This is the fourth installment in a five-part 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.
This story covers the acceptance and application of third-party technologies and new-age coaches by the MLB establishment.
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On a stifling hot day in July 2016, key members of the Houston Astros’ brain trust and the bat sensor company Blast Motion sought refuge in a conference room at Minute Maid Park. The Astros had been collecting data for a few months using Blast Motion’s technology but were still seeking actionable insights. The concept of tracking the hand speed and bath path of every swing had potential but was still largely a muddled mess.
Blast Motion’s lead biomechanist, Patrick Cherveny, had joined the company only a few months prior. Previously, he had worked as an innovation specialist at Callaway, the golf manufacturer, and gained experience with inertial sensors. But golf clubs have the benefit of a repeatable contact point—the club face. Baseball bats are often gripped with different orientations, can be rotated in the hands, and can connect with the baseball in varying locations.
Cherveny, however, was able to clean up and transform the data so the results, regardless of how a hitter gripped the bat, mimicked a consistent swing-plane coordinate system. And it was no small thing: Even upon making repeated contact at a certain location in the strike zone, batters may have swung on very different trajectories to get there because of the variances in body types, stances and mechanics. Blast emphasizes granular 4-D forces and accelerations—that is, the compilation of 3-D motions tracked over time—so that it really measures the coordination and control patterns of athletes.
The pivotal takeaway: what had appeared as squiggly data lines to the Astros could now be converted into metrics such as plane, connection and rotation.
“Once that transformation took place and we broke down exactly what each coordinate measured,” says Justin Goltz, Blast Motion’s director of MLB sales, “you could definitely see the ‘light bulb moment’ happening in the room, and a lot of deeper questions started to take place.”
The Astros had undergone a more exaggerated rebuild than any club in recent history to make the postseason in 2015, their first playoff appearance in a decade—a span of ineptitude that included having the worst record in baseball three straight seasons, from 2011 to ’13. Under general manager Jeff Luhnow, the franchise’s data-driven plan eventually produced 101 wins in 2017 and a World Series championship. The Astros scored 896 runs that season, the most of any major league club in 11 years. They also finished second in the American League with 238 home runs while striking out the fewest times, an unheard-of pairing. The Astros won 103 games in ’18, and Houston’s minor league affiliates have enjoyed similar splits and winning percentages over the past few years.
“If you listen to hitting instructors, you will hear ‘bat speed,’ ‘bat path,’ ‘in-plane,’ ‘time in the hitting zone,’ and all these things are important,” says Sig Mejdal, an assistant GM for the Baltimore Orioles who previously led the Astros’ analytics department. “This tool now reveals, and quantifies, the specifics of all those things and does it at a rate that a human being can’t reproduce. Our visual and observation systems are only so good.”
The Astros’ collaboration with Blast Motion is but one case study that highlights the acceptance and application of new technology in the big leagues. Such success stories require a trailblazing partner and a commitment to working through impediments in the early stages. “Looking back, the need for collaboration on both sides with the Astros was necessary,” Goltz says.
The Astros’ R&D unit, which is headquartered at Minute Maid Park in the staff-proclaimed Nerd Cave, had sought out the raw data from Blast Motion, but other clubs looked at Goltz sideways, telling him, “This isn’t going to work for anybody but Houston.” So Blast harnessed machine learning to develop more of their own metrics, which, building upon the Astros’ success, led to greater adoption. Houston was Blast’s only MLB client in 2016, but five clubs signed on for 2017. After the Astros beat the Dodgers in that year’s World Series, Blast began working with 16 MLB teams in 2018 and now 21 in 2019. Many of the other organizations use Diamond Kinetics’ competing product.
Bat sensors are now being used across baseball in conjunction with other technologies—including the K-Motion wearable vest, Edgertronic high-speed cameras, 4D Motion’s biomechanics motion capture, and batted-ball trackers such as HitTrax and Rapsodo—to rethink how hitters hit.
“They’re revealing the signature of the swing and the body to a degree that just didn’t exist,” Mejdal says. “They’re revealing what was previously invisible.”
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One major league club recently drafted a player who was known to have poor bat speed because he’d been tracked swinging a bat affixed with a Diamond Kinetics sensor on the knob. The rationale for drafting him: Though the barrel lagged through the hitting zone, the device identified above-average hand speed, suggesting untapped potential.
In modern baseball, such a player can be worth a late draft pick under the assumption that the organization’s player development program can improve the inefficiency. In the past, all a scout could see was a poorly hit ball and, with an especially trained eye, some indication that the bat speed wasn’t great. That wasn’t a player worth drafting, no matter how great his raw athleticism.
