Understanding Motor Preference Could Help Cubs, Other Orgs Improve Player Development
Fair warning: The rambling and only cursorily edited treatise that follows is almost entirely hypothetical and based on what is little more than a rudimentary grasp of a concept that is still nascent, at least here in the US. After initially intending to thread my thoughts on X or Bluesky, I felt it would be easier to flesh them out in long form. Those who are already familiar with motor preference can go ahead and skip to the break, but the rest of you may want to check out a previous piece or just read what follows to have better context.
Motor preference is making its way across the pond from Europe, where, like bio-banding in youth sports, it’s much more commonly understood. Simply put, we’re talking about understanding nuances in how a person’s body naturally wants to move. To get a feel for what this means, just cross your arms over your chest. Now try to cross them the other way. You could also clasp your hands together and then do it again with the opposite thumb on top.
One way feels perfectly natural while the other, at least for most folks, feels utterly foreign. The same is true for a number of athletic movements because our bodies are made to operate asymmetrically in order to optimize functionality. You have a dominant hand, foot, and eye, but you also have a specific way you like to hold your arms at your side or which leg bears more weight when you stand. Your gait when walking or running tells a lot about your motor preference and how you’re built to move.
The grassroots movement bringing these concepts to the US is being led by University of Maryland head baseball coach Matt Swope, who founded Motor Preference Experts with David “The Witch Doctor” Genest. They’ve got some great short videos that better explain some of the intricacies of identifying and utilizing various motor preferences, so check those out if you’d like to head further down the rabbit trail. For now, though, I think we can get by on the simple understanding that everyone’s body has certain ways of moving that are unique to them.
Good so far? Cool, let’s get into it.
There was a time when I used to believe there weren’t 32 men on the planet capable of being a competent NFL quarterback. Now, however, I’ve shifted to believing there aren’t 32 men (or women, though their scarcity in the coaching ranks means it’ll be a while on that front) capable of properly coaching an NFL quarterback. Just look at what Sam Darnold has done in Minnesota or how poorly Shane Waldron schemed for Caleb Williams before finally being fired.
It’s an imperfect analogy to what we’ll be discussing here, but at the root of it is this idea that coaches at all levels tend to have a certain way they like to do things. Baseball is particularly rigid on this front, with very specific movement patterns being perceived as right while those that deviate from the norm are wrong. No coach alive would have taught Hunter Pence to move like he did, nor would anyone other than Tim Lincecum‘s dad have allowed him to pitch like he did. Yet, somehow, both found great success in MLB.
The outliers who make it to the highest level with “weird” mechanics are just that, aberrations who managed to be good enough despite their funkiness to keep coaches from trying to fix them. A more current example is Chris Bassitt with his glove arm sweeping way down below his knee and well outside his body. No one is coaching that, nor should they at scale.
While there is a bit of a groundswell among baseball coaches to just let kids gain general athleticism and learn how to swing and throw without trying to refine their movements at early ages, we’re a long way from ingraining that into the culture. Driveline is great with that and hitting coach Jeff Leach is another, then you’ve got Pelotero really embracing MP and attempting to leverage it on their platform.
The video embedded below does a great job of laying out the idea that there are myriad ways to produce the “right” swing. No one would argue with you if you said Barry Bonds, Ted Williams, and Albert Pujols are among the greatest hitters to play the game, but none of those guys’ swings look even remotely similar.
Now think about applying that same thought to young baseball players as they come up through the game and eventually reach the college and professional ranks. There are plenty of kids who achieve tremendous success at early ages due to physiological superiority or other factors and who then fall back to earth as their peers catch up. Maybe they don’t work at it or they just lose interest.
But as the levels go up, it’s also possible these players are being unnecessarily drummed out by coaches and processes that are too rigid to account for individual preferences. Maybe it’s a belief that all hitters have to have wider stances to create ground force even though many are aerial movers who don’t need to be as grounded. Or perhaps a pitching instructor is trying to force hip-shoulder separation from an associated mover who simply can’t comply.
