A Garage Was the Plan. Ty Book Ended Up With 21,000 Square Feet on Ranck Mill Road.

Coach Ty Book has spent twenty years watching ninth graders walk onto a high school baseball field. Every year they arrive bigger than the class before them. Stronger. Faster. But that doesn’t mean they’re getting better at the game, he says.

“I don’t mean any disrespect when I say this,” he says. “But over the last 20 years, the kids that enter high school in ninth grade don’t seem to be getting better. They seem to be getting worse when it comes to the fundamentals of baseball, and just knowing what to do during the game.”

It is not for lack of places to train. Lancaster County has no shortage of cages, lessons, showcases, and travel teams. But Book’s observed a problem that is narrower, and harder to fix.

“They’re bigger, faster and stronger than they’ve ever been,” he says, “but actually playing the game of baseball seems to be losing a little bit of its learning curve.”

This October, Book will open By The Book Baseball, a 21,000-square-foot building on Ranck Mill Road in Lancaster, two minutes off the Walnut Street exit of Route 30.

Twenty years, then a year off

Book has put on a uniform for a Lancaster County team every year since he was six years old. He graduated from Manheim Township in 2001 and played a year at Cecil College. He kept playing baseball into his late thirties, in the Quad County Optimist League, the Susquehanna League, and the Stumpf League, and he ran a Quad County team for about seven years.

He started coaching at Lancaster Catholic in 2008 and stayed through 2021, seven of those years as head coach. In those seven years his teams won roughly 100 games, a state championship, two district championships, and a league title.

His father was on the bench for all of it, as his assistant when he was the head coach and as the JV assistant when he wasn’t.

“Getting to do it with my dad was probably one of the most special things,” Book says.

COVID gave Book a spring at home in 2020 with his wife, Emily, and their two children, Simon and Lucy, and when he came back in 2021 the job felt different. He had started coaching before he was married, before there were kids, and he could put everything he had into the program. By 2021 he felt it was time to step back.

Ty Book

“He told me if I’m having any doubts about staying on board, then maybe it’s time to just take a break,” Book says of his father.

So he sat out 2022. It is the only year since he was six that he has not worn a uniform for a Lancaster County team. He spent it reading about baseball and going back over his own decisions as a head coach. “I kind of tortured myself a little bit,” he says. “Not in a bad way. Just, what did I do wrong? What should I do better?”

His wife noticed something he hadn’t. He wasn’t himself without it.

“What we realized was it wasn’t a competitive outlet,” he says. “It was a teaching outlet.”

Jeff Swarr, a coach Book had played against and coached against for years, offered him a coaching position at Lampeter-Strasburg. He took it and has been there since. Every season he’s been on that staff, the program has sent a pitcher on to college ball. The Pioneers won District Three titles in 2025 and 2026 with Book coaching their pitchers.

Add it up and the record runs to six section titles, four district championships, a Lancaster-Lebanon League title, and a state championship. He has coached in five of the last ten district championship games at one classification or another.

The rabbit hole

The other half of the idea came from injuries.

“I’ve become almost a crazy nerd about the way the body works,” Book says. Watch enough baseball and you watch enough arms come apart. He went looking for why, and kept going.

“This kind of started as a, I’m going to find a garage somewhere that has enough room for a pitcher’s mound and a little weight room,” he says, and bring in friends who understand the body and the physical therapy side of it.

The garage turned into 21,000 square feet.

What’s in the building

The floor is turf end to end, so ground balls are possible indoors. There are six 70-foot cages and five shorter ones, and the short cages convert into two instructional rooms for clinics and small-group work. Every cage in the place can also be cut down to 35 feet, which means the building can be reconfigured into as many as 17 short cages when the demand calls for it.

A separate lab holds a mound and a batter’s box under cameras that break down a swing or a delivery frame by frame. Three TrackMan units are going into the building, reading spin rate, velocity, and vertical and horizontal movement on every pitch and every swing.

“I joke around, they’re radar guns on steroids,” Book says.

Two of the units are indoor-outdoor, so they travel with the teams to the field in spring and summer. The fitness equipment has already been bought.

Book runs the operation with two partners. Dr. Shane Speck pitched at Lancaster Bible College in the 2010s. Matt Geppart has worked in baseball technology and analysis in the major leagues for more than fifteen years. A fourth piece is the one Book keeps coming back to: Dr. Lally, an in-house doctor of physical therapy who will put every player on the program’s travel teams through a movement assessment and hand each of them a training plan built for his own body.

Facility Rendering

That applies to the eleven-year-olds too. Nobody is putting 200 pounds on a middle schooler’s back. The point is to teach a young athlete how to move correctly, and to catch the hip that will limit him at fifteen while he is still twelve.

“I don’t know that anybody else is doing something quite like this in the area,” Book says.

Who it’s for

The building is set up for ages 11 to 30. Younger than eleven, Book says, is probably more than a kid needs.

Facility Rendering

By The Book’s travel organization, the Battle Cats, will make the facility its home, with teams from 11U through 17U. Coaches are being announced on the program’s social media over the coming weeks. Players on those teams get the building four days a week and the movement assessment that comes with it.

By The Book Baseball is at bythebookbaseball.com and on Instagram and Facebook. Book can be reached at ty.book@bythebookbaseball.com.