Driveline Baseball

At Driveline, we’ve summarized the skills that matter the most when it comes to finding success at the next level into what we call “The Big 3” for both hitting and pitching. To start with hitting, those three skills are:

1. Bat speed - how fast you can swing the bat

2. Contact quality - how often you are at making hard contact

3. Swing decisions - how good you are at swinging at hitters’ pitches

Our training and programming decisions for collegiate and professional athletes revolve around improving one or many of these traits.

As for pitching: the three skills are:

1. Stuff - how hard you can throw and manipulate the movement of a pitch type

2. Command - how good you are at hitting a location and target

3. Durability - how long and frequently can you perform at a high level

Again, our training and programming decisions for collegiate and professional athletes are predominately focused on improving one or many of these traits.

The result of all these factors is what we call the Skills that Scale, which we’ve separated into two categories: hitting and throwing.

For hitting:

1. Bat speed

2. Exit velocity

For throwing:

1. Throwing velocity

2. Hitting a target

Skills that Scale are things we can focus players’ attention on to reward their output over the specific outcome of a game.

-        Indicator of the player’s current developmental level

-        Baseline used to compare player’s training development over time

-        Baseline to confirm player’s health & fitness against in practice to a game

Youth baseball is the lowest level of competition that they’ll play, and it should be the lowest level of consequence while they focus on having fun and developing.