From inside a lab at the University of Pittsburgh to a local Dunkin Donuts shop and finally to Major League Baseball, it’s been a quite the sports technology adventure for Diamond Kinetics. The Pittsburgh-based startup launched in 2013, initially using technology to properly fit amateur baseball players with the correct bat. That idea evolved over the past five years as Diamond Kinetics developed bat sensors to help analyze a batter’s swing. The product is used by more than 15 MLB teams and 52 NCAA programs, in addition to thousands of younger players. The latest chapter began this week as the… Read More
If baseball is a numbers game, who better to have on your team than a true data geek? For the first time in team history, the Seattle Mariners have hired a Director of High Performance. For Lorena Martin, it’s the next step in a life and career rooted in sports and understanding the physical and mental connections necessary to perform at an elite level. Martin, our latest Geek of the Week, joined the Mariners this offseason after spending a year as the Director of Sports Performance Analytics with the Los Angeles Lakers. She will be in charge of all aspects of… Read More
If the Seattle Mariners “left it all on the field” at the end of the 2017 baseball season they won’t be able to get it back next year, as the playing surface is being completely replaced at Safeco Field. The offseason project is the first replacement of the ballpark’s original surface, installed in the spring of 1999. New images from the team on Instagram show the process has begun to remove the grass in the outfield. The Mariners said in a news release that grass in the infield and foul territory was replaced in 2012, but with the exception of patches… Read More
After American Airlines threw Tacoma Rainiers infielder D.J. Peterson some sort of curveball, he and his teammates Daniel Vogelbach, Pat Light, and Mark Lowe were forced to take a very pricey Uber. Peterson tweeted out Lowe’s Instagram post, explaining that an issue with their flight led them to take a 7-hour Uber ride from Phoenix to Albuquerque, in the middle of the night, to make Monday’s game. The ride cost them $683.52. Thanks at @AmericanAir for making @DanielVogelbach and I do this last night. #bebetter #havebettercustomerservice #Unbelievable pic.twitter.com/QlWoPgL5pw — D.J. Peterson (@DJPeterson) July 17, 2017 The players were lucky to… Read More
Seattle Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto has been around baseball for a lot of years, as a player and as an executive. He recognizes, that despite all the tech and data available today, that the game has remained largely unchanged for more than 140 years. But that doesn’t stop Dipoto and the Mariners from trying to implement new ways and new technologies to improve play. He discussed it all at Thursday’s GeekWire Sports Tech Summit. Whether it’s analysis of the spin rate on a pitched ball or the launch angle of a batter’s swing — using devices such as Trackman, Rapsodo… Read More
