My name is Ben Baggett and I’m excited to able to share my story—one that at times that felt extremely embarrassing, as if I was just beating my head against a brick wall with everyone watching. But one that I am extremely proud of and wouldn’t change for anything.
As a freshman in high school in 2012, I was throwing upper 70’s, and just like every kid growing up, I wanted to play professional baseball. I looked at what the best players did to have success and realized that I was far from those metrics—the size, strength, velocity, bat-speed, and sprinting speed held me back. After an honest look at myself, I began a journey to become a professional baseball player. Pushed by my dad, I dove deeper and deeper into methods that were a bit unconventional at the time for baseball—long toss, weighted balls, throwing drills, and heavy lifting. I spent my free time reading blogs from a new place called “Driveline” and Kyle Boddy, I made frequent trips with my dad to the Texas Baseball Ranch, and I read articles and pieces from Randy Sullivan at The Armory. I had no pre-conceived notions about physical development at all. I just wanted to learn as much as I could and these concepts by the Ranch, Driveline, and The Armory just made common sense.
At that time, I was lucky enough to have one of the greatest strength and performance coaches in my backyard with Jared Bidne at Explosive Mechanics. He introduced me to actual strength and explosiveness training with methods that were so simple, yet more effective than anything else I had ever tried. Over a period of 2.5 years, we had taken my laser timed 40-yard dash from a 5.6 to a 4.7, my vertical jump went from 21” to 38”, my bench press had gone from 135 lbs to 330 lbs, and I was moving 300+ lbs in a squat for speed. Throughout this journey, Jared has been one of my greatest mentors and has taught me so much in terms of using the weight room for athletic development.
As I continued to read blogs, peer-reviewed articles, and watch content produced by the facilities mentioned above, I quickly began to take the theoretical programming and apply it to myself. After my first year of research (2013), I jumped from upper 70’s to 84-87 mph as a sophomore. However, I knew that wouldn’t get me the offers I wanted as there were plenty of kids already throwing 90 mph in the Atlanta area alone. As I continued to push even harder the next year, I came out as a junior throwing 88-92mph (2014) and began to garner a good amount of interest. That spring I broke the Georgia single season high school strikeout record, and committed to Stanford University at the end of the summer. I felt as though I was on top of the world, and the journey would continue to be a cakewalk to the top, however, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Going into the spring of my senior year of high school, I rolled my ankle and fractured my foot. I continued with my trademarked work ethic and did everything I could from long tossing on my knees daily to leaving school early and taking a bucket of balls out to our practice football field which turned into throwing them further and further, then hopping on my crutches to pick them up and start again. No matter the conditions,I was going to be out there for 12 straight weeks throwing balls from my knees by myself. Gradually working my long toss back to almost 100 yards from my knees, I knew my arm was becoming absurdly strong, and I was pumped to get back to my feet and test velocity. After 12 weeks on crutches, I was cleared to walk again and like any responsible 19-year-old, I decided to throw on the radar gun the first day I was cleared. That day, I ran it up to 95 mph for the first time. However, I woke up with an excruciating pain in my elbow. A few weeks later, I re-fractured my foot, was back on crutches, and the elbow pain hadn’t resolved at all. We came to find out that my elbow pain was a sprained UCL, and my foot fracture was a special kind of fracture that is notorious for not healing. I ended up having surgery on my foot a few weeks later right before going to Stanford and spent the next full year on crutches. After months of the bone not progressing in healing at all, I had to have the surgery revised, thus leading to another 4 months of healing and taking it slow. Overall, after fracturing my foot in the beginning of April 2015, I was not off crutches and out of the boot until the end of April 2016. Over a full year on crutches and a boot with a few lucky weeks off between fractures.
Not walking for over a year will really do some damage to you as an athlete, and it took me until the next winter to be mostly pain free and slightly close to what I once was. By this time, most of college baseball is figured out—coaches have their guys and their plans setup, and as a kid who hadn’t been able to pitch in about 2 years and was not close to cracking that group. While I sat and watched an entire college baseball season from the bench, I knew I couldn’t let this time go to waste. I had a teammate who planned on graduate transferring and playing his 5th year somewhere else who was also into training, so we set off together as training partners and pushed each other for 16 weeks during the entire season. Squeezing our lifts, throwing, and velocity session around an entire college baseball season was brutal. We would set off to the gym and pull-down hours after the games had ended. Nothing about it was convenient at all, but it was the only way we saw fit to make sure no time went to waste. After starting the season in the upper 80’s to low 90’s, I had increased my run-n-gun velocity almost 10 mph to 100 mph and was consistently into the mid 90’s on the mound. I still vividly remember when we hosted a regional as a number 8 national seed and I wasn’t playing at all, with the post-season roster limit, I wasn’t even allowed in the dugout. On the same day of the regionals, my training partner and I were on the practice football field having a velocity day with the radar gun and a speaker. This was the first time I ever hit 100 mph. On one hand, I was embarrassed. I wasn’t even allowed to be on the field with the team so I’m on the neighboring field throwing balls as hard as possible blasting AC/DC. On the other hand, it taught me to get over myself. If you want something, go get it. It’s not about anyone else, it’s not about your pride, it’s about truly knowing you can get the job done and executing your plan.
