Alden GonzalezJan 30, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseESPN baseball reporter. Covered the L.A. Rams for ESPN from 2016 to 2018 and the L.A. Angels for MLB.com from 2012 to 2016.Follow on XMultiple Authors
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Inside Driveline’s 15,000-square-foot facility, two racks holding 16 broken baseball bats hang on a wall, displayed like a valuable piece of modern art. Driveline, the cutting-edge player-development lab that has helped to revolutionize the sport at its highest levels, believes that offensive success in this era of pitcher dominance requires training in extreme conditions. The broken bats, then, are a badge of honor — a symbol of work done with requisite intensity.
Early last week, Edgar Quero, a 22-year-old entering his second season with the Chicago White Sox, stepped into a batting cage only a few feet away. He placed reflective markers below the barrel of his 34-inch, 32-ounce Marucci bat and attached a Blast Motion sensor to its knob. He then stepped onto the cage’s sensor-equipped platforms, known as force plates, and took batting practice. Eight Edgertronic cameras captured his every movement.
Quero has one of baseball’s rarest, most valuable skill sets: a young, switch-hitting catcher with a promising offensive profile. He possesses an elite ability to stay within the strike zone and a knack for consistently meeting the baseball with the barrel of his bat, two skills exceedingly difficult to teach.
“It’s never been harder to hit,” he said, “and the people who work for and have worked here have played a major role in that.”
Four of MLB’s seven lowest full-season batting averages have come since 2021, the others taking place in the dead-ball era at the turn of the last century and in the lead-up to the pitcher’s mound being lowered in the late 1960s. The 18 highest strikeout rates in history, meanwhile, have occurred in the past 18 seasons.
But it’s not just that pitchers throw harder and nastier than ever, Stokey believes. It’s that the technology favors them so heavily that they can often make drastic improvements to their spin rate or pitch profiles — or invent a new pitch entirely — from one start to the next. Detailed scouting reports aided by Hawk-Eye data are layered onto that, providing them with a clear vision for how to attack opposing hitters.
Bat speed and launch angle don’t exist in a vacuum, though. They must be presented within the proper context, backed by precise biomechanical data and implemented strategically. Applying them correctly requires an understanding of how they’re maximized. And that’s where the improvement is truly taking place, both in facilities such as Driveline’s and outside of them, as advanced analytics trickle into the amateur levels and alumni of data-driven companies infiltrate the professional ranks.
Close to 100 former Driveline employees are now sprinkled throughout major league organizations, Stokey said, a quarter of whom came from the hitting side. The Boston Red Sox employ a dozen of them, including Kyle Boddy, a front office advisor who started the company roughly 15 years ago.
“Players younger and younger are getting exposed to this stuff faster,” Stokey said. “So, you’re starting to see the minor league players that are recently drafted, they spent the last four or five years of their lives hitting with HitTrax, using a Blast sensor, using pitching machines that mix pitches. They’re more comfortable and familiar with the information, so as they come up, they want that.”
Those inefficiencies were tracked moments later, when Quero settled into a cage to hit baseballs traveling 65 mph from 42 feet away. The reflective markers near his barrel tracked his bat path, the Blast Motion sensor spit out bat-speed and attack-angle data, force plates measured the power he asserted into the ground, and Edgertronic cameras analyzed his swing mechanics at up to 17,000 frames per second.
“This is a different baseball, and it’s part of the game right now,” Quero said. “You have to learn it.”
In May 2018, Stokey left his role as hitting coach at Arizona Christian University to take a job at Driveline, whose hitting division had sprouted only a year and a half earlier. Driveline was known almost exclusively as a pitching lab. But that perception began to change in fall 2020, when Ohtani embarked on the most important offseason of his career.
In one month, Ohtani broke three of Driveline’s composite-based speed-training bats. On numerous occasions, Stokey would shake his head at Ohtani mishitting a pitch and slicing it to the opposite field, only to glance at the batted-ball data and learn it traveled more than 100 mph.
