Reddit reviews The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players

The best way to teach people how to throw is to have them practice throwing as hard and far as they can (play a bunch of guts basically), rather than doing the isolated wrist flick routine for months. Once they know the grip and basic release (the occasional refresher is good), new players need to learn how to use their whole body to generate power, clean up their release, adjust for the wind, and maintain balance. Precision is easier to learn after learning power than learning power after precision is.

Based on personal experience/observation and reading about Driveline baseball's approach (detailed in depth in this book).

He's thought of as hard to get along with in large part because he's always been an outsider when it comes to developmental techniques. He got traded by the Diamondbacks because he wanted to do his own things instead of just following old school guesswork. He knows he's undersized. He was not the gifted guy in college, that was Cole. But from the time he was a kid with his Dad, he has pushed the envelope of scientific methods to get better. From that perspective he's right down the Astros alley. See The MVP Machine.

I think a lot of his conclusions about the Astros pitching improvement is that he's seeing it from his frame of reference. He's already spent the time and technology to look at things like very intricate control of hand position, grip, stride, linear power delivery. But even for a veteran like Verlander, most pitchers have room to improve on things like velocity and spin rate just be applying the kinds of things Strom teaches and Bauer already does.

This will be the best of the year

THE MVP MACHINE

> analytics didnt help those guys get any better on the field

They absolutely did. The Astros have a fundamentally different approach to developing pitchers based entirely around the analysis of their pitch mix and how their pitches (pitches, not pitchers) perform.

Verlander and Cole were underperforming when they were acquired from the Tigers and Pirates, respectively. The Astros turned them around using nerd juice.

It's fairly well-documented.

There's also this book.

This streamlining of the minor leagues is inevitable. If you haven't read the book MVP Machine (and if you're a Reds fan you really should since it features Trevor Bauer and Kyle Boddy prominently), then at least read this article by the author called "Do we even need minor league baseball". Sawchik explains why the current minor league system is incredibly inefficient for player development, and how some teams are already shifting away from the traditional model.