Deven Morgan: The Problem Youth Baseball Has to Solve

[00:00:00] I ended up throwing it in the trash. I was like really getting better in the nap. Okay, let's go. Welcome to Surviving Youth Sports Podcast, where we dive into real stories behind the wins, the losses, and the lessons that come with raising, coaching, and being young athletes. Now let's get into it. Hi, and welcome to another episode of Surviving Youth Sports.

[00:00:27] I'm your host, Rhett Parker, and today, very special guests. We have Devin Morgan. I'm a youth sports advocate, driveline, father. I mean, talk about someone that's in youth sports. Welcome to the show, Devin. Devin Morgan It's good to be here, brother. And it's basically, that's the entirety of like what my life revolves around. I, man, I got a great partner. My wife and I have been together for more than 20 years. We got great kids that are happy and healthy.

[00:00:56] And I really enjoy my job. And we're just trying to, to the point of today's podcast, trying to survive those experiences. It's like, that's, that's where I'm at. Well, it's something interesting that just popped in my head because I have said this to people forever, whether you're a college baseball coach or you're a tournament director or instructor, youth coach, facility person, driveline. Man, if your partner doesn't get it, one of two things is going to happen.

[00:01:22] You either will not be together or you will be miserable. There is no in between. And again, there's no script on the show. Tell me about it. Talk about that because when I was doing all the stuff I was doing with events and teams, it always was in my head. And then when I'd hire people, I'd see it firsthand like, oh, they don't get it. Uh-oh. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I'll put a real fine point on it. I started a driveline almost eight years ago.

[00:01:51] And when I started a driveline, when I joined the company, I think I was like employee number 11. So it's just like fundamentally different than where we are now. But at that time, the reason that I was even in position to go take a job at driveline was because of my wife. I was working the family business. We were doing internet sales stuff and it was going great. We got seven figure lines. Like everything is good. And at the same time that that was happening, probably for the, I guess, five years previous, I had gotten like further and further and further down the rabbit hole of coaching youth baseball.

[00:02:21] And it was a great job for me to kind of go down that path because I could start my day early, finish at like three and then start getting ready for practice. So make a long story short, you know, my son started a driveline in January of, what was it? And 18. So it was six months before I started at the company. Like I started a driveline as a customer before I worked there. Okay.

[00:02:45] When we were going down there, I got a chance to do to somehow like develop some relationships and not annoy people on the floor. Like Jason no chart, Max Gordon, Joel McKeithen, Brian Leslie, Rob Hill, Sam Breen. All these guys are all coaching in pro ball now. And at the time in 2018, they were also running our youth group, which was like six kids and really just enjoy the experience. And there felt pretty compelled. Like I wanted to be a part of the pirate ship.

[00:03:11] Literally sent a message to Kyle Bodie and said, if you guys open up a facility up north, I will work for you for free. Mm hmm. And and then like, I don't know, it was a stormy night in late June or whatever. And I'm looking at the driveline careers page and they had like an entry level, like a business associate position. And I'm talking to my wife and I'm like, I think I kind of want to apply. And she was like, you should do it. So. It's just that little thing, you know, and there's layers to it, right?

[00:03:38] There's like trying to get the kid kids out of the house and get them fed and get them to their various places. I mean, you could probably spend 45 minutes talking about the continual game of Mario Kart, like just trying to get these kids to the right events, especially when you have more than one. Hmm. But it's it's it's deeper than that, man. And it's baseball. Right. So, you know, sometimes you work longer hours. Sometimes your weekends are going to get disturbed. And if you've got a parent or if you've got a partner who's going to like ride with you for that stuff. I don't know how else you can do it.

[00:04:07] And I think you're 100 percent right, because I've seen guys who have had partners in the space where they're not really on board and it's and it's it's a challenge. And I'm sure that that's just a challenge is like if you're if you're like a bread maker, you know, you got to wake up at three o'clock in the morning. Like, yeah, this is just one of those jobs where it's not necessarily going to be like a clock in at nine, a clock out at five type of deal. And and it's it's it's it is unique to to be in sports in a lot of capacities because you just said it your hours are not set.

[00:04:37] And there's an office. It's kind of sort of like being a teacher, but without the nine to five different hours. But man, if your partner's right or die, you're going to be fine. And yeah, and I hate to be that callous with it, but I know all the coaches out there know exactly what we're talking about here. I think that it's so interesting because I actually didn't know your your backstory at all.

[00:05:01] You just bought into the philosophy of driveline and to just move to that. Man, that takes some guts because I assume you weren't. I mean, you obviously were doing something else. You weren't young. No, no. I mean, I had a career reinvention when I was 40. But but but, you know, the impetus for all that, I think it's just. I just love my kids a lot, man.

[00:05:27] And in for by hook or by crook nature or nurture, we had the privilege of having two kids who baseball was something that they wanted to do and that they chose. Mm hmm. And like, man, I stopped playing the game when I was like 17 ish. And at the time, I thought I got run out by a bad coach. I don't really think about it like that anymore. I think the truth of the matter is, like, I just wasn't I'm not sure if I wasn't tough enough or I didn't have the right context.

[00:05:55] But the decision to stop playing was one that I am responsible for, not not somebody else at that point at like 16, 17 years old. Anyways, flash forward. I meet a girl in the bar. We fall in love. We make people. And then baseball is just something that like went from something I kind of hated because I knew that I didn't get enough. I didn't get all that I could have out of my own experience to something that like I had to be responsible for again. And if I did anything right, I think what I did was like acknowledge like, well, at the end of the day, man, I wasn't good enough.

[00:06:25] So if I wasn't good enough, it behooves me to try to understand how to help my kids get good because I don't know. That's just how I approach things. And I started I think the playbook that like a lot of parents run is you're just going to like go to the library. You're going to go to the Internet. Right. So I bought baseball the Ripken way. Right. Like that's on my shelf right over there. And I bought Ted Williams Science of Hitting and I bought, you know, Ron, the Ron Polk baseball handbook. Shout out to any psychopaths that know that book that's like this thick.

