This is the fifth and final installment in our series examining how swing biomechanics and the proliferation of technological tools are helping hitters.
- Part 1 explored the history of this field and the origin of a few key devices.
- Part 2 looked at newly emphasized swing traits and how they’re being applied.
- Part 3 examined the mental aspects of hitting and the visual cues that batters must look for while in the box.
- Part 4 covered the acceptance and application of third-party technologies and new-age coaches by the MLB establishment.
This story casts an eye toward the future of hitting and baseball technology.
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A major league club sent its superstar to Dr. Greg Rose’s biomechanics lab at the Titleist Performance Institute last year for a motion capture analysis. When time came a few swings, the hitter, whom Rose describes as a top five player in the sport, asked to borrow a bat. Rose was astonished: “If Rickie Fowler showed up without his clubs, we wouldn’t be doing anything. That would never happen in golf.”
A hitter is nothing without his bat, yet its selection is often done by feel or whim. Maximizing force and pressure through the hands in contact with the bat, however, is relatively low-hanging fruit for improvement. “The area that is just the most shocking to me,” says Rose, “is that there’s no bat fitting, no shoe fitting, no glove fitting. It’s just people’s opinions on what feels good … it’s shocking what we can do to increase your exit velocity and launch angle by fitting you in the proper equipment.”
Bat manufacturers are beginning to develop more sophisticated bat-fitting programs, a step that Rose says can “revolutionize hitting.” He estimates that 70% of the players he tests aren’t even wearing the proper size shoes, which can inhibit ground reaction force. That, too, is a part of the game where he sees an inefficiency. A co-founder of the coaching certification program OnBase University, Rose is among several coaches and medical practitioners who are now emphasizing the use of force plates to optimize power production in the swing.
Baseball has always been a numbers game, its stats archiving the results of every at bat and telling the history of the sport. But the proliferation of modern technology has created new metrics that give us insights into the process of how baseball is played, right down to granular components of swings. From where we stand in the batter’s box now, we can glimpse the future of the game—and it’s approaching faster than ever.
“It’s a great time to be in baseball,” Rose says. “And I say this to the old guard: You can fight technology. You won’t win. It’s evolve or move on. It’s like a tidal wave coming through. There is no bad data. There’s just bad interpretation of data, and there’s the unwillingness to learn new data.”
PART 1: The Unlikely Origin of Baseball’s Launch Angle Revolution
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PART 2: Major League Baseball Will Be Decided by Swing States
The digital hitting revolution was fully realized two weeks ago on the South Side of Chicago. An otherwise nondescript exhibition game on a Thursday night played by 15-year-olds marked the first so-called “Smart Game” in which every player movement was captured by technology. Bertec force plates lined the batter’s boxes at the Kroc Center baseball field. Rapsodo trackers cataloged every pitch and hit. K-Motion vests detailed body rotations. Blast Motion bat sensors registered every swing.
Justin Stone, a biokinematic hitting consultant for the Chicago Cubs and president of Chicago’s tech-infused Elite Baseball training center, organized the July 25 game. This pilot experiment pitted one of Elite’s travel ball clubs against a White Sox-sponsored Amateur City Elite (ACE) team, but Stone anticipates MLB organizations replicating the test on back fields during next year’s spring training.
“Unanswered questions eat me alive, and they consume me. I want to find out those answers,” says Stone, a former hitting instructor in the White Sox Training Academy who also advises a few sports tech companies. “That’s why we are churning ahead with unique ideas like the Smart Game. It’s not just to do something that nobody else has done before. It’s: what can we learn that nobody has known before?” (He plans to divulge his full conclusions from the Smart Game experiment at a later date but said that nothing immediately surprised him.)
The effort, however, was onerous. The logistical challenge included 15 devices (eight computers and seven smartphones and tablets) collecting inputs via bluetooth as well as 17 technicians monitoring the data flow and troubleshooting as necessary. Imagine the task for an MLB organization to mirror the feat with a half-dozen minor league affiliates and a player development complex in addition to any big league needs.
