Yesterday I made the hour drive up to Dayton for a media luncheon with the Dayton Dragons to introduce the new manager, Dick Schofield. Hitting coach Luis Bolivar and Reds Director of Minor League Player Development Jeff Graupe were also in attendance.

Most of the local media focuses on more traditional kinds of reporting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I read some of that kind of stuff from those guys, but if you’ve been coming to the site long enough you know that that kind of reporting isn’t exactly what I do here. I’m interested in player development a lot more than the day-to-day kind of things.

Last month I reported that the Cincinnati Reds were expanding their use of Trackman in the minor leagues from two stadiums to five. If you’re unsure what Trackman is, be sure to go click the link and read the article for a good explanation of all of the things that the system measures and tracks within a game. The 2015 season was the first that the Reds organization was using the system, and they only used it at the Double-A and Triple-A levels.

With the expansion of the system to all of the non-complex level teams, I asked Graupe what some of the things that the organization uses the system for. One of the bigger things that stood out to me was that the team promoted Charles Leddon, who had previously worked as the athletic trainer for the Pensacola Blue Wahoos to the Director of Sports Science for the organization, “who will be looking at a lot of the data with an eye on injury prevention”.

Injury prevention is sort of the big thing that sports haven’t really figured out. Obviously, injuries are always going to happen and you can’t prevent them all. But if a team is able to find a way to prevent some injuries, or even find an injury sooner and prevent it from getting worse, that could be a very big deal and give the early finders of these methods a very big advantage over the competition. It was refreshing to hear that the Reds are actively pursuing these sorts of things.

In regards to how the team uses the other kinds of information that the Trackman system provides on the players current skillsets, Graupe had this to say: “That’s one of the big things that’s changed about the job, the influx of data. You’re not only getting scouting reports, coaches reports, daily reports, medical reports. Now you’re getting more analytics with data points like exit velocity, spin rate and extension – everything like that, there’s just so much information. The biggest thing we’ve had to do is create a network of people who can look at different things and have discussions (about it). We’ve hired a few new analysts that help in organizing the data and getting into the hands of me, Dick (Williams), Walt (Jocketty), Nick (Krall) and Sam (Grossman) on a daily basis to make the information easier to get to. There’s a ton of information there and it just goes into your decision making. You can’t ever just look at one thing, but if you think of it all as different data points, the scouting reports, the coaches reports, the Trackman data it just all goes together to help you make a better decision.”