[00:06:54] And I just tried to learn because I knew that I needed to know more. And it and please don't hate me. I was also coaching soccer at the same time. And when I was coaching soccer as like not a soccer guy, what I was getting from the CLE Soccer Association at the time were these week by week practice kind of playbooks. That kind of took the skill that we were trying to develop. So you plug in the age of your team in the week and it would give you like a four page PDF.

[00:07:21] And the first thing that was like, well, this is the skill and this is how you train the skill in kind of like an uncontested format. Right. Dribble the ball on your feet within this box and don't run into your teammates. OK, that's step one. Step two would be an extension of that same thing. So it's like but it's it's offset. So you have like two attackers, one defender or three or two defenders, one attacker. And then you'd have that same drill even. So now it's twos and twos and threes and threes. And then it would scale up to like full game.

[00:07:49] And I was getting that on the soccer side, which I think helped me understand the skill development. And this is all like, again, if you want to get into the sports science stuff and skill acquisition. For me, it'll be. Right. So so there's this the Korver method is kind of the soccer methodology that they were getting off at the time. And Korver method is all about touches. Right. Like if you are if you're not working on technique without the context of like touches on the foot, you're not developing the right skill. So that's what I was getting on the soccer side.

[00:08:18] And then I was getting on the baseball side was like literally university, which was alligator arms fielding. Well, pros don't really look like that. And it was like T pose for throwing. Well, I've never seen a pro look like that. So it forced me to kind of question things. I found the driveline blog probably in 2015 ish signed up for the Sunday Thunder Nuggets email list.

[00:08:41] And that that was kind of how it all went where I went further and further down, trying to get some understanding, like how to skill acquisition really work. And then 15 years later, I am where I am. And what's interesting is and and and I tell people this all the time, too, because, man, hey, Rhett, what do you think about driveline?

[00:09:01] And for people that that aren't baseball people, you know, driveline is a lot of science and technique and it's acquiring skill, it's acquiring strength and speed. But I tell this to people all the time and you may disagree with me. Driveline might work for me and it might work for you, but it might not work for that guy over there. And that's OK. There's no formula in any sport where it works for everyone.

[00:09:29] There's just there's not. I believe that. And I believe sometimes you need to hear different language and it might be the weirdest language ever for this kid over here, but it works. And I think it's it's interesting that because, man, people either love driveline or they don't like drive. And I'm like, how can maybe it didn't work for you? Maybe you didn't do it right. I have no idea. But like, it's OK.

[00:09:56] Yeah, but I think my point is, it's OK to have your own path, whether it's driveline or not, is is my point. And what might work for this person might not work for that person, because, man, there's some freak people out there that can kind of do whatever. Yeah. Talk to me about that.

[00:10:16] Yeah. I mean, I guess the only thing that I would I wouldn't say push back on, but one little caveat that I would give is like general athletic development and specifically physical development is something that is always like that stuff is evergreen. Like, and that is one of those things that like all too often in you muted yourself. Are we good? There you go. Yeah. Evergreen evergreen. Oh, this is what happened. OK, my audio left my headphones. No, it's OK.

[00:10:43] Yeah. Athletic development and youth sport, it really, really is evergreen. And that's something that works all the time. And this is something I think at baseball, we have a little bit of a religious ideology about not wanting certain types of athletic development. Right. Like you can put that quote out there and say, like, oh, pitcher shouldn't bench press. And you're going to have a lot of people that are like, yep, nailed it. It's like, well, what what specifically about a bench press is going to inhibit pitching performance? Like, have you looked at a role this Chapman?

[00:11:13] Like, like I look at that human being now. But but also tell the whole story. Right. A role this Chapman is a thing. Tim Lincecum is also a thing. And it but the thing that I will point to is and again, specifically with Timmy, because he was a Pacific Northwest guy, because he was a driveline guy because a U of O guy. I'm sorry, U dub guy. Timmy found out what worked for him and what worked for Tim was the system that that his father initiated.

[00:11:39] Right. Like a lot of what you know, you look at Tim's mechanics and he had a ton of what's called contralateral tilt in the way that like he he kind of tilted at the I guess at the pelvis, you'd say. And it was unique, but it worked for him. And I guess that's the one thing I would say about driveline as a as a training methodology. Right. We are not going to force anybody into like a square hole round peg type of thing. And I think sometimes there's this consideration that like, well, there's there's a driveline method.

[00:12:06] And I like, yeah, the method is consistent stimulus over a longer period of time and being as data driven as possible about how you need to get better. And but yeah, I mean, you could say the same thing about Texas baseball ranch, Florida baseball ranch tread. I mean, there's a lot of people in this space. I think all of us are trying to do the best job possible with the information that we have available to us, the tools that we have and the beliefs that we hold. Right.

[00:12:29] And I guess that's just the thing at the end of the day at driveline is we do have the luxury of having access to a gigantic database of pro ball guys, of college guys, of high school guys. Like who's one of the best high school prospects in the country? Well, Mason Pike. OK, well, I know how Mason Pike works and I know how Travis Pizzano works like Eli Jones is a younger kid like that. We know how these kids look. So from my perspective, it gives us a little bit of leverage because I can look at a 12, 13, 14 year old child and say,

[00:12:59] specifically, you can be very good right now at the level that you're at. But there's this other target that you need to get to. And that development is going to require this type of stimulus and it's going to be baseball specific. But it's also going to be general athletic preparation, because if you overdo it on the baseball side and you under index for the athletic development stuff, you're just never going to be as good as you as you can. You have it. It's not just a skill solving job. It is athletic development and everything that that entails.

[00:13:26] And that, I think, is the thing that we try to do the best in the world at at driveline for for players that are serious enough to want to do it. And it's not black and white either. And the trajectory is not. I mean, it's up and down. It's never it's never. I mean, man, because I'll tell you what, facing Lincecum. I mean, you had to guess what pitch was coming. And and and man, I you know, I specifically remember. I could hit the fastball and then I never saw one like in the zone again and the breaking ball.

