Driveline Baseball -

Michael Clarkson could not get on the field. He could not get into the box score.

"I tried my hardest, really worked at it," Clarkson said.

It just didn't work at Anderson (S.C.), a Division II school, in the spring of 2024. So, Clarkson started looking for ways to improve.

In his search, he came across the story of a once little-known player from Australia who had developed into not only a college star but the first overall pick in the 2024 draft: Travis Bazzana.

Clarkson learned Bazzana had trained at Driveline Baseball, a facility he had primarily associated with pitching expertise. Clarkson read how the work there had helped turn Bazzana into an elite player. He began to wonder if he, too, could benefit from a radical change in training.

He talked to his parents back home in Chicago about traveling to Seattle for an assessment.

"We looked into it, and they're like, 'How bad do you want this?'" Clarkson recalled.

Pretty badly.

Clarkson grew up in a hockey family in Chicago and starred as a two-sport athlete at Loyola Academy. But his goal had always been to play baseball at the Division I level.

So, in May 2024, after a disappointing first-year season at Anderson, he traveled to Seattle in search of a way to get better and achieve his Division I dream.

What he found at Driveline was something he had not expected: The problem was not that he lacked underlying power skills. It was that he was not using the strength he already had efficiently.

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One of the first things most athletes do when they arrive at a Driveline facility is enter the biomechanics lab for a motion-capture assessment. The goal is to establish a baseline and understand the strengths and weaknesses in how an athlete moves.

Clarkson came in with an unusual profile for a young amateur player.

He was a 6-foot-2, 225-pound catcher/infielder with plus bat speed.

In his initial assessment, Clarkson posted a 70.4 mph bat speed, which ranked in the 93rd percentile of batters who had gone through motion capture.

The problem?

His swing had a 3-degree attack angle.

"He's always been pretty physical. We didn't sprout out this 230-pound catcher," said Driveline's Dylan Robertson, who became Clarkson's primary trainer. "He's a bigger kid who needed to use his strength in a more productive fashion. That's the moral of the story."

Clarkson was surprised when he saw the data, and learned how inefficient his swing was.

For years, he had tried to replicate Mike Trout's swing. He admired how compact and powerful Trout's swing looked and believed he was doing a decent job of emulating it.

"I always wanted to be like Mike Trout, so me and my dad would literally watch slow-mo videos of Mike Trout," Clarkson said. "And I thought like, 'Oh, I am emulating Trout. I'm hitting like Trout.'"

In high school, he thought he had done a decent job of replicating the swing. After all, he'd hit 20 doubles as a senior.

But at Anderson, he struggled to get the ball in the air and generate power in practice. It's one reason he never got on the field. That struggle in his first taste of college baseball was experiential.

Then he saw the data at Driveline.

The objective information showed there was a difference between what he thought he was doing and what was happening.

"I get to Driveline, and immediately based off the assessment they did, they were like, 'Well, so you're having a hard time actually staying back and staying on plane through the ball,'" Clarkson recalled.

That disconnect is common among athletes. Feel isn't always reality. The value of the data was it gave Clarkson something objective to see and understand.

"It was just like immediate, understanding what we needed to fix, what we needed to," Clarkson said. "I'm getting too steep down, and then I'm trying to swing way up at the last second. So, I'm not really giving myself time to get through the zone and swing up, get under the ball - besides for this really brief window."

He finally understood what was happening.

"I didn't honestly know because nobody had ever really told me that I was doing this," he said. "And then once I actually got to see my swing on cameras and everything, I'm like, 'Oh, I 100% see that.'"

The mission was clear.

Now came the harder part: changing it.

Clarkson's first trainer at Driveline was Jacob Hirsh, who gave him a series of drills designed to change how he loaded and moved.

The Big Papi drill became one of Clarkson's staples, helping him feel the separation between his hips and shoulders.

"That has helped a lot in creating hip-shoulder separation, so I can really get my hips to come through and let my hands come through," Clarkson said. "Trust my hand to come through, and generate the extra power."

Pivot Picks reinforced another piece of the movement. Hook 'Ems gave him another way to feel the proper way to initiate his swing.

"That really helped in finding that load position for me," Clarkson said.

But the drills were only useful if Clarkson could eventually turn them into something he could feel and repeat on his own.

That happened during a return trip to Seattle.

