because I've had these thoughts showing in my head.
• 1:11:17
  But I think it's, I think it was great stuff from those guys.
• 1:11:19
  And yeah, it was a it was a good presentation, especially kind of
• 1:11:22
  referring to what you're talking about, of, of talking about
• 1:11:24
  these different constraints that coaches have to deal with that
• 1:11:26
  and not ever it's the luxury of working for the Dodgers and just
• 1:11:29
  access to everything they want. OK.
• 1:11:32
  Moving on leading into lunchtime on Saturday, we have the
• 1:11:35
  strength and conditioning panel. I will say it from the jump, I
• 1:11:39
  do wish they talked a little bit more about strength and
• 1:11:41
  conditioning principles as opposed to workload.
• 1:11:43
  Yeah, I agree. I thought it was.
• 1:11:45
  They did talk a lot about workload, which I think is an
• 1:11:46
  important topic, but there wasn't a ton about actual
• 1:11:49
  strength and conditioning, which I would have liked to hear those
• 1:11:51
  guys perspective those guys. I mean, still that they offer
• 1:11:54
  their thoughts, I thought it was still some valuable information,
• 1:11:56
  but I didn't have any like crazy big takeaways personally.
• 1:12:00
  Yeah, maybe I'll. I'll just read through the
• 1:12:03
  notes. There's Nick Shed, Chris Martin,
• 1:12:05
  Brandon Golden and Mark Seaver. Nick Shed is, I believe, the
• 1:12:09
  strength coordinator with the Red Sox.
• 1:12:10
  Hopefully I got that right. Chris Martin is the head
• 1:12:13
  strength and conditioning coach at LSU.
• 1:12:15
  Brandon Golden works in the private sector.
• 1:12:17
  He runs Ghost Lab in North Carolina.
• 1:12:19
  He's formerly a strength coach in the Dodgers organization and
• 1:12:23
  Mark Seaver, I'm familiar and work relatively closely with
• 1:12:27
  three of those four guys. The only one I don't know is
• 1:12:30
  Nick Shed. Some really good minds on those
• 1:12:32
  other 3 for sure. I'm sure Nick Shed has an
• 1:12:35
  incredible mind. I just don't really know him.
• 1:12:37
  So I don't want that to sound bad that I don't call him an
• 1:12:40
  incredible mind. I just, this is the first time
• 1:12:42
  I've ever heard him speak reoccurring themes.
• 1:12:45
  All these guys spoke on objective feedback.
• 1:12:48
  Really if there's been any place that has objective feedback in
• 1:12:51
  baseball for the longest time it's actually probably been the
• 1:12:54
  weight room because there are numbers on weights at a minimum.
• 1:12:58
  We know what reps and sets are. But the beauty is now there's
• 1:13:01
  other things involved like force plates or like velocity based
• 1:13:04
  training so we can actually gauge levels of fatigue. 1 hot
• 1:13:07
  button topic that I did think was great to hear a little bit
• 1:13:10
  about was aerobic capacity and how far the pendulum has swung
• 1:13:15
  in the baseball world focusing on anaerobic output or short
• 1:13:19
  sprints. We we have to have this sport
• 1:13:22
  specific training of baseball is such a short burst sport.
• 1:13:25
  So pitcher should only train in short bursts, hitter should only
• 1:13:28
  train in short bursts. Just maximize rotational
• 1:13:31
  velocities. Yes, all those things are
• 1:13:33
  incredible and probably necessary, but let's face it,
• 1:13:36
  everybody needs some sort of aerobic base.
• 1:13:39
  And I, I do think it's great that these guys dove a little
• 1:13:42
  deeper on that concept. Yeah, I think the most important
• 1:13:44
  take away in that sense is like this idea of 2nd order effects,
• 1:13:48
  right? Like maybe aerobic capacity
• 1:13:50
  isn't directly related to your ability to get outs on the
• 1:13:52
  mound, but if a higher aerobic base allows you to get better
• 1:13:56
  quality and quantity of reps throughout the week, the 2nd
• 1:13:59
  order effect is that it's going to allow you to get better on
• 1:14:01
  the mount. It's going to increase your
• 1:14:02
  training capacity. So it's just important to think
• 1:14:04
  about like not just like the primary cause or the kind of the
• 1:14:07
  primary effect of something, but what does that allow you to do
• 1:14:10
  now? Like what?
