Driveline Chat: Kyle Boddy Interview, Part II of III

This is Part II of a 3-part interview with Driveline’s Kyle Boddy, with deep thanks to Margie Kahn for her transcribing wizardry. Part I can be found here. As Part II begins, we’re talking about the incentive for pitchers to throw high 90s fastballs because they will be more successful…

Nico: I mean, the rebuttal would be I can name a lot of guys who throw 90 miles per hour who are gonna win more games this year than Gerrit Cole, but...

Boddy: But are they gonna win more games than Gerrit Cole when all’s said and done? And make more money? t’s a complicated problem.

Nico: Now, if eight teams have embraced your preventative models and it has data to show that it’s effective, what’s up with the other 22 teams that aren’t?

Boddy: I have a great idea. I think it’s, love your take on it, but right now there’s no incentive. So, for Gerrit Cole, staying healthy his whole career until now, it’s been a hell of a career, going to the Hall of Fame if he never throws another pitch again in his life, at least I think so.

And so it should be celebrated, right? Now, what if the incentive, there’s no incentive in Major League Baseball to really prevent injuries. Sounds crazy, right, but it’s true. Because what is the penalty for the Yankees for Gerrit Cole missing at least all of this year?

Well, they lose his contract, they lose his performance, of course, but then also they lose the money. So what’s he owed, $30 million, $35 million, something like that? So they lose $35 million. Well, that number used to matter, right? That number used to be a lot of money. But the Yankees are worth $8 billion, so suddenly the money’s not that big of a deal. And that’s not a financial penalty.

Like just losing contract money off the books. The teams just kind of assume that players are gonna get hurt and they budget for it. So there’s not really something that impacts the team. Well, he got hurt, we’ll call up (so and so player), we got this guy and this guy, and yeah, it’s worse, but at the end of the day, injuries are just part of the game.

So there’s no real incentive, no real punishment. No real incentive for keeping people healthy. Here’s what I’m getting to: What if a player gets hurt because of the mechanics of it, Gerrit Cole gets hurt, goes on the DL, put him on the 60-day DL, you replace him with someone else because you get a slot back. What if, when you put a player on the 60-day DL, you did not get an extra roster spot back until the next year? The Dodgers would literally forfeit every game if that was the case. But imagine this. So, you don’t do it forever, because imagine Cole has Tommy John and then, God forbid, has complications and misses all of 2026.

Well, it’s not fair to punish the Yankees, you can’t take a slot from them for two years. At least I don’t think that’s fair. But if you suddenly had incentives in line that health mattered to your roster slots, because what they do care about is roster slots, you play down a roster slot, that’s a huge problem.

Then suddenly, if keeping guys healthy, if there was incentives to roster players that were extremely healthy and really low risk of being hurt, then Nick Martinez never goes to Korea. Nick Martinez got signed to KBO this year. But Nick’s been healthy his whole career, throws a million strikes, and he’s out of baseball. He’s out of the big leagues a couple of years ago and had to go to Korea, and then came back and reinvents himself. Now he’s making money.

But his first big contract, his qualifying offer, happened at age 30-something. But Nick’s a healthy pitcher and a damn good one for along time. Dan Straily wouldn’t be in Mexico right now. Dan Straily, Oakland A’s legend, would be on a roster. He’s never been hurt in his career. There would be value for these pitchers if they stayed healthy.

But right now Dan Straily is in Mexico and it took Nick Martinez walking like three guys in 140 innings to get paid because that’s how good you have to be. There’s just not an incentive for a league average pitcher, or slightly below league average, who stays healthy and throws 180 innings at 4.5 ERA ball, then under a thing that you would be penalized for excessive 60-day IL use. You would actually, these players would see significant increase in their value.

So, maybe a little bit crazy, but something I’ve thought about, and that’s what we gotta do. Because clearly the money is not a problem. So if money’s not a problem, we have to find another incentive to get teams to respond.

Nico: And as a fan of a small-market team, it’s money doesn’t matter to the Yankees and Dodgers, it matters to the A’s and Rays and that’s a whole other problem.

Boddy: So it’s even worse, right? Because the money doesn’t matter to some teams but it does to the others. Well, that actually just makes my argument even stronger. There has to be another reason to have equalizing force.

Nico: My only question off the top of my head on it would be what about a Tom Browning who, minding his own business, throws a pitch and his arm snaps, and he and the team get penalized for it. Is it fair when the injury had nothing to do with anything a pitcher did wrong?

Boddy: Yeah, no doubt about it. And it’s not necessarily punishment. He still gets paid, no doubt about it. But the excessively injured players do get injured, or do get harmed in this set-up.

But I would argue that the benefits of the players who throw strikes, who throw 90 — they don’t necessarily need to throw slow either because a lot of guys stay healthy who throw 94. And then those guys would benefit. And that’s what we’re seeing.

If we really want to say health matters, we need to incentivize. So there’s definitely gonna be some catastrophic injuries, some sad stories. But right now there’s a lot of bad stories of guys pitching Triple A or up and down guys who can’t get service time despite being decent pitchers because they don’t throw 100. And I think that’s fine, that’s just the game we have, but at the end of the day, if we really wanna be serious about pitcher health, we need to find a different way to incentivize it. Because we’re clearly not.

