Business origin stories that'll make you want to run through a brick wall. Released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enjoy.
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Computer programming, poker, and America's Pastime all have one thing in common. Kyle Boddy...  Boddy thinks outside the box. If he doesn't like the box, he builds a new one. He went from professional gambler to software engineer to one of the most well-known figures in baseball development. The baseball world doubted him. He always knew he was right. Now, Driveline Baseball is a multi-million dollar company, and Boddy teaches dudes how to hit taters and throw cheese for a living. Boddy changed the way the baseball world thinks about development. But before he told conventional baseball wisdom to go pound sand, he was coaching a little league team in Seattle. Boddy is an analytical thinker. He likes numbers. He likes data. His little league team reflected that. If you've seen Moneyball, they played a similar style to Billy Beane's Oakland Athletics. Lots of walks. Lots of dingers. But eventually, just playing the game according to the numbers wasn't enough. He wanted to find out how he could help his players get better: run faster, throw further, hit harder. And as he investigated, he found there wasn't a lot of published research dealing with baseball development. So, he built a baseball research lab and got the data himself. He called the facility Driveline. They processed the data, wrote articles, had their research peer reviewed, and published it. The entire time, he fought push back from the baseball community. He ignored them and kept working. Numbers never lie. Eventually, Trevor Bauer, an MLB pitcher, caught wind of what was going on in Seattle. He and Boddy talked, and they hit it off. Now, Bauer is an outspoken supporter of Driveline. And baseball was very wrong about pushing back against Boddy and Driveline's approach to development. Now, Bauer is a Cy Young winner. And Driveline helped him do it. Adapt or die. **Read more FS Stories here. If you liked reading this article, you might also like The Wedge: a quick-to-read weekly e-mail newsletter with awesome business stories that'll increase your creativity and resourcefulness just by reading them. Learn more and sign up here. Comments are closed.
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