I know there are some baseball dads and coaches on BR so I thought I would post this. Way back in the day I was a college baseball pitcher and for a number of years I coached rec, travel, All Star, and middle school baseball. I gave it up this past year because I wanted my son to get away from me coaching him and drive his own destiny on the ball field. Plus, he's at a stage where he needs more advanced coaching. That being said this COVID-19 situation has ended competitive baseball for the time being so we've been working out lately.
Matt has been primarily a P/SS but routinely plays other positions including catcher so he's experienced at all of them. Long term he profiles as a P/1B/ maybe corner outfielder and not a middle infielder. But he loves to pitch and next year he's hoping to make varsity as a freshman.
A lot of baseball academies, all major league teams and most college teams use Rapsodo or something similar to analyze things like pitcher velocity, spin rates, spin axis, vertical movement, horizontal movement, etc. What's great about these systems is that a pitcher can make grip alterations, finger pressure alterations, arm slot changes, and frankly any pitching mechanic changes and see how it changes the shape of the pitch. Unfortunately our local indoor baseball academy does not have one and I'm not about to drop 3 grand on one.
But the last month I stumbled upon something called PitchLogic. It's a baseball with built in sensors that tracks most of the same information as Rapsodo and in side by side comparisons the data was close to identical to the Rapsodo numbers. Best of all it's "only" $250. Not cheap, but not three grand either.
Diamond Kinetics also has a baseball sensor called Pitchtracker but it has only basic information AND they charge you an annual fee to access the data. PitchLogic has no annual fees and you can export data for any time range and have it emailed to you in CSV format.
Anyway, the PitchLogic arrived and we got to use it for a brief 10 pitch session today before the thunderstorms rolled in. My first impressions are "WOW!" I mean when I was a kid we had to go to the library and pick up a book to see what a curveball grip looked like and then when we tried it out on the field we relied on our catcher to try and tell us what the ball was doing. Then if you changed your grip or arm angle or mechanics you had to rely on the observations of your catcher or coach to see if they noticed anything different with the pitch.
Now, you throw a pitch and you have a face full of data staring at you and you can quantify the results of any changes.Today Matt only threw four seam fastballs and he wasn't really loose as we raced the oncoming storm. He hadn't thrown in a month and his lower half mechanics were sloppy, but what was pretty neat is on the last two pitches I reminded him of what his lower half should be doing and he gained 3 mph.
Since I have no idea what his spin rates were before we're putting together baseline data now. What will really be interesting is tomorrow when he starts throwing his curve and changeup. We'll develop some baseline numbers and then experiment with some changes. One nice thing about the app is not only can you chart and track pitch types but you can also up to 5 track variations of those pitch types. This way you can easily compare the results.
Anyway, so far this looks to be a great tool. Once I collect more data I'll post some screen shots. My first impression is that this is a great tool and worth the investment.