Nico: I’m sure that in the course of your work with pitchers, you’re looking at helping them be more effective, helping them be healthy, but that may involve at times recommending changes in mechanics, delivery. I don’t know if you talk in terms of stuff or shape, but do you have the license, the permission to do that, and what is that tension like between you, the player, and the team?

Boddy: Yeah, it’s complicated. You have to earn their trust and you have to be as honest as possible with them. You don’t have to, but we are. You have to say, you’ve gotta lead off with any change, I don’t care what it is, even throwing slower.

Let’s just say throwing slower is the recommendation. That probably carries a higher injury risk because you’re doing something different. Just because it’s lower stress doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safer. It means we’re doing, the body’s adapted and now we’re doing something different.

And so you always tell them, there’s risks with every decision, but is there a risk/reward benefit. So now, more concretely, throwing faster probably is more risky. So you have to say, hey, there’s more risk with trying to throw faster. But the rewards outweigh the risks. And we all make these calculations every single day of our lives, whether we get in a car and drive, what’s the risk, do we speed, do we not, all these other things.

So applying that, these players innately understand that, and I think Spencer Strider said it best even though he ruffled a lot of feathers with it, a couple of years ago, when Spencer said throwing strikes without command, without stuff, is batting practice, is what he said.

And that was not very well received in a lot of circles. But that’s kind of the players understand it.And what’s gotten a lot of attention this year, early, in college, you have a lot of these big league players, and Red Sox player and Internet legend Robert Stock, being like what the hell? I put on a college game in February and these kids should be pitching in big leagues. Their stuff is so good.

And so they see it. They see how much better the product is getting, and so they understand that it comes with a risk. So just being able to level with them and not lie about stuff. Hey, this may carry a risk, it may not. And being willing to say that you don’t know. I think that’s the most important part is to let them know that you don’t have all the answers and you can slowly earn their trust over time.

Nico: What are the natural things that you think make pitching career success in MLB easier to attain or sustain?

Boddy: At this level, what I think people aren’t talking about is how damn good the hitters are.I understand that strikeouts are up and all this other stuff, but you imagine 15 years ago, when I was writing for SB Nation, the average velocity ... my favorite thing was, you put on a game, actually one of the better ones is Roger Clemens striking out 20 batters, or him pitching for the Red Sox, and you watch the ESPN broadcast, Sunday night baseball.

You put it on and when Roger Clemens hits 95, they play an animated flame effect over the velocity. 95? Everyone throws 95 now. That’s no big deal. Now players throw 100 and they don’t do anything on the broadcast. They don’t say anything.

And so that’s how fast the game has changed in less than a generation. And so that’s changed, but what is never gonna go out of style, it just goes to show, being that much velocity and yet the hitters are still alive. They’re still able to compete. And so it shows how hard it is to beat someone that throws 90-94 because the hitters are surviving off of 98-101. Maybe they aren’t thriving, but they aren’t hitting 100.

So then suddenly, when you face someone with significantly worse stuff, these hitters just crush these other pitchers. Now, what is never gonna go out of style, and what I think is really important to emphasize at a young age, is strike throwing. And that sounds very basic, but we have to understand that at a young age, like, their motor control is not anywhere close to developed.

We understand this, right? Kids have growing pains, literally. Kids trip over their own feet, they bang their feet on tables, because they’re growing at such a fast rate, they don’t have good kinesthetic awareness. And the average miss distance of a fastball for a kid in high school is, I believe, last time I checked, was 24-26 inches.

So if they aim down the middle, they miss on average by two feet. That seems insane but it is true, we’ve measured it. So we can’t make unrealistic expectations of these kids, like why didn’t you, you walked three batters today, that’s bad. They’re 15, man.

So it’s not about penalizing, but it’s about surrounding them in an environment, measuring it. Because you get what you measure, right? A classic business thing. So setting up a framework where you’re measuring strikes, are they getting better over time?

We don’t care where they’re at today. We care over time. Is their miss distance going down? Do they throw strikes with multiple pitches? My favorite pitcher growing up, and I know this is maybe offensive to A’s guys, and a Cleveland Guardians fan myself, was David Cone. I loved watching David Cone pitch.He threw from four different arm angles, threw five different pitches from different arm angles.

He was not slow but he didn’t throw fast, and he was one of the game’s best pitchers. And now he’s a great color analyst, he’s incredible on TV. And we don’t allow, David’s mentioned this on the broadcast and to me directly, we don’t let kids experiment. We don’t let kids throw different pitches, we don’t let them throw from different arm angles.

Oh no, we have to have repeatable mechanics to do this and do this, and that’s just professionalization. We should allow experimentation. And actually research shows that’s the best way to develop strike-throwing. Is to let them do a bunch of different stuff. So I think we have to allow variability, we have to allow it to be fun, and we have to allow kids to find ways to measure their progress over time. Because that’s what they do in video games.

That’s why video games are so different. They measure their progress, they have their game or score or rank, I’m platinum, I’m diamond, blah blah blah. We should apply that framework to baseball. Like, we’re here now, we’re in this range, and over time we’re leveling up, getting better, getting better. And kids find that addicting. That’s applied to baseball in terms of throwing strikes, stuff, and so forth, and we’ve had a lot of success with it here at Driveline.

In Part III you’ll get Boddy’s personal Mason Miller story (pre 2020 draft) among other juicy bits of tid...stay tuned.