FIVE OFFSEASONS LATER, Quero was in a conference room with Stokey, hitting coordinator Jacob Hirsh, high-performance coordinator Tyler Kozlowski and two of Quero’s agents from Ballengee Group. For a little more than an hour, every aspect of Quero’s swing and approach was dissected through a variety of metrics, tables and line graphs outlined in two PDF files that totalled 23 pages. One figure stood out:
That was the average velocity of Quero’s bat speed last season, ranked 217th among 226 qualifiers. Just as Driveline’s pitching program is dedicated largely to maximizing a pitcher’s velocity, its hitting program mostly centers on maximizing bat speed. The reason was contextualized early in the meeting: Every one mph of bat speed, Quero was told, equates to 1.2 mph of exit velocity, which translates to 7 feet of additional batted-ball distance.
“If we kept everything in your profile exactly the same, but we added 2 miles per hour of bat speed alone, you’re looking at being more like that type of hitter,” Hirsh told him. “And a couple of these guys made a lot of money very recently.”
It began with Kozlowski’s assessment, which found that the power Quero generated through his countermovement and squat jumps off the force plates, the biggest indicator of potential bat speed, was significantly below the major league average. His upper body is strong, as evidenced by the results of the plyometric push-up drill, but his lower-body explosiveness needs work.
“Getting these up, the power numbers up, should help your bat speed increase,” Kozlowski said. “It’ll give you a lot more juice.”
“The deeper you catch the ball, the less time you have to accelerate the bat,” Hirsh said. “The further out in front you’re able to catch the baseball, the more time you have to get the barrel moving faster.”
Quero swung at only 18.6% of the pitches he saw outside the strike zone last season, the seventh-lowest mark among the 215 players who compiled at least 400 plate appearances. His squared-up rate — a measure of a hitter’s ability to maximize exit velocity based on bat and pitch speed, usually by hitting pitches on the heart of the barrel — finished within the top 5% of the sport.
But his launch angle on the top 10% of his hardest hit balls was 1.5 degrees from the left side and 0.3 degrees on the right side, a far cry from the league average of 12 degrees. On pitches he pulled as a left-handed hitter, his launch angle was minus-8.5, a sign that his swing goes uphill too early, prompting him to scrape the top of the baseball and beat it into the ground.
Attack angle — the point at which the bat and baseball meet — is not a consistent barometer of success. An ideal attack angle resides somewhere between 5 and 20 degrees.
Quero’s inability to produce those bat speeds makes pulling the ball in the air more crucial. Last year, he did that on only 7.8% of his batted balls.
IMPLEMENTATION BEGAN BY placing Quero in a foreign position: hitting same-side breaking balls, the type of pitch he never encounters as a switch-hitter. The purpose was to force him to stay closed with his hips. Leaking out would prompt him to spin off pitches and yield bad results.
Driveline opened its Scottsdale facility in 2022 and unveiled another in Tampa two years later, giving the company satellite locations in the two states where a large segment of players spend their offseasons. A two-day assessment like Quero’s costs $7,500 for professionals. A full offseason program runs $15,000. The full-year package, which includes advanced-scouting reports, stretches to $20,000.
Driveline prefers that hitters — and pitchers — begin working with them at the start of their offseason, seeing it as the ideal time for assessment. Quero, though, arrived three weeks before the start of spring training. The hope is that he implements some of the drill work, sees results show up throughout his sophomore season and returns this fall, at which point, the staff believes, more significant gains can be had.
“I was happy to be here,” Quero said, “to know my body a little bit more. I think it’s going to help me during the season, trying to get more of my exit velo up and bat speed and launch angle a little bit better.”
A DRY-ERASE BOARD in the weight room of Driveline’s Scottdale facility lists leaderboards for professional, collegiate and high school athletes in an assortment of measurements from its dual force-plate system. Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder Corbin Carroll, one of their most distinguished clients, boasts the highest squat jump at 61.2 centimeters. Los Angeles Angels outfielder Jo Adell ranks third with a 60.1-centimeter countermovement jump (basically a squat jump with more help from one’s upper body).
Quero was born in Cuba, an impoverished, baseball-loving island that does not possess any of the advanced data that now proliferates the sport in America. He defected to Haiti in 2019, then traveled to the Dominican Republic a couple of weeks later. He trained there until 2021, when he signed with the Angels for $200,000. In an effort to maximize what would be their final stretch with Shohei Ohtani in summer 2023, the Angels traded Quero to the Chicago White Sox for veteran pitchers Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez. The White Sox later stressed to Quero the need to improve on his pitch framing and bat speed, spurring an interest in analytics.