Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Patrick Corbin’s prospects for this upcoming MLB season look good. But just two years ago, he was one of the 25 percent of MLB pitchers to undergo Tommy John surgery, which fixes a torn ligament in the elbow.
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He is one of the lucky ones—20 percent of pitchers who have the surgery never make it back to their previous form.
Last week, Motus Global released their motusBASEBALL wearable system for consumers to buy, which may hold the key for pitchers like Corbin to never have to be put under the knife in the first place.
MotusBASEBALL is a sensor technology for two completely different facets of baseball, both pitching and batting. At the moment, it appears most useful for pitching, as it tracks the biomechanical movements of a pitchers arm and counts the amount of pitches thrown.
The wearable, placed in a compression sleeve on the throwing arm, has the ability to measure whether a pitcher is starting to be fatigued, shown by their pitching form. The idea is this would allow a manager to more objectively decide when to take a pitcher out of the game.
However, the MLB has not yet approved the system for in-game usage, but pitchers can choose to use it in practice.
The other side of motusBASEBALL is the batting platform. The same sensor that is used for pitching is clipped onto the batting glove, and it detects metrics like bat speed, bat rpm, hand speed and the zone that the hitter makes contact in.
The motusBASEBALL uses Bluetooth to communicate all of the metrics in real time to their suite of mobile apps.
The complete package comes at $150 in the Motus store.
This is not the only system that Motus has launched for baseball—their motusPRO is quite a bit more advanced and available only to MLB partners. It uses five different wearable sensors on the player, and fills out all applicable biomechanical skeletal data, along with customized feedback for players.
Editor’s note: As of the publication of this article, the MLB had not yet approved wearables to be worn during games. But that changed later in the day on April 5th according to AP sources.