I was recommended this book by Brandon McDaniel of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I was personally blown away by how far baseball S&C has evolved in the last decade when I attended the Dodgers Symposium in December. He cited some really good resources as to how he and the Dodgers have created a very holistic performance program; one of them was the MVP Machine.

What I thought was an interesting aspect of this book was how it described modern Strength and Conditioning in baseball. Beginning with the tail end of the Moneyball era in baseball, the next evolution: Player Development. The book was focused on a couple of key players who went outside the baseball circles to develop themselves relative to the competition.

My personal amazement was centered around how baseball always appeared to be somewhat rigid towards player development. You were what you were and that was that. The book demonstrated a paradigm shift towards how much we can develop players. This was a departure from the most common approach of developing past reaching a certain level was considered taboo: if it aint broke, dont fix it.

What happened was that certain players sought outwards to develop themselves. What was incredible was the approach. Much like an engineer would, they started with the problem and formed a solution based on what felt logical. Want to improve power at the plate – they looked at the swing and how to most efficiently create power. Adding a pitch in limited time to learn new mechanics – looked at how to increase motor learning speed and the underlying mechanics of how that occurs.

This engineering based approach changed the perspective of the development of baseball players. Instead of the organization developing their players and capitalizing on their assets, players took that responsibility on themselves. In a way, this created a new frontier of training by seeking non-scripted or corporate answers to existing problems. Instead of following the script of what a major league team does with their talent and leaving it there, certain players went their own route.

The book focused on specific players and their development approach. These players saw they had areas they needed to work on and sought out the best methods and coaches to assist them. It started with this growth mindset that made them unique in pursuing outside development. Their results that achieved great success on their own accord – forced organizations to revisit how they develop their players.

This caused the paradigm shift from plugging players into the correct spot or sequence to garner the most runs, Moneyball approach, to a new approach: how do we take the players we have, and develop them to score the most runs. Instead of looking at players as fixed commodities, players were now looked at as how much potential is there to develop? It became a nuclear arms race to acquire the latest in tech, the best coaches, developing the best systems to developing players. According to the author, this is why the playing field is more level than ever before.

This could easily be our industry’s crescendo. Where we get on a table and scream: “see what happens when players develop!” We need to take a second to reflect on these same players who left and developed themselves completely outside the organization, including their S&C coaches. What I was most blown away with by Brandon’s department with the Dodgers was their embracing of this evolution. I have seen rigidity to a fault, there are plenty of organizations that refused to evolve and that continues to hurt them. MVP Machine is a visual into what could be, but it is also a reminder of constant evolution to become the best they could be to avoid being obsolete.