[00:13:55] You're like, I mean, it is like, hey, this is coming. And it was like, my God, still couldn't hit it. Yeah. You know, so it was so revolutionary at the time, because like you're in the box against him. This is in college. And you're like, dude, I can't see the ball. And it and it's like, I can't see the release point. And it's like, oh, no one else can throw like that. And it's sort of been disproven. And he did have a different body. Right. And because everyone's body is different.

[00:14:24] And what works for this person again, like I said, I'm a firm believer that everyone's body is gonna be a little bit different. And there's different tweaks and different things that you're going to have to do. But I do agree. There's always a baseline for for for athletic athleticism. But, man, and then it sort of became a revolution. And then the old school people are this versus the new school. And I think I want to switch into coaching here, because.

[00:14:51] I have looked at pro ball and even college and, you know, everyone's only analytics or only old school. And and I think driveline has done a really good job of this, especially over the years, as you guys have grown. And and and I would love your coaching philosophy on this. You need a mix. Sometimes you have to trust your analytics and your gut and your gut. You have to do both. I mean, but that's what that's what good coaching is.

[00:15:17] Right. Like, look, I'm well aware that over the course of the last like decade or so, there had probably been some implementation of analytic concepts in a variety of levels of the game that haven't really served the players like that. That has to be true. But I think the best coaches and the ones that have had that have had the most success over that period of time are the ones who do both. Like you have to understand that at the end of the day, you are coaching human beings and all of them are going to respond to different types of stimulus.

[00:15:45] You have we understand this academically, like we understand that academically kids have different learning styles in baseball. You're going to have kids who really want to get into the weeds on the analytics of stuff. And there's levels of that. Right. Like for for a kid 14 and under, I want you to chase. Three things. I want you to chase throwing the ball harder. I want you to chase hitting the ball harder. And I want to chase. I want you to chase the number on the scale going up in a in a healthy, considerate way.

[00:16:12] But like I want you to keep your attachment to analytics really, really simplified. And the reason I want you to do that is just because when those numbers go up, I want you to feel pride and I want you to feel accomplishment. And I want that pride and accomplishment to fuel you to do the work tomorrow that you did today and that you did all the days before to get to where you are now, because that's what it's going to take. If you actually want to be as good as you can be, I want to communicate, communicate that stuff in very, very, very simple terms.

[00:16:39] Now, when we start to get into high school, hey, it's fine for us to flip the switch a little bit and we can start to get a little bit more technical. We can have our coaching get a little bit more internal. Right. So we're talking about actual positions. I'm a pretty firm believer of staying away from that stuff with really young kids because I know that it inhibits motor control. I know that it inhibits perception and we can go into the weeds about those specific training, training concepts you want. But the point being that, like, you always have to meet them where they are and you also have to meet them where they are specifically. Right.

[00:17:09] We have kids on our 18U showcase team who are going to have a very analytically driven conversation. And I'm going to say, hey, that that ball that you just like three hopped to the four hole. What was your attack angle? Oh, your attack was 25. OK, well, you're clipping the top end of the ball because we're too positive into the zone. But then I'm going to tell you to hit a ground ball. Right.

[00:17:33] I'm going to connect the analytical stuff to the coaching correction because because that's how you do it. And that's something the men and women that we have at DriveLine are really, really good at. I know that there are people out in the space who are coaching with our methodology or using some of our concepts. They're also really good about that. And then you're going to have some people who might just go like, well, your attack angle was was 30. Make it be 25. And it's like you tell that to a 13 year old man and you might have to be have a really special 13 year old to be able to understand how to execute that correction.

[00:18:03] And you say 13 or 18 that conversation with Joey over here versus Tim might be very different. And Tim might in a game. Hey, Tim. Hey, it could be as simple as better timing. And then we after the game. Hey, Tim, here's what I'm seeing analytically because he can't handle it in the game. And people have to recognize that whether you're DriveLine or not DriveLine.

[00:18:32] Man, some people cannot think analytically during a baseball game. They will go in the rabbit hole and they will never get out. They just need to be competitive or they need encouragement or they need somebody to get on them. I mean, it could be all of those things. And so you have other people that aren't qualified to understand the DriveLine philosophy and different things that are trying to teach it.

[00:18:58] Give me advice for those people, because the reality is, is DriveLine's a brand. And there's people that use that brand incorrectly and it and it doesn't help people. And again, whether I agree with everything that DriveLine does, which I'd be the first to tell you, I don't.

[00:19:19] I agree with a lot of it, but I don't have to. I implement some of the things that I think are important for my 12U team and the other stuff I do on my own, which is why I old school, new school life. And that that's great. But give me the advice because, man, I got into the I told you this last summer. I got a leads of 11U 12U baseball and there's people out there with the weighted balls before we're playing a tournament. Or I'm like, God, do I go over there and say something or like, do I just because I'm watching this going this.

[00:19:49] This is awful. Yeah, I think I think that the best advice I can give you is utilize our expertise. And part of the reason that, like, I'm so aggressive about putting stuff out for free. But again, that was the thing that attracted me to the company in the first place was finding the blog in 2015. Jason Nochart wrote a blog called Coaching Hitting Mechanics Part One and Two. It's a two part blog and it changed my life.

[00:20:15] It changed my life because it changed what I thought about hitting development, but it also changed what I understood about skill acquisition. So, like, I had somebody the other day, I don't even remember what the comment was on social media was like, well, you know, I really hate when you guys do the reverse throws, right? You do the reverse throws and you're slamming the ball backwards, yada, yada. And I was like, in his postulate, he postulated that there was something about that that throwing motion that was going to create some sort of bad outcomes.

[00:20:41] And it was like, look, just because you're moving in this way doesn't mean the joints are actually impacting each other. That's one thing. But the bigger thing is like, well, why are we doing the drill? Why do we do reverse throws? What's the point? Well, the point is to develop strength in the posterior shoulder. The reason you need to develop strength in the posterior shoulder is because it's primarily important for the deceleration phase of the throw, meaning slowing down the arm after ball release. You can get into a really bad spot if you can't do that safely. And the reason we do reverse throws, there you go.

