Baseball’s new era of data has come with more efficiency in developing players and taking all of the guesswork out of it. This has led to a surplus of new technologies built to provide teams and players with what they need to know to make their players better. Today, I will talk about three of the most popular development technologies and how they help players get better and win more games.
TrackMan
TrackMan is a radar technology originally used to track missiles that were shot in the air, this has since turned into the most popular baseball tracking technology used by college and pro teams. It tracks ball flight from the pitcher’s hand and off the bat of the hitter. As a part of MLB’s Statcast (until Hawk-Eye comes in, a tennis tracking technology), it shows exit velocity, launch angle, distance hit, for hitters, and the release point, spin rate, spin axis, velocity from release, and its movement for pitchers. Those stats are just a small fraction of what it can spit out as it has a ton of data points for every facet of the game. Recently, it has even been tested in the Atlantic League to bring in robot umpires. It hasn’t been extremely successful there, but it will get better and technology like that will replace umpires sooner rather than later.
Player development and scouting are affected heavily by it as teams can see how their player’s tendencies are changing over time, as well as seeing if a pitcher is losing spin or velocity and this can then be addressed in practice or a pitch design session. This also helps in scouting as teams can see other team’s data and create scouting reports to help a pitcher have a gameplan, a hitter knowing an opposing pitcher’s tendencies, and the ability to shift against certain hitters.
Rapsodo
Rapsodo is the main technology when it comes to pitch design. Placed between the pitcher’s mound and home plate, it reads the ball’s trajectory as it flies by and will then track the numbers. It gives all of the main stats used to determine how good a pitch is: spin rate, spin efficiency, spin axis, movement, velocity, and release point. Rapsodo can also be used for hitting, but its primary usage has come for pitchers. The main model for pitchers looks like a red and black triangle shown here:
Pitchers have benefitted from it as they are able to decide if their pitches are moving the way they should and if they are playing off of each other in opposite directions. Scouts can also have a number to prove what their eyes see with numerical evidence that the pitches the player throws are pluses. It is the same thing for the athlete as well, as they can have evidence that their pitch is good by not just relying on their or somebody else’s opinion or their own.
Edgertronic
Famously made into a pitch design tool by Trevor Bauer, Edgertronic cameras are high-speed cameras that can shoot up to 17,000 frames per second and can show a pitcher how they are releasing the ball as it comes out of their hand and even shows how a pitcher tunnels their pitches. An example of this is shown here from Driveline Baseball:
This shows that this pitcher’s fingers are spinning the ball to a roughly 2:30 spin axis, if he wanted to make it a 3:00, he could then use trial and error with finger placement and release to visually see how they each affect spin change instead of just numbers.
As mentioned, Trevor Bauer was the pioneer of this camera and has used high-speed cameras since his college days at UCLA. This tool has helped him go from an average pitcher to an elite arm in just a matter of a few years. Kyle Boddy and Driveline then met with Bauer and decided that this would be a great investment and it would eventually boom to what it is now.
When paired with a Rapsodo device, pitch design is able to happen easier as you have an easier visual to determine how to throw your pitches and the numbers to back up what you see. This has made developing pitches faster and, ultimately, has created more success in this process. There are more pitchers than just Bauer who have become great due to this, such as Adam Ottavino, Gerrit Cole (who was talked about in a previous article).
The data revolution in baseball right now is just getting started, these were just a few of the most popular devices used in the baseball world and there are many more. As we continue into this new realm of baseball, we will continue to find and develop more ways to train players and make overall better teams that win more games. As baseball and the whole world is at a current halt, I hope you all stay safe and healthy.
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