Baseball’s annual winter meetings, when the entire industry descends on one hotel for a week every December, are littered with chance encounters between insiders that can lead to trades, free-agent signings, or new partnerships. At last month’s event in Las Vegas, Driveline Baseball founder Kyle Boddy and KinaTrax president Steven Cadavid shared an elevator in the Mandalay Bay.
The two had met before, but the coincidental reconnection prompted Cadavid to suggest they should talk shop. Driveline Baseball is a leading training facility for baseball players known for its data-driven research and extensive use of technology. KinaTrax is a marker-less motion capture system used by four MLB organizations, including two of the last three World Series champions (the Cubs and Red Sox).
A follow-up phone call led to Cadavid taking a day trip to Driveline’s suburban Seattle facility, although “day trip” hardly captures the journey. Cadavid lives in Miami, so he flew diagonally across the U.S. in the morning, spent about three hours with Boddy, and then returned on a red-eye flight.
The long journey was productive, though. While in Seattle, Cadavid discussed a new partnership with Boddy: KinaTrax will install its camera-based system at Driveline, where the latter’s seven-member research and development department will lead a validation engineering study.
“This is a good step forward to just better understanding baseball and pitching and injury risk, and that’s why we wanted to do it,” Boddy said.
KinaTrax will install its system at the end of January. Cadavid said the standard arrangement uses eight tracking cameras, but some installations have as many as 16. This research will also allow his team to try new arrangements and potentially fewer cameras, too.
Boddy hoped the study would be finished by late summer and estimated that the sample would include up to 100 athletes from a variety of levels. There are pro pitchers training at Driveline now. When spring training begins, Driveline invites inner-city public high school programs in Seattle to bring pitchers in for free assessments. And then, in the summer, as many as 150 college athletes train each month.
“We will use our lab, versus their cameras, to do one-to-one comparisons,” Boddy said. “We know that our lab is sub-millimeter accurate, so we know that it’s extremely precise. And that’s great, but it requires you to be basically naked with a bunch of markers on you, and that’s not very practical. The question in my mind is, how far away is a marker-based system from [having] a uniform on and throwing?”
Boddy and Cadavid both indicated a willingness to openly publish the data. Boddy added that part of his interest in working with KinaTrax stemmed from a recommendation he received from Tom Kepple, the chief science officer at C-Motion, whose Visual 3D image-processing software is a staple of biomechanics labs. Boddy called Kepple “probably the best biomechanicist out there” and noted that Kepple, in turn, praised Cadavid as having as much integrity as any researcher he knows. “When Tom said that, it weighed a lot with me,” Boddy said.
Cadavid said he has two aspirations for the project. The first goal is validation against a marker-based system, which he said is the “gold standard” in biomechanics. The second hope is to review the data of the large sample size of Driveline athletes, which includes amateurs, to scale KinaTrax in the future.
“The goal is for that data that we collect to be used to train algorithms for a consumer-level system and then potentially use that for indoor environments,” Cadavid said.
Notably, KinaTrax’s first MLB client was the Rays, who play indoors at Tropicana Field, but a spacious domed stadium is a far different venue than a private training facility. The research done at Driveline will focus on pitching, but KinaTrax can now track hitting, too. Cadavid said there are 23 KinaTrax systems installed, 13 for pitching and 10 for hitting (in some cases, one of each in the same site). One new feature for this upcoming season will be that the pitching cameras will be able to track ball flight, offering comparable data to what big league ballparks can derive with Statcast.
In the past, KinaTrax required manual intervention to build models for new pitchers. In 2016, iMerit employees in Kolkata, India, became Cubs fans after assisting the work during the World Series season. Now, the algorithms are sufficiently trained that the system is completely automated. The work with Driveline will only refine the artificial intelligence and machine learning further.
“Kyle has the right mentality of trying to quantify [everything], data-driven results are a big part of what they do,” Cadavid said. “KinaTrax has the same mentality. We want to produce the best possible results for our customers.”
In fact, Boddy is so determined to get the data he desires that he was in the preliminary stages of having Driveline develop its own marker-less system for validation purposes. KinaTrax coming along saved him a lot of headaches.
“Let’s can this project. I’m super excited to not have to do that work,” Boddy said with a laugh. “That’s generally true about a lot of Driveline products. A lot of them are born just because no one else is doing them, but we’d rather someone else do them, to be completely honest.”