[00:21:11] There you go. The reason we do reverse throws is because when you're starting to do anything to like train that posterior shoulder, a lot of times you're doing like dumbbells or you're doing even a barbell stuff, right? But barbell stuff, the moment that I get into this position, right, where my fists are closed, I'm starting to constrain return blood flow going up and down the arm. A reverse throw, well executed, has none of those constraints. And you can do it at a high level of intensity. I don't know. We don't do that. Nobody's like ripping 100% reverse throws.

[00:21:39] It's done at a low intensity, but it still allows you to get strength and performance out of a very critical area. So I guess the point that I would make just most specifically is like leverage our expertise. Like if you get if you buy a set of youth plyo care balls. It's going to come with like a 15, 16 page PDF that I wrote. Please read it. Like, please. Right. And pay attention to the details. Right. The devil is in the details.

[00:22:03] I'm a very big proponent of like overload under load training for kids because I know how it's been substantiated for skill acquisition benefits since like the ease when it comes to other overhead throwing modalities, whether that's javelin, whether that's what's that big stupid stone that they throw when you spin around and what I'm talking about. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. That's just been proven for decades and decades to work.

[00:22:29] You can do that same thing with young athletes, I think, in an incredibly positive way to inform their mechanics. But you have to be smart about it. Right. Because kids aren't small adults. The reason that the scary. Yeah. The reason that like the set of tools we put out for younger athletes is not the same as what we put out for high school athletes is not the same. We put out for college and pro athletes is because tomato potato man. These two things are not the same. Mm hmm. But if you just look at like you look at the way that like Dylan sees right Dylan sees.

[00:22:59] He's or scoobal or any of these guys that like throw flames and they have some amount of like plyo care overload under load ball training in their stuff. That is great, but it doesn't mean it's appropriate for your 11 year old. Oh, by the way, those guys are way different genetically to like we keep hammering that point home here.

[00:23:20] Like it that the odds that your son or daughter in different sports is Dylan sees or Ter Scouble is about right here genetically. And and we and there's this thing as parents where we want to look at like the highest level training program and be like. I just want to give my child the best. Right. So I'm going to give my child Clayton Kershaw throwing program. Well, Clayton's Kershaw's throwing program is not appropriate for your child. Right.

[00:23:49] Kids are not small adults, despite, you know, despite your core intention. Yeah. So I think that is the thing that we kind of come back to is just leverage the expertise and don't be afraid to give you thing that your child a thing that is age appropriate. It's age appropriate for a reason. Mm hmm. So you talked about skill acquisition, which is which is really interesting. So give me the the multi sport because I'm a big multi sport guy for a while. And I think we need to create fans of the sport and make it fun and do.

[00:24:18] And I know you believe in a lot of those things, too. Where do you stand? Because obviously did soccer, which I mean, I'm I'm in it, brother. I mean, I'm in it. Yeah. So give me talk about skill acquisition. And to me, man, the one thing I really do like about driveline is that it really the throwing stuff. Yes.

[00:24:42] But your different body movements, I have seen help my own son with other sports. And so, like, that is something that's so big for parents to understand. Man, it's it's not just about baseball. It it can be used for so many other applications. I mean, look, I'm not trying to get all Obi Wan Kenobi on this. Right. But but if you if you look at look at Xavier Nines.

[00:25:12] I kid is a good mover. Look at Mason Pike. Good mover. Look at Travis Bazzana. Good mover. Why? It's not just because they spend an inordinate time solving baseball specific movement problems. So so to kind of like to connect that back to the multi sport thing. Right. I think there's a lot of benefits for multi sport. One is it like it enforces like a natural break from year round throwing, which is needed when it comes to youth players just straight up needed.

[00:25:40] They're highly resilient, but that doesn't mean that they're bulletproof. And I think it's very clear that overuse is the most specific lever that we need to pull on and control for to keep more kids healthy playing baseball. Because that thing overuse on the throwing side is something that is not only applicable to like the flame throwing kids per age, but also for like 10 and 11 year olds who are very good at throwing strikes. All of them are susceptible to the same overuse problem. So multi sport kind of forces you to take some time off from baseball, which is a good thing.

[00:26:08] And again, I'm saying that to somebody who like our driveline academy program, we want a year round program, but we don't play games year round. We don't throw year round. The reason we have a container that's year round allows us to have these breaks and give kids like athletic development stimulus in a period of time where they're taking a break from baseball specific stimulus. If you understand what I'm saying. I 100 percent do because then you got burnout too. Well, that's that's another thing. And again, there's a whole probably 45 minute conversation. For sure. For sure.

[00:26:36] About the systemic effects of putting kids in a continual environment where they are judged and valued based on outcomes. And if we were going to have a podcast where we're going to talk like you and I would if we're sitting in the outfield or we're at a bar, you're going to get probably like seven or eight F-bombs from me on this specific point. Because family show family show. I know. I know. I know. And I will abide by that. But like in the tricky thing is it like I think if you're a parent coming in this sport now, you see that as normative behavior. Right. That seems like normal.

[00:27:05] And it shouldn't be. But again, to kind of come back to the multi-sport thing. You got me. I know. I know. I know, baby. I know. It's good for a kid to play soccer. It's good for a kid to play basketball. It's good for a kid to have other sport exposure because that colors and forms and defines the type of movement solutions that they can deploy. If you show me a kid that is competitive on a soccer field, I'm going to show you a competitive shortstop.

[00:27:30] Because they move well because the environment and the stimulus drives them to adapt and learn how to move well. Right. If all you do is you focus on baseball specific athletic problems, they're highly rotational and there's going to be a blend of linear inter rotational, but it's not so much kinetic. Right. It's not so much open. You're not learning to do a lot of like direction changes and like accept force and produce force in kinetic fashions cutting other sports will teach. Right. Yeah.

[00:27:58] But but like again, but look at Xavier Nyan's. Look at Mason Pike. Look at Travis Bazzana. Mm hmm. Look at why these kids are so good at their sport. It's not just because they have highly refined sport specific skills. They do. But those highly refined sport specific skills in their capacity to solve problems movement wise is informed by the fact that they haven't just been solving baseball specific movement.

