Miami Marlins strength and conditioning coach Kevin Barr has been working in professional baseball for 25 years. During this time, the prerequisites to reach the sport’s highest levels—and stay there—have evolved. More than ever before, MLB clubs are selecting hitters based on home run potential and pitchers on fastball velocity. Training for those physical traits, however, can exhaust the body in ways that’s incompatible with the sport’s grueling schedule.
That’s certainly the case for the 162-game big league slate and increasingly true for the long travel ball itineraries played by teenagers.
Barr is longtime friends with pro ballplayers Ben and Andy Ford, the sons of Perfect Game founder Jerry Ford, and that connection enabled him to collaborate with the youth baseball showcase organization in its new partnership with the technology platform Re-Play Athletics. The soon-to-be released app, Perfect Game Development, uses machine learning to craft personalized training programs for athletes based on more than 800 fitness exercises and routines. An AI-powered chatbot makes inputting information an interactive experience.
BATS TO THE FUTURE: ‘You Can Fight Technology. You Won’t Win’
“The game prioritizes power and speed probably at the highest emphasis that it’s been in my career,” says Barr, who led the team developing the training programs. “You can’t train at high-intensity levels year-round and still play this game year-round. That’s always been true, but I think now it’s forced the issue and that’s where you see the training has gotten way more aggressive at the lower levels. The trade-off is the injuries.”
Re-Play founder Alan Discount has a teenage son whose passion is baseball. When he started coaching his son, he found a deficit in training education and tools. Discount has been a C-suite executive for multiple companies—including Vallon, a dot-com startup that he sold to IBM in 2000—and turned to technology to attack the problem.
“The biggest challenge that I found in coaching was [what] everybody talked about—how do you develop players?” Discount says. “And nobody really knew what that meant. Everybody had a different process. With the advent of travel ball getting bigger and more popular, coaches and even parents had developed a win-at-all-costs mindset. I started to see athletes pushed to their outer limits at times when perhaps they shouldn’t have—coaches really didn’t know better.”
NEW VIEW: You Only Have to Come Up for Air With These AR Swimming Goggles
Ultimately, the app can help connect athletes with goods and services. By knowing the player’s training program and game schedule, it can learn to suggest appropriate training equipment or even accommodations for an upcoming travel ball tournament out of state.
Perfect Game Development has an open API to collect data from a wide array of sources to further enrich the training guidance it can provide. Discount says he is talking to sensor and wearable companies about potential partnerships.
“The average athlete and even most coaches really wouldn’t know what to do with that information,” he says. “So we can take that, create a set of rules and algorithms that allow us to kind of map that to specific needs, and then map those needs to specific exercises that elicit the right behaviors in the athlete.”
Perfect Game’s core value is in helping players improve to the next level, whether that be making a high school team or getting drafted by an MLB club.
NEXT GEN: Zebra Technologies Renews NFL Player-Tracking Deal
“What we are at our heart is an exposure company,” says Perfect Game CEO Brad Clement, “and to help the athletes develop, we just knew that there was more that we could offer.”
Many industry insiders have speculated that baseball being played increasingly year-round has contributed to injuries, particularly among pitchers. Barr says it’s important to strike a balance between gaining sport-specific skills and developing a wide range of motion. Specializing in one sport too soon can rob youngsters of key athletic development. “They’re missing some key movement building blocks, which they never get back,” he says. “But they have very high skill components from all the baseball reps they’ve had.”
The app aims to provide what Barr calls “building blocks of movement patterns” to create durability and work capacity—in appropriate intervals. Barr says the best way to avoid fatigue during the long baseball season is to build a strong and powerful base of muscle, but that training also induces fatigue, of course, creating a “chicken and egg” conundrum. “Rest is imperative,” Barr says.
BIG AIR: Skydiving Helps Skateboarder Stick the X Games Landings
Discount says the app will eschew cutting-edge training programs for more widely trusted and accepted best practices. The data it collects could also help college coaches and pro scouts track athletes.
“Now we could start creating a projection or a trajectory of where that athlete is going to end up with respect to each of the key criteria that scouts would want to track,” Discount says. “We really think this is a big game-changer in the future for things like winning scholarships or contract negotiations.”
Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at talkback@sporttechie.com