The Best Way to Develop a Major League Baseball Player

What is the best way to develop a Major League Baseball player?

Major League organizations have been trying to tame this beast for decades and none of them have hit on a winning formula consistently. Sure, they have stretches but if we're being honest by the time athletes make it to MLB their athletic foundation has largely been set and they are just cherry-picking the best talent. By and large the pros are working with pretty good material. That said, what sets the best organizations apart is their ability to take very good athletes and mold them into elite baseball performers. But that's starting at the end. 

So much happens before an athlete gets to professional baseball that can literally make or break a potential career in the sport. Parents and amateur coaches are responsible for guiding young athletes through these very sensitive years. The baseball industry foists quite a heavy burden on many of these folks whom often work day jobs among a vast array of other responsibilities.

But what if there was a way to make that pre-professional process more manageable? What if the amateur level supplied even better raw material for the professionals to take "advantage"of?

To help shed some light on these questions let's turn to Dr. Greg Rose. Rose is the founder of OnBase University and is one of the leading sports science/bio-mechanics experts in the World with a particular expertise in how the body functions during athletic movements.

Dr. Rose has a very important message that parents and amateur coaches need to hear if they want to optimize the long term development of their young athlete(s):

If your goal as a coach is to create a Major League Baseball player and you get to choose between two boys at the age of 12 (you can only choose one of these kids to coach for the rest of their career) would you choose the best twelve year old athlete in America (whom has never played baseball before) or the #1 twelve year old baseball player in the country? 

According to Dr. Rose if you choose the baseball player the data tells you 96% of the time you would be wrong!

The goal when developing young athletes should always be to build a well-rounded athlete. In order to be a great baseball player you first must be a great athlete. Most of the top MLB players have some type of multi-sport background which is a pretty good indication of how athletic they really are. The very few, like Cody Bellinger, that don't appear to have a multi-sport background are still off the charts athletic. Teammate Max Muncy calls Bellinger's athleticism "freakish."

Playing multiple sports and exposing young athletes to diverse activities from early ages is the absolute best way to develop athleticism. I understand some kids may not want to play other sports but they would also skip math class and eat mac&cheese all day if left to their own devices...

That said, the amateur coaching community and the folks that support them (parents) really should include and insist upon overall athletic development in their programs. If kids aren't getting it elsewhere you have to give it to them where they are at. In other words, the kids may go to "baseball" practice but in reality you have to create a "multi-sport" environment for them.

As Dr. Rose says-

It's easy to play 1 sport... You're just being lazy! The best in the World did all this other stuff...

A foundation of overall athleticism provides kids with a higher ceiling! If you give the best coaches in the World a great athlete it makes their job so much easier. That should be the role of amateur baseball, create environments that allow kids to explore and develop the athleticism they'll need so that when they do ascend to the college/professional level they have the necessary tools to compete. If all you've given them are baseball skills it will not be enough to compete with the best in the World.

If your goal for them is to be the best 12 year old baseball player in town then focusing on baseball may, may get them there. That said, I don't know many kids that dream like that. They dream much BIGGER than that. We need to give them the tools they'll need to have a shot at making their dream a reality.