We went up to SmartKage headquarters in Tyngsboro, Mass., and put the sleeves on Nate, a local high school junior. We then fired up Motus Global’s bullpen mode – first in the new motusTHROW app, and then in the legacy mThrow app. At the app’s direction, Nate threw a mix of fastballs, curveballs, and changeups. A voice from the iPhone instructed him which pitch to throw, whether to throw from the windup or the stretch, and what part of the strike zone to aim for. Each of the two sessions consisted of 21 pitches, simultaneously tracked by SmartKage’s PITCHf/x system.
To date Baden Sports, the parent company of Axe Bat, says it has backed up these claims through ergonomic and biomechanical research. The most extensive study on their product, completed by a team at UCLA, exemplifies much of their support for these claims. You can read the results of that study as it applies to the claims above on their website here, and you can also read more details from the full study here.
We wanted to take it a step further though, performing an independent study in a real world setting. Specifically, we wanted to look at whether the Axe Bat stood up to the performance claims that they make.
Two of the systems — Motus Global‘s motusTHROW, which tracks workload and stress for pitchers, and Zephyr‘s BioHarness, a monitoring system that combines heart rate, respiration, and accelerometry — were approved for in-game use. Two bat sensor systems — Diamond Kinetics‘ SwingTracker and Easton‘s Power Sensor Motion by Blast — were approved for on-field use during events like batting practice, but not for use in-game. The approval also extends to minor-league games, according to Motus Global CEO Joe Nolan.
Just two months after the first prototype was shown to the public, sensor manufacturer Zepp unveiled a “smart bat” at an event at the Angels‘ spring training facility in Tempe last weekend.
The smart bat (officially the Mike Trout Old Hickory Smart Bat Powered by Zepp) features Zepp’s sensor integrated into the handle of an Old Hickory wood bat. The Tennesse-based bat manufacturer works with several MLB players, including Mike Trout, who worked with his two sponsors to help bring the smart bat to life.
Biomechanics lab and wearable sensor manufacturer Motus Global has expanded its offerings for baseball players over the winter. The Massapequa, N.Y.,-based company rolled out the mThrow last spring. This year, Motus Global will sell two systems: motusPRO, a full-body system available only to professional organizations, and motusBASEBALL, a single sensor system that provides feedback for both pitching and hitting.
Sixteen of the innovations presented were named Best of Show by a panel assembled by Collegiate Baseball. Among the winners were Diamond Kinetics for the BatFitter developed with DiMarini; HitTrax’s Video Capture and Analysis Module, combining video with their camera-based data capture and simulation system; Pocket Radar’s Pro Radar System, designed to integrate through a USB port; and the Radar Tee, which integrates Doppler radar into a hitting tee to measure swing speed and ball exit velocity.
Motus Global and Zepp announced new additions to their existing lineup of baseball-specific wearable devices at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
But there’s another way for teams to use technology to gain an edge: by keeping their best players healthy and in those big games. This requires a separate system, especially on large squads like football teams where it would be impractical to collect and process the amount of optical data needed to capture everyone’s movements across all activities. As a result, systems based on global positioning system (GPS) technology are used in practices and rehab by a wide range of teams across all major sports.
As hitters develop, their mechanics evolve over time into a swing that both shares many commonalities with other players and is unique to their own game. But tracking a player’s progress on that journey to a consistent swing has always been tricky. Scouting and video analysis can give players a sense of how repeatable their mechanics are, but these are expensive, time-consuming, and limited to players at the highest level, whom we would expect to already have the most consistent mechanics.
Enter technology. Technological developments, including inertial bat sensors and camera-based ball tracking systems, should make it possible to develop a quantitative measure of consistency readily available to a wider range of players, with a wider range of abilities. This will allow young hitters to better measure their progress while also giving scouts and coaches a tool to judge prospective players.
In this article, we look for a way to quantify that relationship between consistency and hitter quality. We measured over 1,500 individual swings from 25 hitters, ranging in age from Little Leaguers to NCAA Division 1 players. We also collected different kinds of swings from each hitter, having each player hit off a tee and a pitching machine, with the goal of hitting first for power and later for contact.
MLB teams use the fall instructional leagues (“instructs”) to try out new technologies they are considering purchasing. Organizations get to use their minor league talent as guinea pigs, rather than their stars. And tech companies get more access to players than they would during spring training or the regular season, when their schedules are much more regimented.
The result is a who’s who of baseball-related companies making their way to the Arizona and Florida. Over the past year, deCervo, Motus Global, SmartKage, andZepp all reported spending time at fall instructs, and that’s just the companies I’ve personally written about. Motus brought their pitching sleeve — later officially christened the mThrow — to last year’s fall instructs, where they reported metrics such as arm slot, arm speed, and elbow torque to coaches during game action.
Bryan Cole Baseball 