• 1:14:10
  What additional affordance does that open up for you?
• 1:14:13
  A couple of quotes that I have written down here from the
• 1:14:16
  group. Everything we do is general.
• 1:14:18
  Everything you do is specific. I believe this was Mark Seaver
• 1:14:23
  who said this, the strength coach at Wake Forest, meaning
• 1:14:26
  that we in the weight room, we are in charge of the general
• 1:14:30
  versus you pointing to the audience's pitching coaches as
• 1:14:33
  development Staffs. That's where the specifics come
• 1:14:36
  in, which I think is a fantastic concept.
• 1:14:38
  The general physical preparedness concept is going to
• 1:14:42
  come from the weight room. You need to prepare the body
• 1:14:44
  there so then you can go work on the sport specific side which is
• 1:14:49
  throwing a ball, swinging a bat, what have you.
• 1:14:51
  I forgot who said it, but they also clear up this misconception
• 1:14:55
  that like everything you do in the weight room has to look like
• 1:14:57
  your sport. And in fact, it probably, it
• 1:14:59
  probably shouldn't look like your sport.
• 1:15:01
  It like you should be building general capacities, which then
• 1:15:04
  can be used in the actual skill itself.
• 1:15:07
  And not these like middle ground exercises that like kind of look
• 1:15:10
  like the sport, but they're not actually stable enough to build
• 1:15:13
  any extra true capacity or output.
• 1:15:15
  But they're also not skill specific enough that you're
• 1:15:17
  actually building any skill. And so like people kind of get
• 1:15:20
  caught in the middle way too often.
• 1:15:21
  As Bryce Kreider also often says, you don't want to get
• 1:15:24
  stuck in the middle. And unfortunately people like in
• 1:15:26
  the weight room, they're like, oh, everything I do has to look
• 1:15:28
  exactly like the sport, when in reality that's actually not
• 1:15:31
  what's probably best for for improving performance.
• 1:15:33
  One thing I did find interesting is with the weight room, the
• 1:15:38
  minimum effective dose was encouraged.
• 1:15:41
  These guys talked about minimum effective dose and how important
• 1:15:44
  that is on their side. Granted like in season or if
• 1:15:48
  you're in pro ball, you probably don't want a lot of energy
• 1:15:51
  expenditure unnecessarily to be used in the weight room.
• 1:15:54
  I, I thought it was just kind of an interesting juxtaposition for
• 1:15:59
  two presentations prior to hear about not caring at all about
• 1:16:03
  the minimum effective dose because we want guys to be
• 1:16:05
  exposed to as much work as possible that they can tolerate.
• 1:16:09
  To then hear the strength guys say like Nah, find the minimum,
• 1:16:13
  well what do we need and move on.
• 1:16:15
  Well, so if you think about like where these guys are coming
• 1:16:17
  from, right? So all those guys that you just
• 1:16:19
  mentioned, the, the strength and condition guys are all dealing
• 1:16:22
  with high level athletes who probably have a very high
• 1:16:24
  training age and the weight room is not their lowest hanging
• 1:16:28
  fruit. Kansler with the Cubs was
• 1:16:29
  talking about Dominican guys on the skill side and especially or
• 1:16:34
  even on the physical development side who are much, much younger
• 1:16:37
  and don't have nearly the training age or history with
• 1:16:41
  training on either the skill or the, the the weight room side.
• 1:16:44
  And so like those different populations probably dictate
• 1:16:47
  different types of approaches. Now a high school guy who comes
• 1:16:49
  in the driveline and weighs 140 lbs, like, yeah, we probably
• 1:16:53
  shouldn't be doing pitch design on a slider.
