The elite high school prospects participating in the inaugural Prospect Development Pipeline series of showcases and tournaments — a collaboration of USA Baseball and Major League Baseball — will have access to advanced tracking metrics thanks to a new partnership with Rapsodo.
While TrackMan radars are installed at all 30 major league ballparks, as well as many minor league and college stadiums, Rapdoso’s portable devices will now offer the same velocity, movement, spin and other data to evaluators scouting the teenage players for the draft.
“The feeling is pretty strong with Rapsodo that, eventually, this data is going to become available to everybody,” Rapsodo’s general manager of North America, Art Chou, said. “It’s going to be a currency that pitchers are going to need to know, whether it’s at the major league level or the junior high level.”
Chou added, “The accessibility opens up the idea that, now, all pitchers at every level can get to know what their data is. Pretty soon it’s going to become a [standard] piece of scouting information.”
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Rapsodo uses a combination of radar and optical tracking technology whose accuracy rates favorably with TrackMan, according to tests run by Driveline Baseball, a data-driven pitcher training incubator. A half-dozen big league clubs have purchased units, mostly for their spring training facilities (which double as in-season centers for development and rehab). Chou said one club had dispatched the Rapsodo devices to outfit their international scouts for a “commonality of the evaluation.” The use of the monitors at PDP events will aid domestic scouts and crosscheckers in their comparisons between the vast universe of draft-eligible high school and college. players
Rapsodo made its PDP debut with its pitching monitors in early June. Those devices are not for in-game use but are set up behind the catcher for bullpen sessions. Its hitting monitors use the same technology but require a different hardware solution and will be distributed soon, Chou said; those devices can sit either in back of home plate or about 15 feet in front of the plate with protective covering.
While hitting terms such as exit velocity and launch angle have permeated the daily discourse at the major league level thanks to MLB’s TrackMan-powered Statcast, Rapsodo hopes the accessibility of its devices could do the same for comparable pitching metrics like spin efficiency.
“That’s something we’re focused on — figuring out a way that we can help to educate the community in baseball as well as softball about what their numbers are,” Rapsodo marketing manager Tipper O’Brien said.
So much data is being collected for every pitch that analysts and coaches are still trying to hone in on what’s most important, many of whom are focusing in on varying segments of the data sets.
“Based on the conversations that we’re having, we’re learning a little bit more about the product from all the beta testers that we’ve used, from the initial sales,” O’Brien said. “Different folks are using the tools in different ways.”