[00:28:20] And the tricky part is like if you're the parent of a kid who's like nine, 10, 11 years old and they love baseball a ton and they really, really want to be good at the game. That kid also has a significant amount of skill that they need. Right. It's not that these kids don't need skill exposure because they do, but they just need all of the things. Right.

[00:28:40] So you got to be able to find either a schedule or a container that allows all that stuff to develop and it needs to get an adequate amount of consistent and varied stimulus to drive these type of like adaptations. Oh, and by the way, if your son's good at 10, 11, 12 doesn't mean they won't be good at 18 doesn't mean that but it doesn't mean they will because the biggest thing that I started coaching my kids. The best players right now, a lot of them are just physical and they don't even have great mechanics.

[00:29:09] And it's really hard because my son is probably a little bit average size, right? Some of the mechanics doing certain things are rough and others are really good. But it's really hard to look at him and some of his other kids I coach and other kids in general and be like, no matter what you do. See that kid right there who's got facial hair, who's 12. He's going to be better than you.

[00:29:35] And that in what it's okay, because he is just physically mature. But guess what, man? That kid's five, six right now. He's not gonna be six, five. Correct. He's not like that. That is that you don't talk about science. That is science. And it's just encouraging them to continue process and continue to have fun, continue to get better. And I really want you because I do want to talk about pitch counts.

[00:30:03] And I do want to talk about putting your kids in the right environment. And that is so crucial. So before we get into pitch counts, because I know you're passionate about it. It's okay if your team or player plays double A tournaments. So there's major tournaments, which are the best teams. And then there's triple A and double A. And that's okay, man, when you're 12.

[00:30:28] Because if you're four, nine, and you're 80 pounds, but your dad's six, four, and your mom's five, 11, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay, dude. Like you're gonna be okay. It's okay. But getting your ass kicked 20 to nothing is not good for you in any sport. And so don't push my whole thing. And I want your, your take on this. Don't push them through, man. It's gonna be, we played triple A man. And we're very competitive.

[00:30:57] I looked at our games from last year. We got blown out twice. We blew two people out. Every other game was within one to seven runs. So guess what? We're in the right division. Correct. 100%. 100%. I think you're 100% right that a lot of this stuff is defined because of physiology, right? We, we understand in a technical sense that that thing, peak height velocity phases, are not linear in any stretch, right? So your kid is not gonna go through like a linear phase of growth.

[00:31:25] It's highly irregular and you can't control it. And you are going to have kids that like have accelerated peak height velocity phases and they get bigger early. You see this in the form of, look, I will never forget one of the first years that we were running teams down at driveline. We got to the field. We had one of our 11 new teams is going to go and I was just showing up to just support, right? And I'm walking up to the field and I see our guys and I'm like, okay, cool. And I see the other team. And I'm like, man, that other team is like a lot of coaches, dude.

[00:31:52] Like that's, I mean, I'm, I'm used to like two, three coaches in youth baseball at 11. You, but like these guys got a lot of coaches. I get closer and closer and closer. Those are coaches. Those are kids. And we got, we got murdered, right? Like we, we got literally crushed. Again, there's a significant note there that like we do a very terrible job of sorting kids at the appropriate level of competition in baseball because a lot of it is self-selected.

[00:32:15] And if you're the coach of a team and you want your parents to feel like, oh, well, we're putting in them in the most challenging environment that I will take a kid of like average kids and then drop them into a majors or a triple A division that they're not ready for. Because I think that like, if I put them at the most greatest challenge that they're going to benefit the most instead of understanding the thing they actually benefit the most is like, do they still love baseball the same way that they did when they walked off the field? And I understand and accept the fact that like by the time that you're in high school, you probably should hate baseball a little bit.

[00:32:45] You probably should. You should hate it because it's going to make you feel bad. Game of failure. Game of failure. But you also should feel good by the things that you earn by an attachment to process. And that process can take place in the training gym. It could possibly take place on a dirt baseball field that like that's that's why we want kids to play the game. That's why we want them to fall in love with it, because that stuff is in perpetuity.

[00:33:09] If you understand process as a 13 year old in baseball, the odds that you should understand it as a 23 year old young adult are decently high. But when you're not playing. Yes. And you're getting a job and you're trying to figure that out and life and your bills and all these different things that are that are difficult. And man, I mean, that's really powerful because man, people, you know, and I'll give you just a tiny flip side of that.

[00:33:36] Man, if you're blowing people out and you're not playing the top division, get them out. Like, go, go lose. I know. Coach, it's gonna be okay. Trust me, they will be better off in baseball to going two and two and losing two close games. Then you go, man, we're gonna be triple A this weekend and we're gonna go five and oh, and closest game is gonna be 11 to one. That doesn't help them either. So, because this is the best advice.

[00:34:05] And this is kind of how I learned who you were. And this is very baseball specific, but you can apply this to other sports guys. Pitch counts and overuse and playing in so many soccer tournaments. So my wife is a I don't know if I told you, she's a physical med sports doctor. Yep. But the overuse stuff in her clinic in younger kids, and you're not talking college athletes, you're talking high school, middle school.

[00:34:30] I mean, thanks for keeping my wife and her clinic employed because man, it's it's it's Devin, it's all overuse. It's it's all overuse. Go into the pitch counts, man. So, so I guess the big headline that I would I would want anyone to take away from this is this is a problem that is not only solvable, but one that we're actively trying to solve. I'm a member of the ABCA, the American Baseball Coaches Association. The youth baseball committee, or I guess I'm on the travel baseball committee. I don't know.

[00:34:59] But I'm I work with all these men and women that are part of this committee who are actually like trying to do some good. We've had an annual youth baseball summit for the last four years now. Coming out of the summit two years ago, my big push was that as a committee, we needed to start taking some action. And I was tired of just sitting in a room and talking about what was going wrong. But I wanted to figure out how we can get some stuff done. I have the support of a lot. Again, a lot of men and women. This is not a singular initiative in my half. However, my idea was universal pitch counts, universal reporting.