• 1:16:54
  We should probably be force feeding food down his throat and
• 1:16:57
  forcing him to gain muscle mass because that's literally going
• 1:16:59
  to be the thing that changes his life more than anything.
• 1:17:01
  And so it's really important to know the population that you're
• 1:17:04
  working with and like what the low hanging fruit is, what
• 1:17:07
  beginner gains are still possible?
• 1:17:09
  And if there's not a ton of beginner gains left on the
• 1:17:11
  weight room side, you're probably going to get better
• 1:17:12
  bang for your buck working on the skill side.
• 1:17:14
  And that's, I think, where these guys were coming.
• 1:17:16
  There is probably one more piece that I want to address here and
• 1:17:21
  that is something that I think actually aligns perfectly with
• 1:17:27
  something you talked about during our player panel.
• 1:17:30
  What is measured versus what is shared.
• 1:17:33
  So coaches collect all this data and then what they collect or
• 1:17:38
  what they see on their end doesn't have to be every single
• 1:17:43
  thing that goes out. How can we grind on the back end
• 1:17:48
  to make what you see as a player actionable?
• 1:17:52
  It doesn't need to be simple, but it needs to be actionable.
• 1:17:56
  I mean, I think the quintessential example of this
• 1:17:57
  is like an advanced report. And if my advanced report has
• 1:18:00
  all these tables and plots and charts and when I'm on the
• 1:18:03
  mound, I'm thinking like, OK, what was this guy's width
• 1:18:06
  percentage and two strike counts on sliders below 3 feet in the
• 1:18:10
  zone, right? Like I'm, I've already lost,
• 1:18:12
  like I'm already thinking about things that I should not be
• 1:18:14
  thinking about. What I should be thinking is I'm
• 1:18:16
  throwing a slider here. This is where I'm throwing it.
• 1:18:19
  And so action ability requires a little bit of feature
• 1:18:22
  engineering and like ability, like cleverness on the back end
• 1:18:25
  to like turn things into something actual.
• 1:18:27
  What pitch should I throw? Where should I throw it?
• 1:18:29
  That's very actual. But it requires a lot of actual
• 1:18:32
  complex stuff in the back end to make that happen.
• 1:18:35
  But I think the same thing is true of your development plan,
• 1:18:36
  right? If you want to dig into it, you
• 1:18:38
  can. But I think it's really
• 1:18:39
  important to know, here's what I need to work on and why.
• 1:18:41
  And not necessarily like all the different components that go
• 1:18:44
  into it. So complex on the back end,
• 1:18:47
  simple on the front end is is kind of what I think is is a
• 1:18:50
  general rule of thumb that is pretty effective.
• 1:18:53
  I did say one more point, but I actually see a quote that I
• 1:18:57
  think could create a little bit of a hot button discussion, so I
• 1:19:00
  am going to go back to it and just ask how you interpret it.
• 1:19:03
  I wrote this as a quote. It is literally in quotations in
• 1:19:06
  my notebook, but I think I paraphrase this a little bit so
• 1:19:09
  I apologize for assigning this to someone.
• 1:19:11
  I don't remember exactly who said it during the panel, but in
• 1:19:15
  quotes I have. The game of adjustments is a cop
• 1:19:19
  out. How do we get back to who you
• 1:19:21
  were when things were good? How do you feel about that?
• 1:19:25
  That's interesting without the and I'd actually don't remember
• 1:19:27
  the full context of that, but I do think that's something like
• 1:19:30
  where this these kind of like test retest cycles, like
• 1:19:33
  checkpoints in time of knowing like who were you when you were
• 1:19:36
  good? Like how did you move?
• 1:19:37
  How strong were you? Like what did your shapes look
• 1:19:39
  like? I think that's really important.
• 1:19:41
  The game of adjustments thing, I think is if you're making your
• 1:19:43
  adjustments blindly, I think you've lost right?
• 1:19:46
  Like it's you're like, I, I don't know what's going on.