Unfortunately, at the end of the season, my shoulder had enough and I began dealing with a lot of shoulder inflammation that kept me from throwing all summer. I pursued every option to try and heal my shoulder but struggled to do so. I re-connected with my friend and the founder of Connected Performance, Alec Hammond, and he let me live on an air mattress in his living room while he interned at the Florida Baseball Ranch asI continued to chase my career.
Finally, come the fall of my junior year at Stanford, I felt healthy and ready to make an impact. I was running my fastball into the mid 90’s and felt like I had plenty more in the tank. A few weeks before the season started, I was throwing in a velocity day at our hometown training facility. I was throwing harder than I ever had—102 with a baseball and 107 with a 3oz baseball. I decided to make a few extra throws to break every velocity record at the facility and on the very last throw I felt this pop deep in my elbow. I was stunned. I was devastated. I knew exactly what had happened but couldn’t find a way to process and swallow it. After getting back to campus and getting a few MRI’s, I was told my UCL was torn. I then chose the route of PRP injection and spent all season rehabbing and continuing to watch from the bench. I then had Tommy John Surgery in May. An extremely frustrating year of ups and downs, having to continue to go to the field every day and watch after years of not playing had really taken a mental toll on me.
I remember going out with my family for lunch a few days after finding out Tommy John surgery was the only option and I was mentally exhausted. I had been at this whole rehab/not-throwing thing for a while. It was getting old and getting old quickly. I’m sure my parents were just as frustrated as me because they just wanted to see their son enjoy the game of baseball again. While my mom was comforting in this situation my dad took a different route, “Well you could just quit, it’s the only other option you have” And it absolutely pissed me off. He knew he was right; I knew he was right. What other option did I have? The reason I decided to train early before games, or at 9pm following a full day of Stanford classes and a game, the same reason I continued to push everything to its absolute limit. I couldn’t give up at that point. I kept telling myself, you want something. Go take it. Your only option is to push through.
The time away allowed me to dive even deeper while taking a smarter and better approach to building myself back.The common misconception is that Tommy John surgery makes you throw harder—this is simply false. Tommy John surgery, and any surgery in that case, is a test of will power, it’s fully up to you to take the time and use it to your advantage to come back better than ever and to work on your weaknesses. With the help ofBen Brewster, I completely designed my own rehab throwing program because the current model is absolutely outdated. Continuing to use different weighted balls when throwing after having Tommy John surgery is a great recipe for having everyone look at you like you’re crazy. Many people looked at me like,“You’re still going to train? Isn’t that why you had TJ? You’re a lunatic.”
In one sense, they’re right, something I was doing wasn’t best suited for me, something I was doing was wrong, and I was determined to figure out how to best train and alter my plan of attack. After a grueling 9 months, I was back throwing baseballs 100%. Inn my first full intensity session, I was touching 97 mph. While I was still dealing with pain and hadn’t thrown much at 100%, it was a massive milestone for me, and something that I felt like I had really earned. After only 2 bullpens, and about 2 months of rehab still left, I was put into our first weekend series in 2019 far before I was ready and I paid the price.
First bullpen back footage, click here.
I came in, up 10 runs, walked both hitters in the 9th inning, and was immediately pulled—an extremely hot start for not pitching in 4 years. A few weeks later, I couldn’t bend or straighten my elbow, and the price for trying to push the envelope had to be paid. It took me the rest of the season to regain full function of the elbow and begin throwing again, and by that time, the sun had set on my fourth and final season at Stanford. 4 years, multiple surgeries, healthy for a total of 20 weeks, and multiple botched rehabs. My pitching stats were even more impressive—1.0+ IP, 2 hits, 3 Walks, 2 HR’s.
To go from striking out more hitters than anyone ever in a single season in the state of Georgia, to a career at the pinnacle of college baseball filled with 4 years of misery was one of the toughest and humbling experiences I could have ever imagined. I felt as though I wasn’t even close to the athlete I was in high school and couldn’t stay healthy enough to get back to that point.
After declining some free agent interest, I got a call from my friend Alec Hammond who was going to be the Director of Player Development at the Division 2 powerhouse Florida Southern. Given my past relationship with him and his knowledge of player development, I knew it would end up being the best fit for me. I decided to train all summer to get a consistent workload in and I began to toy with a lot of new training concepts brought to me by Ian Walsh. He began opening my eyes even more to a slightly different style of training, incorporating a lot more specific work of training ideas that made common sense, yet I had never really thought about or seen before. Many were taken from the training of javelin throwers. I knew with my track record of not being healthy, I needed to continue to adjust and learn what worked and what didn’t. I was starting to build back up stronger than ever with plyo velo and a 100 mph pulldown.