[00:35:29] So what that means. Is trying to build a coalition of leagues, tournament providers and even showcase organizations who would all self select into universal pitch count standards. Wherein it's not that PG is going to run one standard. You trips going to want another and little is going to run another. It's all running the same standard. So that's one thing. And what we're going to do is we are going to define that standard, not by just kind of like throwing a dart at the wall and saying like, well, I think you can throw 25 pitches and then come back the next day on zero rest. Right.

[00:35:58] We were going to leverage the biomechanic data that we have to come up with a standard that actually allows you to moderate volume. And that's how you're correlating pitch count and rest. The back end of that system, though, is the most important part because we're talking about universal reporting. And what I mean by that is a system where if the kid pitches in a little game on Thursday, if they do go to play in a PG event on the weekend, all that information flows into the same place. And it is either like a red light or a green light about whether that kid can pitch and when.

[00:36:25] So now you have the right hand and the left hand talking to each other. And you need that. Right. You need that. Because right now, not only do we have disparate systems, but those systems don't talk to each other. And we understand, again, specifically because some of the rules that have changed in the last five years, some of the rec ball organizations have made it more easy for kids to double dip between recreational ball and travel baseball. Those same kids are the ones who are good enough to get overused a lot if they're not tracked.

[00:36:52] And they're more likely to be overused if they're playing in multiple game formats without any of this type of like open communication about what's happening from one venue to the other. So that's our big thing. We went and presented that in Major League Baseball in March of last year. We've had I'm trying to think about what I can and can't say here. We've had a lot of positive agreement that like that is this is the thing we're trying to figure out. We're going to be presented on the MLB arm care panel at ABCA just this last in Columbus.

[00:37:22] And then I'm going to be back at the Major League Baseball offices next month to talk about next steps. And we do have members of the coalition that are substantial, you know, like perfect game is at the table with us. PBR is at the table with us. Little League International is a table with us. The folks that control Ripken now are at the table with us like we're.

[00:37:41] But it has to be this coalition of the willing because it's not like other national governor bodies of national governing bodies of sport in America where USA hockey can just kind of like decree something on down and it works that way. That's not that's not what our ecosystem works, which means ultimately as we get closer to implementation, we have to start to get a little bit political and I have to bring in perfect perfect game. I have to bring in you triple say to the table and be like, hey, this is what we're trying to do, but this is why.

[00:38:10] And I understand the first thing you might be concerned about is how this might affect your pocketbook. And I'm not trying to take away and modify anybody's business. But what I am telling you is it like if you go right now on Instagram and you search like travel ball or travel ball mom or these type of hashtags, you are going to find an undercurrent of parents in our ecosystem who are dissatisfied with what they're getting. They think the environment is too crazy. They understand it's potentially injurious and they're not really sure that they want to be around these crazy coaches and crazy parents like that. That is a thing that's happening right now.

[00:38:38] And the other thing I will tell you, I will tell anybody that's listening, is that every year the gap between the number of kids who sign up to play baseball and the ones who quit right now, the most recent number we have, the gap is six point nine percent between the kids that we churn, meaning that they leave and the new kids that sign up. And that's a thin margin. And I am not going to assume that parents are going to continue to make the same choices and put their kids into baseball because they don't have to.

[00:39:04] Like when my son and I were at the perfect game, the main event showcase in December, we had some time to kill. We go to a mall. We walk into like a footlocker store and there's a bunch of Jordans sitting on the shelf. And I say to my son, who's now 17, I'm like, so you guys just don't really care about Jordans anymore. Right. And he's like, yeah, not really. Those are shoes that my generation would line up for on Saturday morning at five o'clock in the morning. Right. But consumers start making different choices.

[00:39:31] There is a generation of parents coming who if they've had crappy experiences in baseball or they think that other people are having crappy experiences in baseball or they think that their kids might get hurt, they're going to have their kids play lacrosse. They're going to have their kids play soccer and we might lose that generation of kids because of the system that we've created. So I think that if there are systemic solutions to this that start to change that, one of the best things that we can do is control for injury. Right. Because we can't do the thing that the NFL did. They had an issue with CTE.

[00:40:00] They had a concern about kids getting hurt and they flipped to like flags and seven on sevens. We can't really do that. Right. You banana ball is trying. Banana ball is trying. My buddy David Klein that runs speedball down in the Bay Area like they're trying to do some stuff. But at the end of the day, we need to acclimate kids to basically like a three up, three down version of our game wherein a pitcher has to pitch. Well, because that's the nature of the game, it's so heavily dependent on a kid to be able to have the skill to execute that task.

[00:40:29] And we know that none of us have enough pitching. So the kids who can execute the task end up getting overused and they get more overused when you have parents and coaches who define the experience by outcome, because it's not about learning and it's not about development. It's about validation. And like I'm going to put fifteen hundred dollars or five hundred dollars or five thousand dollars on the line every single year. And I want to see that stupid, that stupid like thing that I buy in my kids room to be filled with plastic. I want it to be filled with plastic.

[00:40:58] It's a problem. It's it is. But it and Devin and I'm involved in other sports as well, obviously baseball more. But man, it's it's different because you just sounds pitching. It's the same in the other sports, too, brother. And we're pricing people out. I mean, I mean, it's this and and I do agree. People do need to leave. It's OK to leave town, man.

[00:41:24] It's OK to go to an out of state tournament and see what the world's like and have a great experience. Experience not. Oh, this is a step to professional baseball or college baseball. I'm getting ready to do it in a couple of weeks for for soccer. We're going down to California because we're one of the better teams here. We're going there because honestly, at least one of those games, I promise you, we will get our butts kicked and it'll be really good to fail. Yes.

[00:41:54] And so for me, it's not. Oh, man, it is called a showcase. My kids are 12 and in a showcase. So I get the hell out of here. You can call it that whatever you want. I think it's I don't even know the organization running. But you call a showcase. They're not showcase. You tell me there's going to be a college scout there watching my 12 year old. OK, awesome. Because some of the other parents and man, it's so hard. Be like kind of being in it. Listening to them talk.