Capturing and syncing data at such a scale would require collaboration with outside companies, says Diamond Kinetics CEO C.J. Handron, for the sake of coaches to “simplify the mental bandwidth required to use this technology.”
“For efficiency gains for everybody,” adds Blast Motion’s MLB lead, Justin Goltz, “integration is probably going to be inevitable.”
Much of baseball’s innovations have already come from third parties, with unaffiliated training centers such as Driveline Baseball, Elite Baseball, 108 Performance, Baseball Rebellion and others serving as think tanks and incubators for MLB. They help pair athletes and technology when there are inefficiencies. Some MLB clubs have even hired analytic liaisons—often recently retired players or independent gurus steeped in the latest tech—to serve as a bridge between the front office and the clubhouse.
Stone and others expect the outsider hiring frenzy to continue because coaches within organizations don’t have the time to conduct the same kind of research while preparing players for nightly games. “Generally we’re finding that major league organizations are not providing the player development tools that the players want or need,” says Jason Sherwin, the founder and CEO of deCervo, a neuroscience company that makes uHIT, a cognitive gaming app for batters. “That demand and that mismatch are creating some very interesting market dynamics.”
Further research into what metrics best project performance and identify inefficiencies could lead to a consolidation of that market—especially when baseball’s technological boon moves from the practice fields to the game fields.
While TrackMan radars are nearly universal in professional baseball for batted-ball data, few other technologies are allowed during games. None of the wearable devices that MLB has sanctioned for use during big league games are hitting-centric. Bat sensors are permitted only in minor league games. When it comes to tracking data in practice, many clubs have chosen to build their own statistical platform and dashboards—not only for lack of a universal system but also because of their own particular focuses.
“You can fight technology. You won’t win,” Rose says. “It’s evolve or move on. It’s like a tidal wave coming through. There is no bad data. There’s just bad interpretation of data, and there’s the unwillingness to learn new data.”
“They’re analyzing the data in a very specific way for their team,” says HitTrax co-founder Tom Stepsis. “Early on, we tried to create some customization for certain organizations’ needs, and it turned out to be a little bit futile because everyone wanted something different.”
HitTrax calculates its batted-ball data through computer vision, just as KinaTrax does for pitching biomechanics and ChyronHego does for all player movement in the Statcast system. Another camera-based system, Hawk-Eye, is under consideration by MLB to replace the TrackMan radar that executes Statcast’s ball tracking. “My hope is that, eventually, we’ll get to a place where wearables are not required,” says White Sox hitting analytics instructor Matt Lisle. “Someone will invent some type of camera system that allows you to get all the data from the K-Vest and the Blast sensors without having to actually wear anything.”
“Ultimately where it needs to go is in-game data—get away from assessing a one-off and start getting actual data of performance,” says Ben Hansen, the VP of biomechanics and innovation at Motus. “That’s going to give us a lot more information than having someone set up a tee or front toss or live BP. The detail is really in pitch location and getting a batter when they’re off-balance.”
PART 3: You See the Ball, You Hit the Ball, You Got It?
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PART 4: How Outsiders Became the Ultimate MLB Insiders
There is no doubt, as Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow says, that “we’re now starting to see a much deeper understanding of the swing.” What may be more striking is the broader understanding of the swing. This is an era of democratization and accessibility. More affordable, more automated technology is enabling more players and coaches at all levels to track every component of the kinematic sequence and how bats are being swung to make contact with balls. But we don’t yet have a complete understanding of how science alone can teach players to become more consistent, more powerful hitters.
“The data has to become meaningful,” says independent hitting coach Bobby Tewksbary, who believes a holistic view is necessary rather than the current snippets and snapshots being produced by scattershot systems. “They’re numbers, so you have to convert all this data into actual feels or ‘swing thoughts’ that help hitters perform in games … the current data set is wildly incomplete for hitters. All of the data has to be player-centric, and it’s not right now.”
“If you keep missing the ball, it’s pretty useless,” adds Rob Neal, the CEO at Golf BioDynamics who has consulted with MLB teams in applying K-Motion vest data. “I’ve got the most efficient swing in the world, but I can’t hit the ball. You’ve got to marry these things together. Ultimately, the technologies are better combined than they are [separate] at the moment.”
