Announced earlier this year, Rapsodo Baseball is a now pitch training solution that has recently added several new features and capabilities. A product that wants to make professional-level pitch analysis available to all levels of baseball, Rapsodo Baseball is designed to help coaches, trainers and athletes to better understand pitch performance through reliable statistics captured by a single accurate, affordable and compact tool.
Rapsodo’s founder, Batuhan Okur, explained that Rapsodo Baseball “is a proprietary combination of radar and camera for high speed imaging. What makes this product unique is that this combination allows for a smaller product, and thus a device that is lightweight, portable and easy to set up. These precision technologies work together to capture the most accurate pitch data. Rapsodo has elaborated targeted algorithms to map the data specifically to baseball pitching.”
Since its initial announcement of the product, Rapsodo has received feedback from beta testing partners that helped inspire the latest iteration, which has just become available for purchase. According to Seth Daniels, Director of Sales at Rapsodo, this process allowed the team to assess which features would be most useful to users and add them to the solution.
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Daniels discussed some of the new features added to Rapsodo Baseball––starting with a new video analysis capability. The device’s accompanying iPad application can record video of a pitcher from any angle, which is automatically cropped to show the mechanics of the pitch. The data is then instantly overlaid on the video and becomes available to view just seconds after a pitch is thrown, enabling fast video replay and review so that a pitcher’s mechanics can be assessed in more detail. After recording a pitch, the live session can continue, saving the recorded pitches for review at any time.
Rapsodo Baseball is now available! Place your order today at https://t.co/oqSDAkV5IR and get 3 months free of cloud! #PitchData pic.twitter.com/YKuI7P9AVi
— Rapsodo (@rapsodo) November 21, 2016
The video analysis can also save real-time coaches’ comments—both verbal and written— allowing for reexamination of key takeaways from a particular bullpen session. Here, the coaches have the opportunity to indicate positives and negatives during a specific pitch, while a pitcher simultaneously reviews the video.
Pitch Type is another new feature within the solution. Daniels explained that this metric allows users to save and review a dataset of pitches. The software can track the athlete’s pitch selection (fastball, curveball, slider, etc.) and store that data by pitch type. By organizing this information based on pitch type, all video and data of a specific category of pitch can be reviewed together, making the data more useful.
Going a step further than the traditionally tracked “Total Spin” or RPM’s of a pitch that the solution tracks, Rapsodo Baseball can now also collect new spin related data through its True Spin and Spin Efficiency features.
The revolutions per minute (RPM) of a pitch is often cited when analyzing a pitch––including the top and back spin, side spin, and rifle spin. Those three components of a spin can be measured to find the Total Spin – a metric that details the exact amount of rotations per minute a baseball has once thrown from the pitcher’s mound to home plate.
Realizing that the Total Spin metric doesn’t exactly tell the entire story of a pitch, the Rapsodo Baseball team has developed a way to measure the True Spin of a pitch. The True Spin feature removes the rifle spin component of a pitch, leaving only the elements that depict exactly how efficiently a ball spun through the air.
“Rifle spin correlates to zero movement on the pitch, so in order for a pitcher to be most efficient in making a ball move, there needs to be minimal spin of this kind,” Daniels explained. “True Spin is calculated by removing rifle spin from the equation and analyzing the remaining top/backspin and sidespin, which are what truly enable the vertical and horizontal movement of a pitch.”
Spin Efficiency is another new metric measured by the product. This measurement is calculated using the difference between the Total Spin and True Spin of a pitch. For certain pitches, Spin Efficiency should be high––like a fastball, which is typically thrown with large amounts of backspin (equating to an extremely high Spin Efficiency – often in the mid to upper 90’s). A slider, on the other hand, has a lot of rifle spin, lowering the Spin Efficiency.
Having these kinds of analytics allows coaches, trainers, and pitchers to understand how and why a pitch is moving in certain ways. If a certain type of pitch isn’t showing ideal statistics, they can examine the metrics to identify adjustments that can be made to improve the pitch.
Daniels also mentioned that the raw data gathered is visually represented in a way that lets users easily review this complex information and draw key conclusions from it. The data collected by Rapsodo Baseball can provide evidence about elements that need to be changed in a particular pitch and acts as a feedback tool for coaches and trainers.
Since Rapsodo Baseball’s initial announcement in January 2016, the company has partnered with a variety of beta testers around the country––including Driveline Baseball, Texas Baseball Ranch, Florida Baseball Ranch, K-Zone Academy, Sandlot Elite, Xavier University, Nebraska, in addition to other universities and pitch academies.
During the beta testing phase, there were new iterations of the product almost on a weekly basis. Daniels said, “The updates were tested in both indoor and outdoor environments––providing so much valuable feedback from our partners on elements they liked and areas they’d like to see improved.”
Rapsodo Baseball has stated that they will continue to gather user feedback in order to constantly make improvements to the product’s features and capabilities.
“The goal has always been to make a product that is as rock solid as possible, and then begin adding additional features,” Daniels said, describing Rapsodo’s process. “Continuing to add new capabilities to Rapsodo Baseball strengthens it as an analysis and training tool, rather than just a data collection product.”
According to Daniels, too many tools only collect data, but do not offer feedback––Rapsodo Baseball on the other hand, provides data typically only found in a Major League ballpark and then backs it up with visual feedback from the video and spin axis of the pitch.