Continuing to battle some complications from the Tommy John surgery a year earlier, I was able to throw off and on but was having a difficult time recovering and throwing consistently. I had a great fall at Florida Southern both academically and athletically as I was sitting in the mid 90’s on the mound. However, by the time the season came, my elbow couldn’t take it any longer. I would pitch, and then take a week off in order to try and pitch the following week, and this wasn’t sustainable anymore and my ulnar nerve was causing me far too many problems. I tried to come back and pitch through it for a few games that year and could barely raise my arm. The body will adapt to the stressors you place on it, and with throwing, my shoulder began to take all the stress from the throw as the elbow wasn’t able to take much at all. This led to excruciating shoulder pain as I tried to come back and pitch.
There was no option for me, I had to try and grit through the season to hopefully get picked up by a major league team that had shown interest that fall. However, I wasn’t even close to being that same player. I was in so much pain I was using whatever I could to numb it and was still throwing fastballs 5-8mph slower than normal. Two appearances later—COVID-19 hit, the world stopped, and the season was cancelled. 5 innings later, for a whopping total of 6 college innings, I was in the same exact place as I started—in pain and on the shelf without any clue what was about to happen,I only knew one thing to do—go get after it. I dove even deeper. On one hand, I felt as though I had been dealt a bad deck of cards, the foot cost me years, leading into the elbow which continued to take years away from me, and ultimately leading to an entire arm that just didn’t want to work anymore. On the other hand, I felt as though there were things I was missing. I felt as though it was my fault, there was something that I could have done to avoid this deck or at least get healthier quicker. Draft time came, and I remained unhealthy enough to throw for anyone. Guys were picked up and I wasn’t one of them. Another year felt like it was wasted.A dream that I once had seemed all but unattainable at this point.
Having a little over a year left of my MBA, I decided to finish it out, and see what the future of baseball could hold for me. I moved up to North Carolina where I lived on a pullout sofa in a good friend’s college house. I sought out rehab with one of the best in the world and a great friend, and mentor—Nevin Markel. I was given the opportunity to come and train at the new Tread Athletics facility. For the next year, I hammered away daily. Treatments and rehab with Performance Rehab Associates, going in to train for hours at Tread’s gym, continuing to take business school classes, and realized just how little I knew about training as I began to learn more and more. By a blessing from the Lord, Ian Walsh came to the Charlotte area to run the pitching development for a post grad and a high school. Ian was an old friend of mine from Driveline, and he had an extreme passion for all things player development—from the physical aspect of throwing to the pitching and analytical side, not many know how to cohesively weave it all together likeIan. I was excited to begin interacting a lot more with him as I’d make the hour commute there and back to train, hangout, talk shop, and help him out with the kids. It came to the point where I’d show up at 11 and not get done until close to 9pm and it was becoming an overall awesome experience. It was ultimately just a huge think tank and experimental lab as we could test different training methods out. We could learn the art of coaching and meet every guy where they were at with their specific situation and needs.
At the start of 2021, I decided to take on more of a full-time coaching role with Ian at the Combine Academy. I had one last semester of business school, still wasn’t healthy enough to throw for anyone, and the dream of professional baseball was drifting even further away. If you know me, you know that whatever I do, I want to be the best at no matter how many hours it takes. With throwing being limited, I decided to try and be the best at legitimately anything else possible related to training. The weight room, mobility, medicine balls, and anything that we could use to train guys; I was going to experiment with it first and see what happens. We were spending 12+ hours a day working and training at the facility with the kids, and it was an absolute blast. Helping kids develop and reach places they had never been reminded me of what that process had been like for me and was far more fulfilling than my own career had felt. I began to develop a true passion for the kids and how I could best help them, not only in baseball but also in life. The 2021 draft came and went, and I was no closer to anything. I couldn’t shake the fact that something was legitimately wrong with my shoulder, so Nevin was able to help me out with some imaging. With the help of a doctor, I learned that I was trying to throw through a couple torn muscles in the rotator cuff.
For two years, I had been spending hours trying to throw, trying to fix a torn rotator cuff, and relatively speaking,I had done a decent job. I was still throwing low to mid 90’s. Was it good enough to get a 25-year-old into professional baseball? No. However, it wasn’t something to scoff at. After receiving treatment, we were full speed ahead on rebuilding my shoulder spending one to two hours daily, just on the shoulder itself.Again, whatever it takes. Forget the past, it’s about the now. As the fall approached, I was now full time with Connected Performance, coaching at combine, while making a push back to throw, we began training professional baseball clients in the morning and the high school kids would start at 1.Whether that meant training with the pro guys, training with the high school kids, training after an 8-hour day, whenever I could get my work in, I did. I refused to go down without a fight.
