by TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Nestor Cortes stepped behind the plate in a batting cage and watched an 8-tall, 1,200-pound robot spit out fastballs, cutters and sweepers just like those was spinning from the tips of his fingers. .
“It was like seeing myself pitching. That was crazy,” the New York Yankees All-Star left-hander said.
Technology has come a long way since the days of the Iron Mike.
The Trajekt Arc pitching machine uses high-tech baseball data to mimic the way balls break from all major league pitches and has been approved by Major League Baseball for in-game use this year in batting cages. Using delivery video and data, the robot allows the hitter to tackle recreated pitches from any pitch he wants to face. Dodgers two-way star Shohei Ohtani said he used Trajekt to see his pitches from a different vantage point.
“You’re training their brain. You’re training his eye,” Philadelphia hitting coach Kevin Long said.
Each machine costs $15,000 to $20,000 a month as part of a three-year lease, an unimaginable leap forward from the 2 1/2-foot cannon-like landing gun invented by Princeton math professor Charles Howard Hinton in 1896 at all.
Paul Giovagnoli turned the concept into a business. He had golf driving ranges in Wichita and Topeka, Kansas, he wanted to add baseball and created something called the Iron Mike. Giovagnoli founded Master Pitching Machine in 1952, and his units became ubiquitous with long metal arms throughout the majors.
By the mid-1970s, machines with spinning wheels came onto the market, the better to replicate breaking balls, and the Yankees had three for $1,600 each at spring training in 1978.
Those models have gone the way of flannel uniforms.
The iPitch Spinball Sports Smart Machine retails for $14,000 and is programmed with 16 built-in pitches for 140 pitches. The company’s sales manager Sam Root says more than 100 of its iPitch machines are among 27 MLB teams and 15 Division I college conferences have units.
Elite eHack Attack SportsAttack comes with fastballs, changeups, split fingers and right and left curveballs and sliders, and allows custom pitches and storage for 20 options. It sells for $14,999.
Joshua Pope took it a step further. He was a senior at TanenbaumCHAT high school in Toronto in 2014 and was talking to friends about how many swings it would take for them to hit Marcus Stroman, then a Toronto Blue Jays rocket man. After undergoing a few shoulder surgeries, Pope knew that his career would not be as an athlete. It affected the University of Waterloo in Ontario in part because John McPhee, a professor of mechanical engineering there, had developed a hockey slapshot robot.
“We had a theoretical modeling approach to how we could create a machine to replicate gyro spin,” Pope said.
Data was publicly available. MLB installed PITCHf/x Sportvision in 2006 and then its more detailed Statcast system for 2015, which runs on Hawk-Eye data. All teams get Hawk-Eye, and some add information from KinaTrax Motion Capture, Simi Reality Motion Systems and DARI Motion.
During his five-year college program, Pope received a grant of Canadian $60,000 and raised funding to build a prototype. He became CEO of the new company founded in 2019 and recruited Rowan Ferrabee, a Waterloo mechatronics engineering student, to be chief technology officer. They originally called their company SimulatePro but changed it to Trajekt Sports – Traject was built with a regular spelling and they liked the K because it was used for strikes in baseball scoring.
Working at Velocity, a startup hub in Kitchener, Ontario, from April 2019 to March 2020 – and then in Pope’s parents’ garage after the coronavirus pandemic began – they developed a machine that controls 11 of 12 degrees of freedom for parks, at one maintenance fixed release point 56 1/2 feet from the plate.
They presented a demo of the ball striker and user interface at the 2019 winter meetings, and Chicago Cubs director of Innovation Bobby Basham agreed to a three-week spring training trial in 2021. Trajekt struck deals for seven teams in 2022 and now has 20 teams. with about 45 machines – including a club in Japan that started last season. Until this year, MLB had little use before and after games.
Trajekt trains a data and video team and sends two people to install, which takes a day or two. Teams seem to prefer using the softer Rawlings L10 practice balls to reduce broken bats.
Phillies All-Star catcher JT Realmuto spends about an hour before each game going over the data on other hitters, writing notes he takes to the dugout and reviews before each defensive half inning.
“It’s amazing to see how far baseball has come based on data,” Realmuto said. “Analytics is obviously a huge part of our game now. Analytics was happening 20 years ago, we didn’t really know how to understand it and how to translate it into real time.”
MLB began regulating on-field technology in 2016 and has approved six products for in-game, on-field use this year: 4D Motion kinematic/motion tracker, Catapult GPS tracker, STATSports GPS tracker, Motus Pulse Sleeve that measures biomechanics and heart. monitors from WHOOP and Zephyr. In addition, two bat sensors from Blast Motion and two from Diamond Kinetics have been approved for use on the field during workouts.
“A lot of due diligence needs to be done. Keeping your eyes on emerging technologies is important but it takes a lot of work,” Phillies general manager Sam Fuld said. “It’s not as simple as snapping your fingers and investing in a piece of technology that looks interesting. You have to make sure you are making the right choice because it comes with a lot of human capital that is required to operate the technology. If there’s technology-related data, a lot of bandwidth is needed to make sense of that data.”
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