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.

This May Be the Key for Winning the Pitching WAR...

WAR is an acronym for Wins Above Replacement. WAR measures a baseball player's value in all facets of the game by deciphering how many more wins he's worth than a replacement-level player at his same position (e.g., a Minor League replacement or a readily available fill-in free agent).

Nine out of the top Ten (American Born) in Pitching WAR over the last decade have multi-sport backgrounds/in addition to playing baseball:

1. Justin Verlander- Basketball
2. Zach Greinke- Tennis, Golf, Basketball, also switch hit as a kid
3. Clayton Kershaw- Football
4. Cole Hamels- the only one I could not find without a multi-sport background
5. Max Sherzer- Football, Basketball
6. Chris Sale- Basketball
7. Jon Lester- Basketball, also played a great Centerfield
8. David Price- Basketball
9. Adam Wainwright- Football (Wide receiver and Kicker) 
10. Jacob DeGrom- Basketball. Also bats Left. Was not a full-time pitcher until his junior year in College.

The two foreign born pitchers in the top ten are Felix Hernandez who played basketball in High School and the legendary Bartolo Colon. Colon was likely too busy to play another sport because he worked full-time from ages 9-14, harvesting coffee beans and fruit. Colon credited his childhood job for developing his considerable strength.

Not only did these pitchers play other sports but they excelled at them. For example, Greinke routinely won tennis tournaments as a junior (in the tennis hotbed of Florida). He also excelled as a junior golfer but stopped playing after he was "skipped" ahead 3 levels and could no longer play with his friends. He switch hit in Little League and was primarily a hard-hitting short stop on his high-school baseball team. Greinke lead all Major Leagues pitchers in 2019 with 3 home-runs. Not to mention he's the best fielding pitcher in the sport, winning 6 consecutive Gold Glove awards.

The other take away from this list, these pitchers have all been remarkably durable. They have all pitched a very long time and have done so at an extremely high level.

A broad base of athleticism is essential to becoming an "elite" baseball player. And playing multiple sports is a great way to develop that athleticism. 

Playing Multiple Sports: The Chicken or the Egg?

The best baseball players in the World also happen to be tremendous athletes.

Did they develop this athleticism because they played multiple sports as kids... Or, did they play multiple sports as kids because they were terrific all-around athletes?

There are two broad schools of thought on this topic.

There is the idea that when kids are young they should be exposed to and sample as many different activities/sports as possible. The theory is that with this broad exposure they will develop a wide and diverse base of movement skills. With this broad foundation in place it can now support more specific and highly specialized skills. If you were to start with a specific skill, say pitching, you would ultimately be capped because you're foundation is to narrow to optimize the development of that skill. This would be a kin to trying to fire a canon from a canoe in the middle of a lake... Abandon ship!

On the flip side if you first develop a foundation under that canon with building blocks such as coordination, speed, strength, power, bracing, and spatial awareness now when you go to fire the foundation is strong enough for the canon to display it's full potential.

The other element of early sampling/multi-sport participation is actually finding a sport you like and usually that's one you're really good at. If all you did was play baseball and never tried anything else you may miss out on being the next great TEAM USA soccer goal keeper or the next great American male tennis star (America hasn't had one of the latter since Andy Roddick!?!).

Then there is the school of thought that you're just born with IT! Out of the womb you are destined to be the next Mike Trout blessed with both elite athleticism and baseball skills to boot. Great athletes play multiple sports simply because they are great athletes and those opportunities present themselves. Maybe that's true but do you really want to take the risk of finding out for yourself? Because here's the thing if you guess wrong you can't go back and make up for it!

What's the reality?

The reality is that in order to be a great baseball player you first need to be a great athlete! The canon analogy from above is extremely important to understand. A broad base of athleticism gives you a higher ceiling. And the way the game is trending a high ceiling is an absolute prerequisite to compete at the highest level.

So do you have to play multiple sports as a kid to develop that athleticism?

In my opinion it is the BEST strategy for a few reasons.

1. It's the best way to ensure you are developing the athletic foundation and fundamental movement skills you'll need to develop a higher ceiling. The chances that you join a very progressive baseball organization that offers a complete athletic development experience is rare. In over 3 decades of athletic experiences as a player and coach I have never witnessed such an organization. If you find such an organization congratulations you have found the lost city of gold!
2. It's protective! This builds off point one from above. By playing sports seasonally (more on this soon) and trying many different sports you are less likely to develop "poor" motor (movement patterns) skills. I've had conversations with Division 1 coaches and when they ask me what I do they tell me- "what you do is WAY more important than what we do!" They say this because once they get an athlete in their program at 18/19 years of age if that athletic foundation is not in place it makes their job very difficult to squeeze improvement from that player. You are way better off developing athleticism and playing off of that than being plugged into a "system" and learning a style. Hitting, throwing, catching a baseball and running the bases are all propped up by athleticism. The best coaches in the World are at the Collegiate and Professional level and yet they get these athletes after the foundation has been set. It's very hard to break bad habits... Best not to develop them in the first place.
3. There is nothing like playing in a packed football stadium or basketball court on Friday nights! If you want to learn to be a "clutch" performer you need to put yourself in environments like that. It won't happen in Fall Ball or even the most competitive Travel tournament. 

Are playing multiple sports ever detrimental?

It can be IF you don't take seasonal breaks! Play baseball in the Spring/Summer stop in the Fall and play soccer or tennis. In the Winter play basketball or hockey don't just add these on top of your baseball skill work. You need an off-season from baseball to ultimately deepen your skill acquisition pool. If you absolutely don't want to play another sport or it's not an option dedicate time to upgrade your athletic capacities such as flexibility, strength, speed, power, mindset...

I could leave you with a hoard of examples of the baseball players in the World that played multiple-sports as kids but better to give you the one Elite player that did not... At least I couldn't find any evidence that he did. 

Cody Bellinger is the lone great baseball player that I could not find with a multi-sport background. That said, all you have to do is watch this guy play the game and you'll quickly come to understand he is clearly one of the best athletes in the sport. So maybe Cody can get away with it but unless you move like Cody I wouldn't recommend it!

What the two coaches who meet in the 2019 College World Series have to say about multi-sport athletes:

Tim Corbin, Vandebilt - 

"Our mission as a staff is to find multi-sport athletes that play other things besides baseball... I'm dead set against it (early specialization)."

Erik Bakich, University of Michigan - 

"It is, in my opinion, 100% the best decision a parent of a young player can do."