The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players

by Ben Lindbergh

Boddy has a radical suggestion for how we should teach children intent. “Don’t ever play catch with a six-year-old,” he says. “I’d put my kid by a fence, and I’d throw the shit out of the ball into the fence, like as hard as possible.” That way, Boddy says, the child will learn and mimic an adult’s max-intent mechanics. Kids copy the adults they’re around, Boddy notes. Boddy’s theory on why the children of major leaguers succeed at such a high rate is not so much genetics—which doesn’t hurt—but because they’ve emulated more effective throwing and movement patterns. If you play catch, lightly, at low intent, kids learn the wrong motion, he says. “[Then] you yell at them at age twelve when they’re not athletic,” Boddy says. “But you just spent six years teaching them how to throw like an idiot, so what do you expect?” He had always intuitively believed that max-effort throwing helped pitchers throw harder, but professional baseball was moving in the opposite direction.