As I ramped up throwing more and more with throwing sessions, I knew this was my last shot. I was going to be turning 26 right before the approaching season and with 6 innings since I was a junior in high school, the chances of getting anywhere were extremely low.However, I took a bit of a different outlook on this process, and I believe it made a whirlwind of a difference. Rather than focusing on the external goal of getting picked up by someone, or hitting a certain velocity number, I just set out to create the greatest version of myself and push myself to my limits. I wanted to see just how good I could be and how much fun I could have along the way. Whether that would have been me throwing 110mph in a barn in the middle of nowhere training kids, or throwing95 in the big leagues, I just wanted to be as good as I could possibly be. This mindset was the most freeing thing for me, and I began enjoying each day again.I enjoyed going out and throwing and just being in the present moment. As the fall went along, my arm felt better and better. The ball was coming out better than ever. I felt as though the thousands of hours I had spent building the qualities necessary over a 10-year period were all finally coming together. We took it slow, but there was still a big sense of urgency to be ready for some type of season, come the springtime.
As I got close, I began to fight the nerves of bringing out the radar gun—oh the dread of objective feedback. I had long tossed a ball 390-400 feet over the centerfield wall of Combine’s fence from home plate, I was pulling down balls harder than I’d ever seen in catch play, I was finally able to properly throw a javelin, but the radar gun doesn’t lie. There was a part of me that was still fighting the fear of just not throwing hard enough to get picked up or even noticed. This would deem the end of a career that started with absolute heat but had been ice cold for a period of almost 8 years now. Was there anything to lose? Absolutely not.Objectively, I was a nobody. I was a guy who had experimented with himself and training for over 8 years to figure out what works and why. Realistically, I had to accept that if nothing happened, it would just be another step in the process and just another learning lesson. We can’t truly test our knowledge and abilities without that—a true test. For me, that was picking up a baseball and trusting what myself and support group had put together. We had attacked everything smarter, harder, and much more specific. And the results… were oh so sweet. After picking up the baseball and ramping up with some shuffle throws, I proceeded to PR back to back with 102 and 104mph throws. Ian seemed to have enough of the toying around and demanded I get on the mound (the only thing that truly matters). I followed this up with a bullpen at 95-97mph, and ripping in a few nasty sliders for the first time.
After throwing, I felt more at peace than I had been in a long time. I was not in pain, I knew it was sustainable and it was a summation of countless roadblocks, countless lessons, and countless hours spent hammering away. While most people think about trying to ‘get back’ to what they once were, I abandoned this mindset, and searched for the best version of myself. I felt closer to it than ever before and I was filled with gratitude for everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly—which there had been a lot of. A little while later, I threw another pen with video and Trackman at 95-97 with the same Frisbee slider and it began to circulate quite a bit. After a few weeks of some life changing events, I ended up inking the paper and singing with the Toronto Blue Jays in February of 2022 as a 25-year-old free agent with 5 innings in the past 7 years.
At points in time, I was ashamed of where I was. Unable to play and compete for years, watching helplessly on the bench as everyone else got to play, being left at home while everyone else travelled, making a lot of training mistakes—these things added up. However, when understanding that you only have one choice when you want something, and that is, to go get it done. Plain and simple. No matter how hard it is, no matter how mentally draining it is, no matter how long it takes. Just get it done day in and day out. I remember listening to Driveline’s video withCasey Weathers a few years ago, and he said something that drastically impacted me. He spoke about how it would have been a nice comfort blanket to blame not making it on injuries; it’s a comfort piece for your pride when people ask you, to just use the injuries as an excuse. And I get it, everyone is dealt a far different hand, but at the end of the day if the goal is to win, it really doesn’t matter. The excuse of injuries can make you feel better, but realistically, you just didn’t get the job done.
Throughout this journey most days were fought through. They were not easy, they were not exciting, and they were not rewarding. But in the end, the summation of continued determination and excellence will lead to reaping something far greater than you could put your finger on. Had I never made it anywhere—the lessons I’ve learned, the peopleI’ve met, and the people I’ve been able to impact are beyond worth it, and I’m grateful for the unlikely journey I have been on for the past 8 years.
How long are you willing to hammer away with little to no results? How many dead ends are you willing to reach? How far are you willing to go? How much are you willing to pay?
“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” –Galations 6:9
The journey hasn’t been pretty at all—it has been filled with failure, pain, and embarrassment, but it has been one of the most rewarding and fulfilling things I have ever done, and it has taught me more than I could ever imagine. I am excited to be able to share this knowledge and help players along a journey of their own to reach their fullest potential.