• 1:19:49
  I'm way worse than I used to be. And I'm just going to try a
• 1:19:52
  bunch of stuff and just see hopefully something works.
• 1:19:56
  It's this, it's like this tinkering idea.
• 1:19:58
  You see this so often in in professional athletes.
• 1:20:01
  They're just tinkering on something every day and every
• 1:20:03
  week it's something different. It's like, well, I think I
• 1:20:05
  figured it out this week. It's just my back leg or oh,
• 1:20:07
  it's my glove side or oh, it's like the way I hold the ball
• 1:20:10
  and. You're just never going to be
• 1:20:12
  able to make the consistent progress that a guy makes.
• 1:20:15
  If he's like, if he knows what he's what he's working towards
• 1:20:18
  and he knows why and he's constantly re evaluating that
• 1:20:20
  with objective data. It's just, it's, I just don't, I
• 1:20:23
  just don't see a way that that's like the other approach is very
• 1:20:25
  sustainable at all. That probably does it on this
• 1:20:29
  specific presentation for me. Do you feel there's anything in
• 1:20:34
  particular we missed? No, I think, I think that about
• 1:20:37
  covered it. I did like you said, I do wish
• 1:20:39
  they would have went into a little bit more of some strength
• 1:20:41
  and conditioning topics. I think there's rumor they were
• 1:20:43
  gonna talk about bench press and stuff like that, but I never got
• 1:20:45
  into it. But yeah, I think overall it was
• 1:20:48
  a lot of great minds on there and it was nice to hear from
• 1:20:50
  them. OK, so that puts a bow on the
• 1:20:53
  SNC panel. And then, although this wasn't
• 1:20:56
  our original intention at the start of the episode, Josh and I
• 1:21:01
  did hit a little pause recording button there to discuss a plan
• 1:21:05
  if anyone is keeping track at home.
• 1:21:07
  We're about an hour and a half into this already and we are
• 1:21:10
  exactly halfway through the Wake Forest Player Development
• 1:21:14
  Seminar and at the mercy of our significant others or any other
• 1:21:21
  priorities that we have waiting for us on the other side of this
• 1:21:25
  recording. We decided to press pause and we
• 1:21:28
  will reconvene with a Part 2. This is going to be the first
• 1:21:31
  Part 1 and Part 2 lay back episode that I have ever done.
• 1:21:34
  And if I'm not mistaken, that will quickly put Hedge Cut in
• 1:21:38
  the lead of total playback podcast appearances.
• 1:21:43
  So maybe. This was like the Brooklyn
• 1:21:45
  Cyclone's all over again, all time appearances record holder.
• 1:21:50
  That was a conversation topic on our first episode.
• 1:21:54
  It probably was. So yeah, we'll we'll tie things
• 1:21:57
  off here. No sense doing any crazy reviews
• 1:22:01
  at the end. We are going to pick things up
• 1:22:03
  post lunch on Saturday and that'll be Chase Aldridge.
• 1:22:07
  Next base NBA trends from the Daniel Kurtz 6 MLB panel.
• 1:22:14
  After the MLB panel, we get into winning with workload with Casey
• 1:22:18
  Mulholland, the precision model with Nick Serio, and then
• 1:22:24
  performance neurology with IHT and then maybe some final
• 1:22:28
  takeaways from the weekend, but that's.
• 1:22:30
  How we got some good ones? We got some really good ones for
• 1:22:32
  next episodes. This episode there's some some
• 1:22:34
  really good discussion and excited to talk about some of
• 1:22:36
  these other ones. The next episode.
• 1:22:37
  It'll be a good time. Yeah.
• 1:22:39
  Well, Josh, thanks for dedicating this much time for
• 1:22:42
  just a Part 1. Looking forward to another hour
• 1:22:44
  and a half or so on Part 2. Let's do.
• 1:22:47
  It Yeah, this is great. Find a way.
• 1:22:49
  And to everyone out there, thanks for laying back with us.