Premium statistical insights are an established competitive advantage in Major League Baseball. On many occasions, a player will break out to start a season, and fans will hear reports that their performance might have something to do with them spending some time in the hitting/pitching “lab” the previous winter. Today, many players are turning to Driveline, an Arizona-based company that uses advanced biomechanical info to assist training and development, to improve their play and extend their careers.
At this point, Driveline’s reputation is universally strong across the industry. Their founder, Kyle Boddy, is an advisor to Red Sox GM Craig Breslow. Many of their longtime coaches and coordinators recently joined the Washington Nationals front office under new GM Paul Toboni. Their scientific and tailored programs have helped many accelerate their careers, from Shohei Ohtani to World Series cult hero Will Klein. Driveline believes that biomechanics are both the present and future of player development, and it’s easier to buy into that when the best players in the world and fringe major leaguers alike have bought into them.
Driveline has an expansive clientele across MLB, the minors, collegiate, and even high-school baseball. If there’s a master list of players who have trained there in the 2025-26 offseason, I certainly don’t have it. However, I figured it would be worthwhile to keep tabs on known major leaguers training there as a way of identifying breakout candidates for the upcoming season. Jordan Walker, for example, is still a relatively young hitter with a toolset that’s easy to dream on, but its lack of translation to consistent success at the highest level has tormented fantasy managers and Cardinals fans alike. Walker has 99th-percentile bat speed and max exit velocity but has been plagued by a woeful inability to make contact and lay off bad pitches, leading to replacement-level production since a solid rookie season in 2023.
However, Walker is confident that he “found something” last fall at Driveline. He went to the facility in October, almost immediately after the regular season ended. According to RotoWire, he discovered that his back hip was “collapsing on his swing”, leading him to fall forward too fast and lose power. He worked with resistance bands and trained his swing specifically to alleviate this back hip problem. Curiously, power is not as much of a problem for Walker as contact and discipline, but he hasn’t been putting the ball in play enough to achieve a high slugging percentage either. Perhaps these mechanical adjustments will allow the raw power to translate better to an in-game setting? Skepticism is warranted given that Walker has underdelivered for a sample larger than 500 plate appearances now, but it would be premature to completely write off a 23-year-old of his physical stature, especially after a swing design session at Driveline. Hopefully, 2026 is the year that Walker ascends to elite status and realizes his full potential.
After scouring the internet, I found ten more MLB players who trained at Driveline this winter. They are listed below, alongside some specifics of what they were trying to achieve there.
White Sox catcher Edgar Quero was the subject of a feature article by Alden Gonzalez over at ESPN about Driveline’s modern philosophy towards player development. Quero is 22 years old with advanced plate skills, a rarity among young catchers, but he has fourth-percentile bat speed and frequently hits the ball on the ground. He kept his offensive production passable thanks to outstanding discipline and good contact-ability, but his ceiling won’t be all that enticing unless he learns how to do more damage. Adding bat speed and launch angle were the primary goals of Quero’s training.
Instructors told him to focus on staying closed with his hips and use a variety of training bats with different weights to get used to swinging harder. Quero also learned that catching the ball farther out front is closely related to these objectives, which is relevant because his contact depth was way closer to home plate than the average hitter in 2025. It would be welcome news for the future of the White Sox if Quero found another gear to what’s already an intriguing profile.
Like many of his teammates, Rangers catcher Jonah Heim has been searching for ways to replicate his 2023 season for a while now. He has posted a .603 OPS in back-to-back years since they won the World Series, which was the culmination of an excellent two-way season for Heim that led many to believe he was among the best backstops in the game. He has always lacked eye-popping bat speed, but has been successful in the past thanks to a knack for making contact and pulling fly balls.
In a short clip posted to X in November, Heim was shown at Driveline refining the early part of his swing, particularly his load and his rotation, and came away encouraged from the practice, saying “that’s what I’ve been trying to do for two years”.
There’s no shortage of wipeout pitching in Seattle, and 24-year-old Logan Evans is hoping to keep that trend moving. Evans made 15 starts as a rookie in 2025, posting a respectable 4.32 ERA before the Mariners’ rotation got healthy for October, reducing an immediate need for his services. He has a slightly below-average arm slot with a highly advanced arsenal (six pitches with >=10% usage), but there are still a variety of ways he could improve from here. His strikeout, walk, and chase rates were worse than average, as was his fastball velocity.
So, in November, Evans decided to try Driveline, where he worked on strength training and fastball command using the facility’s innovative Intended Zones Tracker. Seattle’s five-headed starting pitching monster should be back in full force in 2026, and unfortunately, Logan Evans will be missing all of the season with TJS. but if there are injuries or openings in the bullpen in the middle of 2027, a different version of Evans than the one we’ve seen to this point could blossom.
Amed Rosario re-signed with the Yankees on a 1-year, $2.25M deal for 2026. He was sneakily productive after getting traded to the Bronx, hitting over .300 with a high-.700 OPS in 16 games. He has never hit more than 15 home runs or slugged higher than .432 in a full season, yet he added two MPH of bat speed between 2024 and 2025 while maintaining the exact same swing length, as well as recording an above-average pull air rate for the first time in his career. This indicates he has been enlightened with modern swing design training since before this offseason, but he nonetheless spent time at Driveline over the winter, and the focus once again appeared to be strength training.