There is a non-zero portion of the population that is able to succeed on the basis of superior talent and preternatural ability, but a vast majority of athletes don’t fall into that bucket. Rather than just chalking it up to attrition, using motor preference might be a way to get far better results from a development infrastructure while possibly reducing injury risk at the same time. I am not indicating that this is some panacea or magic bullet, only that it’s potentially a massive value-add for organizations willing to embrace it.
And believe me, there are organizations willing to do just that. Even if it’s not explicit, the Cubs took a step in that direction by hiring former pitcher and Tread Athletics performance trainer Tyler Zombro to aid the front office in player evaluation and acquisition. Zombro has a very clear understanding of the way pitchers should build their repertoires to complement their arm slot and pronation/supination tendencies, which is exactly what motor preference would suggest.
Though the Driveline Academy guys more or less brushed aside the notion of motor preference as a means of injury prevention during a recent podcast, I’d argue that their entire philosophy is evidence of MP’s value. They preach the idea of teaching kids how to move their bodies quickly and to develop better proprioceptive tendencies that will translate into baseball movements. That’s motor preference, baby!
I think I’ve mentioned Bruce Lee’s water quote before, the idea that a martial artist or athlete should flow rather than try to force themselves into a rigid set of fixed positions. Pushing a player to fit a coach or organization’s ideal movement patterns may be a great way to stunt their development or worse, to get them injured. Leveraging motor preference, on the other hand, can lead to more efficient movements that accentuate their natural ability.
You recruited or drafted a player because they were successful doing what they do and how they do, so why try to change who they are? More often than not, the answer probably comes down to ego. Now, I’m not saying young players should be left alone. Rather, it’s a matter of understanding how they want to move and helping them get the most out of those preferences by eliminating much of the guesswork or experimentation that might otherwise be required. Maryland players have different warmups based on their movement patterns and some of the mechanics you’ll see from them would never be taught at scale.
Just look at Matt Shaw, whose funky batting stance was developed to allow him to get the most out of being an aerial-associated-axial (elbows tucked instead of flared) mover. His pigeon-toed stance allows him to pre-coil his hips, then landing with the front foot open lets him clear the hips as his upper body initiates movement with the big leg kick as a mechanism to create energy he can’t get from the ground.
As a more personal example, my son has overhauled his entire pitching delivery since August in order to better suit his aerial-associated-large preferences. He had been viewed as more of a drop-and-drive when he’s really tall-and-fall, to use more common parlance, plus he’s unable to create big hip-shoulder separation. That latter reality had led to him starting with his shoulders much more closed, which only exacerbated the tendency for his shoulders to fly open.
Getting him taller and more neutral, among other tweaks, has improved his lead leg block while adding 4-5 ticks to his velocity over the last five months. Being a 16-year-old baby giraffe who weighs the same at 6-foot-2 as he did at 5-foot-9 a couple years ago means physiology alone is responsible for much of the improvement as well. The greater point is that we’d tried with limited success to make changes based on general philosophies and have seen several unlocks since adopting a motor preference mindset.
I was talking to a scout recently about this topic and we both wondered aloud how many guys have been ruined or simply left to stagnate because they were forced down the wrong development pathway. The Cubs admittedly avoided high-ceiling, big-stuff pitchers for years because they valued safety over upside. The result was an overt failure to produce big-league arms, though they’ve continued to struggle in that respect even after overhauling their evaluation philosophy.
My bias should be pretty evident by now, so those who’ve actually made it this far can take it for what it’s worth. But I really believe there’s a whole lot of developmental meat being left on the bone, even for those players who do make it. How many times have we lamented the way the Cubs seem to be unable to help young players maintain early success? Understanding motor preferences won’t turn an organization into a juggernaut that sees every prospect pan out, but it can aid in the developmental process by helping teams and coaches understand where a player should be making changes and how to get them re-centered.
In the meantime, I highly recommend looking into this stuff if you have a young athlete or know someone who does.