How The Red Sox Overhauled Their Hitting Development Program

Image credit: Kristian Campbell (Photo by Tayla Bolduc/Worcester Red Sox)

Kristian Campbell occasionally encounters clips from his one season at Georgia Tech. He is jarred by the vision.

“I look at that player like, ‘Noooo! What are you doing?!’ ” Campbell said. “I see some videos of my old swing and I don’t like it. It worked, for sure, but I see it and I’m like, ‘Dang, I looked like that? It worked at the time, but it’s gonna look a lot better in less than a year.’

That’s what I’d be saying to Kristian from Georgia Tech: ‘You have no idea what you’ll grow into.’ ”

Campbell’s growth from a fourth-round, slap-and-dash draft pick in 2023 to the Minor League Player of the Year in 2024 represents a stunning ascent—one that was driven primarily by a player who transformed his swing and offensive approach over the course of one year.

Yet for members of the Red Sox organization, it also highlighted the payoff of an overhauled approach to hitting development.

After the 2022 season, the Red Sox engaged in an organizational self-examination. The championship-winning team from 2018 was built chiefly around an elite homegrown core of position players—Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Andrew Benintendi and more—but a years-long gap had formed behind Devers.

“We probably weren’t getting progress in development, maybe the way that we had hoped,” Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham said. “We wanted to put a system in place and processes in place that allowed for consistency in development all the way through our system, not just in one place—to be able to track, be able to be objective about the development that was happening, be able to see progress.

“We had to take a step back to see where we were process-wise. We probably weren’t as far along as maybe we would have hoped.”

The Red Sox leaned hard into overhauling their hitting development in pursuit of alignment behind a clear organization-wide philosophy. The process included some painful decisions to let go of some respected, longtime hitting coaches while seeing others choose to leave.

At the same time, Boston hired Jason Ochart—who founded Driveline’s hitting program in 2016, then worked as the Phillies’ minor league hitting coordinator from 2019 to 2022—as minor league director of hitting and program design.

Ochart was tasked with creating a more data-driven development environment and to scale it out in ways to achieve measurable progress in areas that both he and Red Sox player development officials believed would contribute to in-game success.

“He was exceptionally open-minded, but he’s also really clear and disciplined in how he builds out a program,” Red Sox assistant GM Paul Toboni said. “He’s a great leader, empowers people and holds people accountable. To this point, it’s turned out exactly how we thought it would turn out.”

A heavy emphasis was placed on work in the batting cages. The Red Sox had HitTrax machines installed in every batting cage at every level, so that hitters could get immediate feedback on the location of the pitches they were swinging at, how hard they were hitting the ball, their launch angles and the expected wOBA of the balls they were hitting.

While cage work is at the heart of the team’s training, the Red Sox are comfortable letting players incorporate more traditional methods as well.

“We’re not, like, ‘Burn the tees!’ (or) that kind of thing,” chuckled Ochart. “It’s silly to me to be that extreme.”

Still, while feel-based reps on both the tee or on the field are still valued, the organization places immense value on the trackable training that occurs inside. The team has created friendly internal competitions around the cage environment—an exit velocity leaderboard, for instance, as well as a “March Madness” hitting bracket featuring different cage skill competitions during spring training—meant to bring joy to a professional necessity.

“We want our guys taking hundreds of swings, more than 100 a day,” Ochart said. “The best way to get better at hitting is to hit, and that’s something we talk about a lot. So we’ve created a culture of players who love to get in the cage and train and take a bunch of reps. That’s really important to what we build.”

Within that work, the Red Sox have defined a “core four” of areas for targeted hitting evaluation and development: bat speed, bat-to-ball skills, swing decisions and ball flight.

“We use the core four as sort of the North Star (of hitter development),” Ochart said. “These (elements) are really, really predictive of both current and future success as a hitter.”

Typical big leaguers have a top-end exit velocity of around 111 mph. For Red Sox minor leaguers who fall short of that—and some who exceed it—the use of overloaded bats (20% heavier than those used in games) and underloaded bats (20% lighter) in cage work became widespread.

Roughly two-thirds of all Red Sox minor leaguers are on bat-speed training programs, work that is further supported by targeted strength and conditioning efforts. The Red Sox saw payoff in the form of an uptick of an average 0.6 mph in average bat speed among all hitters with at least 100 plate appearances in the organization in both 2023 and 2024, as well as an average increase in 90th percentile exit velocity of 0.7 mph.

According to the team’s analysis, the Red Sox led the minor leagues in average bat speed this year after ranking ninth in 2023. The payoff has been seen not only in elite prospects, such as Campbell, Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer who hit the ball incredibly hard, but also in players like David Hamilton and Nick Sogard for whom bat speed gains resulted in improved offensive traits that contributed to MLB opportunities.

“I know (bat speed) is trainable. I’ve been doing it my entire coaching career,” Ochart said. “This training works. It’s effective. It’s backed by peer-reviewed research. It’s just a no-brainer.”

Swing-and-miss issues can have a number of causes: timing, pitch recognition, a swing that’s too slow or too steep. The Red Sox try to train for bat-to-ball skills with mixed-pitch batting practice sessions that vary pitch types and locations, forcing hitters to recognize pitch types and adapt their swings to them.

“Hitting is chaotic. There’s a lot of adjustments that hitters need to make. They need to pull their hands in, or they need to adapt because they were sitting on a cutter or on a fastball, and now it’s a changeup,” Ochart said.

“We’re going to challenge them. It’s ugly in practice, but it makes them better in the game, and that’s what matters.”

For swing-decision training, HitTrax allows players to get a precise sense of the dimensions of the strike zone—and whether players are expanding it. The Red Sox introduce count-specific scenarios in their cage work to train players on the importance of attacking pitches in locations that permit them to employ their “A” swings early in counts, before accepting more defensive swings with two strikes.

Mayer identified improved swing decisions and a reduced strikeout rate as his primary hitting goals for 2024. An improved chase rate contributed to a decrease in his strikeout rate from 24.3% to 19.7%, kept his walk rate stable at 9% and improved his quality of contact while batting .307/.370/.480 at Double-A Portland.

In terms of ball flight, a sign quoting Ted Williams above the minor league batting cages at Boston’s spring training complex in Fort Myers, Fla., crystallizes what the Red Sox want their players to do:

“We’re going to learn how to do two things … We’re going to hit it hard and we’re going to hit it in the air.”

In addition to hitting the ball hard and in the air, the Red Sox also embrace training to pull the ball in the air. The hope is not to displace the natural all-fields ability of players like Anthony, Mayer and Kyle Teel—all lefthanded hitters who have a chance to become doubles machines while dimpling Fenway’s Green Monster—but instead to layer upon that an improved ability to catch certain pitches with a contact point in front of the plate to get to their highest exit velocities and greatest chances of hitting homers.

“That’s new for players. Being able to hit the ball out in front and pull it well is a big part of our program, and something that has been beneficial for our guys,” Ochart said. “We’ve started to see the ball flight improve in game, with Campbell being the best example of that transformation.”

Of course, it’s one thing for the Red Sox to see immense progress among their minor leaguers, but ultimately the true impact of an overhauled hitting program will come when anticipated cornerstones arrive in the big leagues.

“We’re starting to see signs,” Ochart said. “The next couple years will be the true test.”