By itself, his love of the game has made his participation in the sport the center of our family life since he was four or five years old. That love sucked me into acting as a team dad, coach, taxi driver, equipment manager, and life planner. These things have been fine by me; I wish I had had similar support as a kid with some talent in the sport of hockey. Not that I was brought up wrong. I had all the love and support any kid could ever want. And I grew up in a different era. But succeeding in sport now, for kids with real emergent talent, requires a level of dedication to skill-work and physical strength and conditioning that were not really apparent when I was young. So I happily support it all for my boy, for as far as this game will take him.
Which is why my boy throws with Kyle Boddy at Driveline Baseball, in Puyallup, Washington. Jacob has been throwing things since he could crawl. His first word was "ball." His godmother bought him a baseball glove for his second birthday (thank you, Dawn, I'll never forget that) and he's been playing catch ever since. By the time he was seven, he threw well enough to pitch to 10 year-olds in our local little league. He had structured pitching lessons given by local pros and college coaches. And he continued to throw in increasingly more difficult competition.
But at 13, he suffered a common adolescent skeletal injury called a little-league elbow. At the time, Kyle was building a process of training amateur and youth pitchers, still very much in its first or second iteration. I had followed Kyle's work through that first iteration and felt certain I wanted him interested in my son's arm as the kid grew into a more serious player.
The fact that Kyle Boddy is intent on iteration as a method of building his service matters very much to me. I work in an analytical field. I am reliant on data collection and evidentiary stewardship. Doing work like this makes one acutely aware of how little our society values data and its use, logic, argument, facts. We live in a "receptor site" world full of people who seek information that makes them feel better about how they view the world, cultivating an unwillingness to view information that might challenge their views. Guys like Kyle will not soothe those seeking conventional wisdom while in a state of utter cognitive dissonance.
And his latest article best exemplifies both his approach and capacity to challenge false authority through critical filtering. The article stands as a takedown of misuse of data, slavery to anecdote, and absence of criticical thinking in work from writers viewed as authoritative baseball analysts. Kyle makes a couple of outstanding points about false authority (and really by extension the overall weakness of mainstream treatment of any mildly technical subject).
To me, the worst thing about designating experts for the purpose of promulgating a massive conventional wisdom is that it's disabling for those who might want to think for themselves but lack access to divergent sources of analysis. As a sports parent, I don't need information from "experts" based on their access to sources they consider knowledgeable just because they have ascended to power in an industry that values group-thinking and an anecdotal conventional wisdom. People who so willingly correlate without considering causation, leading to conjecture and generational truth-making.
I want analysis and critical reassessment. Don't just bring in the data to add the appearance of science, analyze it correctly and then critically. Inspect and filter new information. And being fucking willing to change in response to new information.