He set multiple personal records in the gym and showed plenty of pop to all fields in the batting cages. Rosario can play multiple positions and makes up for his free-swinging ways by getting bat to ball often, but if he’s coming into 2026 with an elevated ceiling on account of his power, it’ll help alleviate some of the swirling angst in the fanbase after a quiet winter for New York.
Also eager not to be forgotten after a stellar 2023, Nolan Jones spent a good chunk of time working through faults in his swing at Driveline. He was traded to Colorado and had a tremendous classic Coors-Field-style breakout, without elite bat speed, exit velocities, pull-air frequency, or contact skills. Things came crashing down a year later; he was essentially never healthy, lost bat speed, and hit way more ground balls. In 2025, back with his original team in Cleveland, the key raw power indicators all rebounded, and he was able to lift the ball again, but results did not follow.
In a clip posted by Driveline, Jones identified that he was “crashing too far forward” during his swing. To get around this, he experimented with an offset-open stance, which gave him a more natural landing spot upon following through. Especially away from Coors, a .931 OPS might be expecting too much, but Jones has more to give than what he showed the past two seasons.
Unlike many on this list so far, Brent Rooker doesn’t have to prove himself. Since joining the Athletics, he has recorded three consecutive 30-homer, .800-OPS seasons, becoming the unlikely cornerstone of what looks like an up-and-coming offensive juggernaut. Despite that, he’s at an age where bat speed starts to tail off, and his hard-hit rate last year already dropped considerably from 2024. Why not keep going to Driveline to stay ahead of the curve?
In addition to posting some detailed side-view footage of various swings to his own social media, he was the subject of a longer video on Driveline’s YouTube showing his progress on their drills to maximize exit velocity. Even for an out-of-nowhere two-time all-star like Rooker, the quest to get better never stops at the MLB level.
One relief pitcher looking for a shot at redemption is Cionel Pérez. Once a key lefty on the impressive Orioles squads of 2023-24, he got off to such a brutal start that he was DFA’d well before the 2025 All-Star break. He did deal with some poor batted-ball luck, but most of the problem stemmed from a walk rate that ballooned to over 16%, which is often all it takes for someone in the bullpen to lose their job. He spent all offseason training at Driveline and had a solid live at-bat session in front of scouts at the company’s recent Pro Day.
His sinker topped out at 97 MPH (it averaged just under 96 in 2025), while the more extreme of his two breaking-ball shapes (classified as a slurve by Statcast and a sweeper by Driveline) sat 86, more than two MPH higher than its previous average, while maintaining the same amount of glove-side action. After an offseason to mentally reset and focus on throwing strikes again, Perez and his new-and-improved breaking ball could return to the majors soon enough. There’s always a revolving door of teams in need of lefty bullpen help.
Nationals infielder Trey Lipscomb absolutely raked in college at Tennessee, leading to a third-round selection in 2022. Throughout the minors, though, he saw his output recede, and after getting 211 plate appearances with the big club in 2024, he spent most of 2025 back in the minors, with worse numbers than his last stint there. At 6’2″ and 202 lbs, Lipscomb has the frame to produce more than he has up until now, and he underwent a full swing design session at Driveline over the offseason. His bat speed is below the major-league average, but most of the focus during his training was on figuring out how to pull and lift the ball. He had more of an all-fields ground-ball profile in his first taste of MLB action than what’s probably optimal for someone like him, but he’s set on fixing that ahead of a transformative year for the Nats.
Hitting nerds and coaches across the world will love Driveline’s video of Angels catcher Logan O’Hoppe reworking his swing. It’s nearly 20 minutes of extremely low-level stuff – drills for rotation, load, and posture, that sort of thing – featuring a talented young player coming off a down year. In 2023, O’Hoppe experienced a short breakout, slugging an even .500 while pulling and crushing the ball.
Fast forward to last year, and he’s still lifting and pulling, but striking out way more and not hitting the ball as hard. In an effort to better tap into the strength he flashed before, Driveline helped him more efficiently load and unload during his swing during the offseason. At 25, O’Hoppe still has room to reach his peak and is putting in the work to try to get there.
Imagine a center fielder with world-class range, elite sprint speed, and a very good arm, but a replacement-level bat. In theory, if our hypothetical player managed to become valuable at the plate, they’d become one of the best outfielders in baseball. That’s the current goal for Jacob Young, who fits this description to a tee and is working at Driveline to figure out that last part. Their philosophy before working with Young was quite sound: his excellence on defense and on the bases signals rare athleticism. Someone like that should have better than seventh-percentile bat speed, so they worked together to see if it was there. As with many hitters looking to gain bat speed, contact point will be central to Young’s quest to be more productive; he makes contact deeper than most hitters in the majors. It’s easy to play the what-if game when discussing what players need to improve upon, but for someone like Young, who is already so good at everything else, things will change in a big way provided he can become more of an offensive threat.