Clarkson had initially gone to Driveline for his assessment and then returned home. After suffering a minor weightlifting injury, he decided to rehab in Seattle again with Driveline.

During a swing-design session, something clicked.

"We did a swing design, and during that swing design, it was like just a moment of clarity," Clarkson said. "I felt something in my hamstring, and all the internal-external cues all just started to make sense. Then it was just find that feeling as many times as you can, and from there, it just kind of took off."

Robertson had seen the problem from the beginning.

"It wasn't a glaring issue where he was catching balls deep. That's an easy fix," Robertson said. "His path was just pretty flat for quite a while. Just kind of from the get-go, steepening it out earlier in his chain, and giving him the external target of missing in the air. That was pretty big for him."

As the movements became more ingrained, the Driveline staff stress-tested Clarkson's new swing with game-like training on the iPitch, intentionally making his training more difficult than what he would face in college.

"High spin, big shapes, on purpose," Robertson said. "Making training hard, as harder than game at-bats."

Soon it was time to find out whether the changes would hold up in games.

Before the next season, Clarkson transferred to Paris Junior College in Texas, where he would have an opportunity to test his new swing.

But there was a new challenge: Driveline's coaches would not be with him every day. They would not be embedded with his college team, standing beside him for every practice swing, or on the bench during games.

Clarkson had to take what he had learned in Seattle back to campus and become his own coach.

That's a key to successful remote training, Robertson explained. Athletes must understand not only what they are changing, but why they are changing it, and how they should reproduce it.

"We want them to know what we are doing for them, why we are doing it, and how we are going to do it," Robertson said. "Even if they were in the gym every day - even if I was their coach at school - I am not getting in the box with them and feeling the things they are feeling. We are trying to make them the best hitting coaches they can possibly be for themselves."

Clarkson embraced that responsibility.

He stayed in regular contact with Robertson, and Clarkson became a regular Blast user. He bought a tripod and recorded his swings, sometimes improvising with an umbrella to make sure his phone could capture the video.

"When they leave the gym, Blast Motion becomes super important," Robertson said. "A guy like Michael, whose attack was the issue ... Blast gives you that immediate feedback loop."

Said Clarkson of the Blast-fueled feedback loop: "You have your attack angles, you have your bat speeds, you have like your swing, it tracks, your swing path, and how you move."

The feedback loop allowed Clarkson to monitor his swing, make adjustments and, perhaps most importantly, know whether he was still doing what he had been taught.

Then came the test.

At Paris Junior College, Clarkson's playing time was limited as he split catching duties.

His sample, however, was loud.

In 18 games and 42 at-bats this spring, he hit .357 with a .550 on-base percentage and a .833 slugging percentage, with four home runs, a triple and six doubles.

The videos he sent Robertson improved.

"Every time I reached out, he'd say something like, 'It was awesome - here's a home run,'" Robertson said. "He was producing highlights weekly, sometimes daily. 'Left the yard again.' That's exactly what you hope for - for a player to keep coming back with that kind of progress."

The performance was one piece of evidence.

The data provided another.

When Clarkson returned to Driveline for another assessment, his bat speed had increased to 74.5 mph, ranking in the 98th percentile.

But the more important change was in the swing itself.

His average attack angle had risen to 12.5 degrees - more than four times his original 3-degree mark.

"He was able to match different planes, and get his best swing off against multiple pitch types," Robertson said. "We're looking in that 6-12, 8-12 (degree) range. He's right in there. I think that's a really great spot to be."

The data had changed.

The swing had changed.

And now coaches were noticing.

Including Division I coaches.

This spring, Clarkson's JUCO coach told him to keep his phone ringer on. Clarkson usually kept the volume off, but his coach had a reason.

Stephen F. Austin might be calling: a Division I program.

The suspense built.

A day later, Clarkson pulled into the parking lot at Paris Junior College and stepped out of his car.

Then the phone rang.

"I saw it was a number from Texas, so I immediately just picked up," he said.

His heart felt like it was leaping out of his chest.

He had a Division I offer.

A year earlier, Clarkson couldn't get on the field.

Now he would be a Division I player.

The difference wasn't simply more strength or more practice. Clarkson learned to see his swing differently, understand what his body was doing, and turn that understanding into repeatable movement.

He had gone looking for an answer. He found it. In a year's time, he had made himself into a Division I player.