BRINGING IT HOME

A pair of longtime buddies—Lake Bluff’s Tyler Esplin, a former professional baseball player, and Lake Forest’s Tyler Grumhaus, a former high finance professional—team up to open a premium baseball and performance training facility in Lake Bluff.

MERE MILES FROM WHERE THEY FIRST MET as classmates and teammates at Lake Forest Academy (LFA), Tyler Esplin and Tyler Grumhaus are together again—this time as the co-founders of Drive Performance, a state-of-the-art baseball academy in Lake Bluff that also provides strength and agility training for athletes and adults. It opened in October 2025.

Esplin, a Lake Bluff native and successful product of IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 2017 at the age of 17 and played seven seasons as an outfielder/first baseman for the organization, reaching Double-A in 2022. Grumhaus, a Lake Forest native, played basketball and majored in economics at Grinnell College in Iowa and went on to work in high finance.

“(Esplin) was my quarterback at LFA, and I was his 4-foot-10 wide receiver,” recalls a grinning Grumhaus, who, like Esplin, also played baseball for the Caxys at LFA. “(Grumhaus) and I,” says the 26-year-old Esplin, “are still best friends. We do a lot together, from playing golf to battling each other in baseball video games, and now we’re business partners who want to give back to the community that means so much to us. But I don’t stay up until 3 a.m. like he does sometimes. I am still getting used to seeing a barrage of emails in my inbox that weren’t there when I went to bed. “Our strengths are very complementary. It’s a yin and yang dynamic.”

What Drive Performance is to young and professional baseball players alike: a go-to place to develop and hone skills in an exceedingly difficult sport. It offers a complete training environment and services that address every need of a player’s development, from skills to strength and agility training. Preteens and teens have swung at all kinds of pitches in the batting cages at the facility, with Esplin watching, coaching and then going over the metrics—such as exit velocity and launch angle, displayed on a hitting dashboard—with the players during each session.

62 Drive26@james Gustin26 28 — Tyler Grumhaus and Tyler Esplin

Drive Performance doesn’t field age-group teams, so the focus in bringing professional-grade development to the community is to sharpen each player’s individual skill set rather than to select all-star squads. “One 12-year-old, who was preparing to compete in a tournament for his baseball team, told me, ‘I’m going to look to hit high pitches this weekend,'” Esplin recalls. “I told him, ‘No, you’re not.’ I then showed him his HitTrax batting averages of .041 on high pitches and .277 on low pitches.”

Former Milwaukee Brewers and current Boston Red Sox infielder Caleb Durbin—a Lake Bluff native who finished third in National League Rookie of the Year voting last year—has also taken cuts at Drive Performance. Durbin is one of six pro ball players to have worked out at Drive Performance from its inception. Unsurprisingly, he is at the top of the facility’s leaderboard for many of the metrics measured. “Let’s say Caleb has a tough stretch at the plate in his first season with the Red Sox,” Esplin says. “He could ask us to look for videos of his swings on his best days at Drive Performance to help him get out of the hitting funk. We would then send the footage to him, just like we’d do for kids who work with us here and their parents.”

Aaron Perry, who played for the Double-A Knoxville (formerly Tennessee) Smokies last season, serves as the pitching coordinator at Drive Performance and was teammates with Tyler Esplin in the Red Sox organization. Anthony Ranallo, a former Lake Forest High School baseball/football player, serves as head of baseball strength and conditioning. Chris Affinati, a former professional hockey player and MMA fighter, and Cassie Ratajczyk, a former all-conference volleyball player, lead training for non-baseball athletes and adult clients.

Drive Performance isn’t exactly a North Shore version of the Sunshine State’s elite IMG Academy, where Esplin, beginning at the age of 15, attended its boarding school and earned his advanced “degree” in baseball while turning pro scouts’ heads at every turn. But Drive Performance features many of the high-tech tools Esplin used at IMG to steadily lift his draft stock. “It was eye-opening right away, learning what I did from a metrics standpoint,” says Esplin, adding IMG’s staff of former Major Leaguers, including Chris Sabo and John Ford-Griffen, also helped him reach the next level and a series of higher levels after that.

Esplin batted .270-something in his first IMG year. His average skyrocketed to north of .430—against top-notch pitching—in his second year. No wonder Boston took him with the 221st overall pick (seventh round) and signed him to a significant contract before he was old enough to vote. Shoulder surgery ended Esplin’s playing career three years ago and brought him back home to share his acumen and enthusiasm as Drive Performance’s director of baseball development.

“Tyler is obsessive and passionate about what he does for Drive Performance,” says Grumhaus, who visited Driveline Baseball, a premier training center in Scottsdale, Arizona, ahead of Drive Performance’s opening. “You should see how great Tyler is with the kids, how engaging he is, how knowledgeable he is, and how much confidence he instills. He knows their strengths and knows what they need to do in order to improve significantly as baseball players.

“A lot of what he provides,” continues Drive Performance’s operations manager, “comes from his experiences at IMG. We want Drive Performance to be a viable option for families that want elite development without having to leave the community.”

Grumhaus got engaged recently, with the wedding set for February 2027. Esplin’s probably working on his toast to the couple as you’re reading this. It’ll be a hit. Count on it.