The old way of scouting, says Diamond Kinetics co-founder and CEO C.J. Handron, was “only measuring the outcomes.” But by measuring and understanding an athlete’s process, small problems can be addressed without having to totally reinvent players’ swings. “The ability to generate speed with the hands, and even very likely the ability to accelerate the bat, is there,” Handron says. “Why isn’t the barrel speed following? That’s where you can start to get into rotation and functional motion and movement.”
Development needs to be individualized. When former big-league catcher Don Slaught started his video platform, RightView Pro, one of his early objectives was to record slow-motion clips of All-Stars to serve as blueprints for younger hitters to emulate. Now a part of OnBaseU’s progressive coaching program, Slaught has revised his understanding of what to teach. “RightView Pro started with, ‘All the best hitters do this, this and this,’ ” he says. “The new philosophy with OnBaseU is, ‘There’s a million ways to hit, but there is one efficient way that every hitter can hit. And that’s based on what his body can do.’ ”
OnBaseU, an offshoot of the Titleist Performance Institute co-founded by Dr. Greg Rose, offers clinics to hitting coaches, strength coaches and trainers to unify the language presented to an athlete. Dr. Sean Drake, a performance director for both TPI and OnBaseU, likens an athlete to a race car. The coach is driving the car and needs to consult four dials: technical skills, physical aptitude, mental approach and equipment.
“What we say is there’s an infinite number of ways of swinging a bat or pitching a ball,” Drake says, “but there’s one efficient way for your athlete to do it and it’s based upon what he can physically do.”
The OnBaseU protocol starts with a basic screening to see what physical limitations a hitter might have. Slaught says they seek evidence of 13 known inhibitors that take away from power, contact, and the ability to adjust to speeds and locations. While there are some ideal principles governing the swing, each hitter has a unique stance, body type, flexibility and other traits that facilitate his abilities.
Through these assessments, coaches sometimes will identify swing inefficiencies. Other times, a batter might be kinematically efficient within their physical constraints, which begs a question: “Do we want to change the swing?” Drake says. “Or do we allow him to continue what he’s doing based on the efficiency and that he’s actually doing things the best way he can right now?” (Such discussions bring to mind what Chris Welch, the founder of biomechanical analysis company Zenolink, says about technology in sports: “It’s funny because it always starts off as a player development thing, but it almost always quickly turns to scouting. Everyone realizes, ‘Well, this is great that we can develop players, but why don’t we just pick them better?’ ”)
Using motion capture and K-Motion vest technologies, OnBaseU personnel can trace the transfer of energy as hitters generate force and isolate the problem areas for each athlete. Regular use of the wearable device can chart a player’s progress in addressing his weaknesses, or memorialize a player’s mechanics when he’s at his best. Having such reference points can hasten a return to form during future slumps. Says Reds assistant hitting coach Donnie Ecker, “Player development will hopefully be shortened down in terms of the time we’re spending and used in a more optimal fashion.”
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Jason Ochart started playing college baseball in 2009 at Glendale Community College, where he was named second-team all-conference, before transferring to San Francisco State and finishing at Vanguard University. At that middle stop in San Francisco, his playing career took a downturn that did not portend his future as an acclaimed hitting instructor.
“I was turned into a pitcher because I was such a bad hitter, ironically,” says Ochart, who is now the Philadelphia Phillies’ minor league hitting coordinator. “That’s where it started—I started to wonder why I was so bad. I think it’s a pretty common story when you talk to these new-age hitting coaches. A lot of them hit rock-bottom early as players, so they started asking questions. I was certainly one of those guys.”
Some of Ochart’s early analysis mirrored the work that Slaught did with RightView Pro—gleaning lessons from the game’s best—except he used YouTube clips of Manny Ramirez and Albert Pujols. But Ochart also earned a degree in kinesiology from Vanguard; following a capstone project that analyzed movement in volleyball frame by frame and joint by joint, he embarked on his own version for the baseball swing.
His own research helped his hitting career rebound at Vanguard. Afterward, Ochart worked as an assistant coach at Menlo College and continued his search for answers. He shared many of his findings with the robust #HittingTwitter community, which caught the attention of Kyle Boddy, the founder of the Driveline Baseball training facility in greater Seattle. That was his springboard to an MLB organization.
New technology has enabled new analysis, told mostly by new messengers. Some pro hitting coaches, including the L.A. Dodgers’ Robert Van Scoyoc and a number of minor league coordinators, were independent instructors not long ago. Of the 30 MLB clubs, 23 have changed hitting coaches within the last two years. That cohort reflects a new breed with new job titles and responsibilities, with many of the posts requiring detailed knowledge about technology. (When quality assurance coach Dustin Lind joined the Seattle Mariners, for instance, his chief role was overseeing the use of the K-Motion vest.) Only five MLB hitting coaches have at least three years’ tenure.