[00:42:20] You're just like, all right, just don't say anything because I don't know anything about soccer, but I don't need to. I know. I know the system and the business and the flashy words and all these things. And but I would say from my perspective, I appreciate what you're doing and I'm supportive of it. And we haven't thrown breaking balls yet, really, for my son's team. And I monitor the pitch counts very heavily.

[00:42:46] In fact, I just told the tournament director we're planning and you'll appreciate this. And I go, all right. I you know, and I got some guys that won't throw a lot. And we're full Little League, too. And by the way, I've watched people jump from Little League and back and they're throwing hundreds of pitches and there is no communication. But I got some guys that probably will throw in March. They're probably not going to throw a ton, but they're throwing in March. Everyone is.

[00:43:13] And I go when we're through our pitch count, it's about 40, 45 pitches. If we're out of guys games over, you can either accept us in the tournament or not. I don't care if it's the fourth inning on Sunday of whatever I go. We're done. And he's like, well, God, man, I could cause a problem. I go, why the other team will be happy. They'll win. And I'm not trying to act like I'm holier than that.

[00:43:39] I'm not because just like you, I want to win. Why the hell would I want to fricking lose? I don't want to lose games. But I also understand it's going to be March 8th. And our goal as a team is to be really good for our last tournament. And we're full Little League. We want to go to state again at you, which is an amazing experience. That's what we're building to. So by then, yeah, dude, we're not going to be 44 or 45 pitches.

[00:44:06] We're going to be 85 pitches, 80 pitches for the guys that can handle that. And we don't throw back to back days. I think in two, 10 and 11, I think I've done that twice, two or three out of 60, 70 games over two years. I think I've done it two, maybe three times and it's 18 pitches and then maybe 40 at most in, in May when, when the, when it's built up to do that, because we just, we don't need to.

[00:44:35] And if we lose because of it, then we're going to lose. It's going to be okay. I'm going to be okay. And when my son was had his final year in Little League as a, as a 12, he missed the 11th year because of COVID. So that was kind of how it lined up for him. So, so as 12, you know, we have our final like all-stars thing at 12, into like 12 year old all-stars in Little League is just kind of, it's a little bit of a rite of passage. It's a rite of passage, a hundred percent. And we knew that like the team that we had was like, I was light on good 12 year olds.

[00:45:02] I had some pretty good 11s, but like, and again, in that environment, the kids who have a little bit more physiological leverage because they're 12 months ahead of the calendar have, have a lot of leverage. So we, we went out, played our first game, got, I got duffed my, my number two starter that I threw. Cause I was like, you don't want to go to a barbecue and in the all-stars tournament, right? You don't want to do that. So I throw my number two guy and I hope it's going to go well, but I know that I've got my number one, which just so happens to be my son going into the second game.

[00:45:29] So first game, my number two guy has like a bad warmup. His dad starts barking at him. Like the whole thing just goes sideways really early. Like we walked the first three guys. I'm just like, all right, like this is just done. So we come out for the second game, got a window. You're able to play, play game three. My son's on the bump and he went five and a third with like, I don't know, 10 punchies or whatever. Like it went really well, but he went out to the, he went all the way out to the pitch

[00:45:59] limit and it was the first time I'd ever run him all the way out to the limit. And then he finished the game at shortstop. And I had a coach who I know who doesn't like me takes this screenshot and he posted online. He's like that Devin Morgan guy over at driveline. You, you runs his kid. He says that you're supposed to control for pitch count. And then he runs his kid out to the limit and he has a complete shortstop. I'm like, yeah, brother, you need to understand that. Like this was a thing that we develop capacity for since he was eight years old. Right?

[00:46:25] So the same way that you're thinking about conceptualizing your season where you're going to build from March through May and into June and July, you can do that over a multi-year process to also do that thing and do it safely. Right? And ideally you're also like equipping the athlete with the right information to understand why at the same time. So like we started, we were talking about my, my son did a showcase recently. One of the things he ended up doing because he's a pitcher catcher shortstop, combo. I have no idea where he's going to play in college. He's fine. He's good.

[00:46:55] He's good guys. They get to the infield stuff, right? And nowadays in a showcase format, like infield velocity is basically just a pull. It's what we would call a pull down, right? You're going to, you're going to feel like a two hopper shuffle shuffle. And you're just trying to let it eat. And at some of these showcase events, there's a little bit of cool down time between when you go and when you get hot and he goes out there and he does his infield stuff. And I kind of just see that like, he's not really letting it fully. He finished with like an 87 across the diamond. He was 89, five off the bump.

[00:47:23] So like, obviously that starts to look a little bit weird. And I asked him, I was like, it was like, well, how are you feeling? It was just like, yeah, I felt like I was just kind of sitting around and got a little bit cold. So I just, I didn't let it eat all the way. I kept it like 85, 90%. And it was like, thank you. Because I want you to understand all the levers that are involved with making a decision about whether it is safe or not for you to go 100%, whether it's safe or not for you to pitch through fatigue. And again, like not to get too nerdy about it, but the reason we want to attack overuse

[00:47:52] as the lever to control for pitching injuries and throwing injuries is because what we understand scientifically, as fatigue continues to go up, you start to see what's called kinetic and kinematic changes, just basically meaning that the body starts to move worse and less sequentially. If you continue to throw without sequence being good, then your output starts to go down. And if you continue to throw through that, then that's when your risk starts to like increase by a factor of like, it's on the USA baseball side. It's either like by 24 or 36%.

[00:48:21] It's bad. Mm hmm. So fatigue is the enemy, but that doesn't mean that you always just keep a kid at like a 20 to 30 pitch count. You can progressively help them adapt and develop throwing workload if you're smart about it. But if you have tournaments on the weekend, back ball during the week, lessons during the week, now that's not like a gradual accumulation of workload. It's a spike. And in the same way that like, hey, if you decided you were going to try to train for a

[00:48:51] marathon and you decided to just go out and like go try to run a marathon. Well, like RIP your hamstrings like that, that ain't going to work because everything's going to be shot because you didn't get enough of a runway to like progressively adapt to the type of stimulus you're giving yourself. Human beings are human beings. This is just how the thing works. We are capable of incredible adaptations, but we're also susceptible to overuse. And that again, it's like why we really want to attack that type of the system based thing,

[00:49:19] which in my mind, the only solution is user universal pitch counts, universal reporting. And some someday when I, when they find me in a, in the, in a dirt box, I want to be able to say that that thing got done because I think it just, it benefits the whole game. Yeah. And no, and I, I think, you know, the causes is, is, is really great and warranted and we're trying to create fans of the sport. And I think that's something that, that really might help with that. So, well, Devin, man, it's been great to have you on brother.