ROBOT UMPIRES: You Can’t Argue with Technology
The notion of an ideal swing path is overstated, not only because each hitter will have his own optimal version but also because of the obvious—not every pitch is thrown at the same speed, to the same location, with the same spin or the same break. This is an area where former American Sports Medicine Institute researcher Dave Fortenbaugh began making inroads, but much more work remains.
“Where I think the next level of that is going—and this is a place of great interest for us—as you get into really understanding how individual a player’s swing is and starting to map that against pitch types and pitch locations and strengths and weaknesses of the swing,” Handron says. “It’s not as simple as ‘the swing path and plane’ as if every ball was on a tee in the middle of the plate.”
Regardless of pitch complexities, players often average vastly different exit velocities and launch angles depending on whether they are pulling the ball or hitting it to the opposite field. Driveline Baseball, for one, built its own bespoke system integrating the various technologies to glean actionable information. “We can look at heat maps of batted ball profiles—how well guys hit the ball to different fields, at different launch angles, based on different pitch locations, heights, widths, and depths, to see if a hitter is able to maintain quality contact through a wide range of contact depths,” says Jason Ochart, Driveline’s director of hitting and the Philadelphia Phillies’ hitting coordinator.
At its St. Petersburg-area biomechanics lab, Motus tested a number of Astros and Yankees hitters, building mechanical equivalence models for prospects and following their progress as they ascended through the minor league ranks. Essentially, Motus built and cultivated a projection system based on game stats and biomechanical data. “That was the first time we started pairing ball-flight data with the actual biomechanical body data,” Hansen says. “We started to see really interesting things, like mechanics that correlate to exit velocity or certain locations in the strike zone—for instance, a ball low-and-in [requires] different mechanics than a ball low-and-away or high-and-away.”
Neal, the golf biomechanist, recently visited the Chicago Cubs for a training session and likened the various baseball swings—at high and low pitches, for instance—to a golfer’s driver and wedge shots. “Perhaps the most important difference is that, predominantly in baseball, you’re trying to make every swing as hard as you can,” he says, also noting the importance of lead foot placement and the timing of lateral and rotational movements in addition to the energy they generate.
Michael Bentley, who runs the Paradigm Performance Group in California and previously led development of K-Motion and Blast Motion, has a prediction for a third golf-related technology that will become a staple in baseball: force plates, just like the ones used on the South Side of Chicago. Early measurement in ground forces in baseball dates back to Chris Welch’s biomechanics research published in 1995. Dr. Marcus Elliott, the founder of the Peak Performance Project, used them while working with the Seattle Mariners a decade ago. But larger adoption has lagged until recently.
DOWN THE PIKE: The Top Tech Storylines of the 2019 MLB Season
Visual preparation is also gaining in popularity, with vision-training apps like Vizual Edge and virtual reality helping batters hone their pitch recognition. Former Rockies general manager and chairman of WinR, Dan O’Dowd, says the evolution of VR hardware will improve the video capture and transfer to the programs, as well as reduce the cost for downstream markets beyond MLB.
“We developed this based upon a lot of my frustrations in trying to replicate game-speed training applications,” says O’Dowd, who is also an MLB Network analyst. “The way we did our advance [scouting] reports at the big-league level were both antiquated and unproductive. I believe this type of technology is going to continue to get better and better.”
More work remains, of course. Not just in collecting the data, but in turning it into actionable guidelines and advice. “They’re measuring a lot now, but I question how much we actually know for sure,” says Cardinals hitting coach Jeff Albert. And Reds assistant hitting coach Donnie Ecker adds, “There’s things we know now that, a year from now, are going to prove to be only half-credible because something new is going to tell us something deeper. What we know today is fluid.”
- PART 1: The Unlikely Origin of Baseball’s Launch Angle Revolution
- PART 2: Major League Baseball Will Be Decided by Swing States
- PART 3: You See the Ball, You Hit the Ball, You Got It?
- PART 4: How Outsiders Became the Ultimate MLB Insiders
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