A Sports Illustrated analysis last fall found that the average age of new major league hitting coach hires was 10 years younger (42.3) than the men they replaced (53.0). There are 11 with no MLB playing experience and another six with less than half a season. Many received advanced education from the classroom rather than just the ballfield. Cardinals hitting coach Jeff Albert, for example, has a master’s degree in kinesiology from Louisiana Tech in addition to a decade of pro coaching experience.
The outsiders are becoming insiders. The California-based training center of private hitting instructor Craig Wallenbrock, who is now a consultant for the Dodgers, has fostered several bright young coaches: Van Scoyoc, Chicago White Sox hitting analytics instructor Matt Lisle, Dodgers hitting strategist Brant Brown, and Seattle Mariners hitting coach Tim Laker, a veteran player and coach who has spent off-seasons collaborating with the others.
A former NAIA pitcher at Patten University, Lisle was an assistant college softball coach two years ago—similar to Ochart, it was hardly a harbinger of what was to come. His advantage, Lisle says with a laugh, is that he was always “a huge computer/math nerd.” Wallenbrock later mentored him, and Lisle cultivated a baseball following, both online and with big leaguers such as the Mariners’ Mitch Haniger and the Dodgers’ Joc Pederson. Less than 10 years ago, Lisle was alternately couch-surfing and sleeping in his car but, by 2016, he had laid out $22,000 for his own HitTrax “probably against my wife’s knowing or wishes.” In his new role with the White Sox, Lisle says, “My job is to be the bridge between the analytics department and the coaches.”
Similarly, there’s been a league-wide emphasis in ensuring that the data collected from all these new devices is applied properly. For their part, the tech vendors understand that it’s incumbent upon them to simplify the presentation of this information.
“Our goal is to enable them to digest it without having to have a degree in physics,” says Diamond Kinetics co-founder Buddy Clark.
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Dr. Marcus Elliott, a Harvard-trained physician and the founder of the Peak Performance Project biomechanics lab in Santa Barbara, Calif., was the first sports science director in the NFL (with the New England Patriots, 1999-2002) and in MLB (with the Seattle Mariners, 2010-2013). P3 now devotes much of its energy toward analyzing movement among NBA players.
“With an NBA club, all of the decision-makers can sit around my dining room table,” Elliott says. “When I took over sports science and performance for the Seattle Mariners, they introduced me to the organization, and all the key people of the organization filled up the infield.”
To his point, baseball franchises are sprawling entities—coaches, trainers, scouts and analysts support the team at a half-dozen levels—and can often by stricken by inertia. “Of the sports we’ve worked in, baseball is the most historically dogma-driven,” says Elliott, who is also part of the OnBaseU faculty. “In some ways, that’s compelling. It’s part of the romanticism of the game, but it leaves a lot of inefficiencies.”
As recently as three years ago, HitTrax co-founder Tom Stepsis was giving a demonstration of his product to an MLB organization in which the divide between the analytics department and the coaches was literal. “They stood separated within the same room that we were in,” Stepsis says. “They did not want to talk to each other. It was a little uncomfortable, actually.”
When discussing how HitTrax’s computer vision system could produce advanced metrics, Stepsis saw the stats guys nod. When offering thoughts on how that applied to mechanics, he saw the coaches nod. That club, incidentally, became a customer a year later, and Stepsis has seen most organizations build a more collaborative culture in which both sides are “working more in harmony now than they used to be.”
All teams employ technology to varying extents, with most of the work being done at the minor league level. Laker says the Mariners organization can give devices more of a “trial run” in the farm system because older players tend to be more hesitant. The tech vendors have noted a change in their points of contact at MLB organizations. Diamond Kinetics’ Handron, for instance, says analytics directors used to make inquiries as they collected more data. Now, the requests generally come from player development and baseball operations as the field moves from understanding the data to applying it.
“There’s definitely some value in showing guys the right way to generate some [power]. If the end goal is a little bit misconstrued or misunderstood, some of that can lead you down a little bit of a rocky path,” Twins catcher Jason Castro says, adding: “There are wrong ways to create lift and launch angle, and there are right ways to do it, so there’s definitely a fine line on how it’s used.”
Yankees hitting coach Marcus Thames, who played 10 years and slugged 115 career homers from 2002 to ’11, notes that many of the organization’s younger minor leaguers are already well versed with the sport’s new technology, having used it in high school, college or travel ball. The onus is on player development to ensure the best match of device and prospect to maximize the benefit.
“You can really dissect it well now,” Thames says. “There’s super slow-mo video, and some of the K-Vest stuff and the Diamond Kinetics, you hook that up to a computer and show the hitter, ‘This is you.’ ”
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