[00:49:47] Uh, you know, I think, you know, my wife would be fully supportive of, of, yes, of, of all those things. And I'm sure you guys could, you know, talk science and I could just sit there like I do with all the medical conversations being, Oh yeah. Yeah. I don't know that. Yep. That makes sense. We're going to coach you up, dude. We're going to turn you into a scientist. We're going to get there. There you go. Well, I appreciate it. Uh, and what you're doing and, and obviously you have my support on that.

[00:50:15] And, and like I said, your son is a, is a very good player and he's a great kid and looks you in the eye and shakes your hand. And again, man, whether he plays college or professional baseball, like he, he's going to be successful because of those things, not the baseball. Yeah. And that's a message that, you know, because I don't know nature and nurture man. Like we, we, we made a kid who like, this is just kind of the only thing that he cares about. And, and it's scary. Like it, like it, it really is scary because if you understand the game, you understand,

[00:50:45] if you're going to tell the truth, like how hard it is to get to, to that place. Like it's really, really difficult. I think the things that matter the most to me about what we've done in his period of time, just playing the game, but also since he's been at drive line is like, it's teach process. The process stuff is the stuff that's primary. The understanding like data driven development and understanding, like a system of understanding, like how do you measure your performance now? How do you try to get it better? And then retest to make yourself feel good about what you earn or accept the truth that

[00:51:14] like you didn't work hard enough. Both of those things are valid signals to take. I tell my kid all this time, all this all the time. And whenever I say it, he always gives me like a dirty look, which is great. I'm going to be like, look, man, if you decided to be a dentist or a rocket scientist tomorrow, I don't care. I just want you to find success and happiness and fulfillment in whatever you do. Passion. Yeah. Like, like follow that. Right. Because again, I changed my career at 40.

[00:51:42] This is the, like, how can I tell him to do anything different? And I think if you attach yourself to that type of process, if you attach yourself to finding validation in that search, and if you attach yourself to something you're passionate about, you're going to find success. I don't know if he's going to play college baseball. I don't know if he's going to play professional baseball, but I understand the experience of trying to get there is going to affirm the way that he pursues anything for the rest of his life.

[00:52:11] And that to me is like, if I was a parent cutting a check to driveline or like, that's the thing I want all of them to take away from. I want all of them to take away process. And that is our value proposition. And it's not a mountain of plastic because I think one of those things is actually pervasive and it's going to last with you. And that other thing is going to land in a box that you ship off to Goodwill when your kid decides to either renovate the room or go off to college.

[00:52:39] I think I got, I was on a podcast. I got a basketball one because it's got a picture of the team and my dad was the coach and that's about all I got. I think I got some shirts in the background here of cool stuff. I did that my mom made into a kind of a blank that I put up, but no, I couldn't agree with you more, man. And appreciate everything you're doing and for coming on the show. And yeah, man, I'm excited to see where you take this fish count thing you're doing, brother. We're working. We're working.

[00:53:09] It's, you know, it's not going to happen overnight. I think the earliest implementation at this point we could be looking at would probably be 2027 for like a trial. I'd really like to get some trials coming in summer of 26. So if anybody like you run a league or you run an organization, I'll be devin a drive line to ease because because we are trying to build like this coalition of the willing. I know people too. Yeah. And like, I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, we are working in partnership with Major League Baseball because they pun intended swing the biggest stick in this market.

[00:53:39] I'm also a crazy enough of a person to say that if for some reason that doesn't get kind of the the push that it needs, I'll just figure out a way to do the thing on my own. And we'll just put it out in the hands of parents and coaches because the technological solution for that is simple. And there's all sorts of stuff that comes to it. Like if we've got this repository of pitch counts for players, well, why don't we do that for coaches? Right. Because then you can have coaches be like, yeah, I've gone through USA Baseball safe sports stuff. I've gone through their abuse prevention stuff.

[00:54:08] I've gone through coaching certifications. There's a record of how many kids that I coach and have pitch count violations. All of this stuff gets a lot more transparent if you just have a system that communicates this stuff to parents. But like right now, if you're a parent in youth baseball and you want to find out if your coach has gone through like a USA Baseball safe sports certification, you tell me, how you're going to find that information. Can't. You can't. You can't in soccer. And I think different sports can pull from different people. Right. But like we wouldn't accept that in our schools.

[00:54:36] You wouldn't accept going out to your school and it's the first day of elementary school and you've got like a fourth grader and you're like, hey, you're talking to their teacher like where did you go to college for teaching? They're like, I've just been doing this for a couple of years. You would beeline straight to the principal's office. I'll leave us with this note because we have to wrap this up. But again, we could talk for two, two, three, five hours, whatever. But trainers, physical trainers, athletic trainers, physicians, nurses, they all have certifications. And we're dealing with physical. It's all physical.

[00:55:06] Right. So no, I agree with you. But man, I really appreciate you coming on. I think this is great. Keep fighting the good fight. And yeah, we'll, we'll keep surviving new sports. Cause you're in it just as much as I am brother. Yep. I got, I got a year and a half left and then it's gonna, you know, if he gets a chance to be college baseball, it'll be that next thing. And you know, at this point, man, I'm along for the ride, man. Love it. He's my favorite player. He always will be. Love it. Appreciate you, man. Yeah. Always. Thanks for joining us on surviving new sports.

[00:55:34] Remember the scoreboard may tell a different story, but the snacks, the car rides and the questionable coaching decisions. That's where the real memories and the real survivors goes come from. Please share, subscribe and follow us.