Cleveland Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer first ordered an Edgertronic high-speed camera in August 2015, and he carried the small blue box device with him that winter to his offseason training facility, Driveline Baseball. His father, Warren, came along and was setting up the camera behind home plate for his son’s bullpen session when he started chatting to Driveline’s founder, Kyle Boddy.
“You know, if I show you the Edgertronic footage, you’re going to immediately buy one,” Warren Bauer told Boddy.
Edgertronics were cheap by high-speed camera standards but still cost more than $5,000 apiece, so Boddy demurred. Then, the camera started rolling. Even the very first clip taken to calibrate the resolution was convincing.
“I remember looking at a blurry clip, and as Trevor loves to say, I buried my head in my hands because I have to buy one right now,” Boddy said. “And I went and bought one that day. Because the level of detail—I immediately knew. I immediately knew this was going to take over baseball.”
Edgertronic has now become common around Major League Baseball, a tool utilized by analytically driven players and coaches. Its high-speed video captures movement at more than 1,000 frames per second. A full accounting of clubs using the cameras is impossible, as few openly discuss what they view as trade secrets. But the consensus is that the trailblazers in this field were the Houston Astros under general manager Jeff Luhnow and director of player development Pete Putila. (Luhnow declined to comment for this story.) Sports Illustrated reported during the Astros’ 2017 World Series title run that Astros ace Justin Verlander used the camera to tweak the positioning of his right hand when releasing his slider to devastating effect.
Clubs and coaches use the Edgertronic cameras to study both pitching and hitting mechanics, although pitchers have been more open about their utility. Bauer, for instance, uses the cameras as the starting point of his work fine tuning or designing new pitches to get a precise look at the baseball’s spin rate as its leaves his hand.
“The delivery happens so fast, and there’s subtleties in the delivery that the human eye just can’t pick up,” said an American League executive. “Many of the interesting ones are with the high-moving part, and the fastest part of the pitcher in the delivery is the end of his fingers, the end of his hand.”
Cleveland Indians' Trevor Bauer teamed up with Driveline Baseball to use tech to design his pitches.https://www.sporttechie.com/trevor-bauer-driveline-baseball-data-driven-pitch-design/
Posted by SportTechie on Monday, September 18, 2017
Baseball now represents 20 to 25 percent of Edgertronic’s market. But as popular as the cameras are becoming in the league, the technology’s use in the sport is “accidental,” said Sanstreak CEO Mike Matter, the inventor and producer of the Edgertronic.
Before MLB recognized its value, Matter said his camera had few repeat use cases other than university professors studying small animals like kangaroo rats or recording zebra fish. Other customers include those looking to debug production lines, record crash tests, or to take a closer look at how everyday objects, like a slinky, move. He has received inquiries from the Department of Defense, major industrial supplies, and farm equipment manufacturers.
“I expected to be surprised,” Matter said. “When I founded this company, I knew there was a latent demand for high-speed videos. I think some industrial applications like assembly lines and drop tests and all that story of stuff was obvious. But we had so many customers do so many weird things with our camera—and after they would explain it, it all made perfect sense, but not in a million years would I ever have dreamed that we would sell a camera to that market.”
Matter has a small team with just three full-time employees. Based in San Jose, he relies on Silicon Valley’s contract manufacturing. Only last month did Edgertronic release a software update with functionality specifically intended for baseball—a background mode that allows the continued capture of events that take place in intervals (such as baseball pitches) while rendering the high-fidelity videos.
The proliferation of high-speed video in cable TV shows such as Mythbusters piqued Matter’s interest back in 2011. At the time, the MIT-trained engineer was self-employed as a consultant but had an entrepreneurial interest. His background included work with high-speed photography and imaging as well as ultra-high-speed electronics.
“I was aware of what the cost of those cameras was, and I was also aware of what went into them,” Matter said. “The quandary I had was, ‘Why do these cameras cost so much?’ To be honest, and not very modest, I figured it was probably pretty bad engineering.”
His first unit, the SC1, started shipping in 2013 and cracked the baseball world around 2015. Even though Edgertronic now makes higher performing cameras, the SC1 remains the MLB industry standard. Matter describes that model as having the “minimum performance-level necessary to be interesting.”
“Human muscles don’t move that fast,” he added. “There’s a point when you don’t learn anything new.”
In other words, any faster frame rate would be redundant. Much of the early work was done via trial and error. Matter admitted he was not a baseball fan before the market stumbled upon him. He declined to discuss the identity of his customers as a corporate policy but said the regular calls from club officials all carried the same themes.
“Every time they’d call us up and say, ‘What do you recommend for a lens? What do we need for lighting? How far should the camera be? What frame rate?’ And we pretty much say, ‘Well, we don’t really know,’” Matter said, before adding: “By the time we had the second or third baseball team, it was pretty obvious everyone was doing the same.”
Free agent @DCarpenter29 back in and working on pitch design. Focus was on the slider this time. Goal was to shade it away from a cutter and add more lateral break. The cue we used was throw it like a curveball. By shifting his mindset, we caused a slight decrease in velo… pic.twitter.com/qtBgtdSPui
— Sam Briend (@SBriend97) January 29, 2019
The Edgertronic website now advises the particular model and features that those interested in baseball training should purchase, touting that they have “sold hundreds of this configuration to MLB teams.” The company recently sold out of three months’ worth of inventory in one day.
Teams are known to use the cameras in both training and in games. The AL executive said Edgertronic cameras were more useful in player development but have also been used in scouting. He added that players didn’t need convincing to use this new resource because they are already used to video. His own first impression, he said, “was for something so modern, it’s not very modern looking. It’s unsensational from your first glance. But when you look deeper, it definitely is.”
The name of the camera hails from an early pioneer in photography, Harold “Doc” Edgerton. An engineering professor at MIT for nearly 60 years, Edgerton popularized the use of the flash in photography and also developed sonar for use by famed undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau. Matter studied under Edgerton and worked in his lab in the early 1980s.
In one of his first interactions, Matter recalled, he was asked to fix a piece of equipment “that he somehow beg, borrowed, or stole from the DoD that had once been used to take pictures of some of the above-ground nuclear tests.” Edgerton developed the rapatronic camera in the 1940s, blending the words rapid and electronic together. Matter took a similar tack with his device, in honor of his mentor, from whom he received “the engineering equivalent of fatherly advice.”
A number of pitchers, such as Bauer and new Yankees reliever Adam Ottavino, have had great success after retooling their repertoire at Driveline under careful observation using the Edgertronic. Boddy is such a proponent that he equips four Edgertonic cameras at his facility and has a business relationship with Matter as an authorized reseller of the devices.
“It’s going to augment scouting in a big way, and that’s going to change how scouting’s done,” Boddy said. “The teams that are behind, man, they’re way behind.”