Shaddon Peavyhouse
Right-Handed Pitcher, Seattle Mariners Minor Leaguer
Shaddon Peavyhouse was out of baseball. After his college career ended with him sitting out the end of his senior year with a back injury, he moved on to a construction job back home, working on electrostatic precipitators at the local power plant.
He still had the itch, though. He wanted another shot, and knew that if he could get healthy he could make an impact on the mound again.
So in September of last year, Peavyhouse flew out to Washington to visit Driveline. He wanted to figure out how to stay on top of his health, how to lock down a routine that worked, how to improve his command, maybe learn a new breaking ball. Basically: the works.
“I knew that if I wanted to play, I needed to find a way to stay healthy and get a better routine,” Peavyhouse said. “I thought I had a good routine, but obviously I didn’t because I kept getting these nagging injuries. I had always heard of Driveline, and I thought it was a good idea to go train with the best.”
Peavyhouse has always thrown hard. At Coastal Carolina, where he started his college career, and North Carolina, where he ended it, he sat 92-94 mph and touched 98 mph when he reached back. That plays. That’s why he knew he needed to give it another go.
That’s why he traded in the electrostatic precipitators for biomechanical motion capture at Driveline.
Driveline trainer Toby Nagel taught him a PlyoCare Ball routine (Peavyhouse had never used them before), and set up an online training program for him to follow back home in Tennessee leading up to Driveline’s January Pro Day.
Peavyhouse says he felt like that initial trip to Driveline back in September set him up for the success he would eventually have in January.
He was in a great place then, health-wise, when he flew back out to Washington in January to prepare for Driveline’s Pro Day.
That allowed him to dive into pitch design, which Nagel knew needed some work before Peavyhouse threw in front of scouts.
“The big thing for him is that he had no feel whatsoever for a breaking ball,” Nagel said. “He threw a hard gyro slider in college, which is fine, but he would spike it a bunch.”
The two played around with different grips for a while, finally settling on one where Peavyhouse spikes his index finger to allow his middle finger to get around the ball a bit more.
It was a huge improvement on the version he had been throwing earlier in the offseason, the one that did more spinning than sweeping.
It shined at Pro Day. Seattle’s area scout from the Carolinas reached out to him to let him know he had gotten good feedback about his performance, and that he would be in touch again soon. The next phone call came from Brendan Domaracki, Seattle’s Director of Player Personnel.
He had an offer.
“He told me if I would like to sign, that I have the opportunity and they would love to have me,” Peavyhouse said. “I was like, ‘Absolutely, I want to. What kind of question is that?’ Then I told him I hadn’t even talked to my agent, but I didn’t need to. I wanted to sign with them. So then I called my agent, and he said it was a done deal. They sent me an email with the contract, and I signed it. The rest is history.”