As a high school and college baseball player who had read Ted Williams’ “The Science of Hitting,” Mike Donfrancesco understood the need to elevate the ball.
“I had a little bit of pop,” said Donfrancesco, who played at Boston University in the early 1990s, “and I was always trying to hit the ball 20 degrees, not even understanding what the launch angle term was. It was just kind of intuitive.”
An engineer by trade, he went to work for companies specializing in motion capture technology. That’s when he had the idea for a camera-powered, ball-tracking product — what today is the baseball simulator HitTrax — but had to wait more than a decade before computer technology was sufficiently advanced to make this a reality.
Even after building his first prototype in December 2012 and beginning production in April 2013, the self-described “early evangelist” of the now commonplace metrics launch angle and exit velocity had trouble gaining traction in promoting those metrics in an industry where “swing down on the ball” remained the trade standard. Then, Major League Baseball’s Statcast arrived, overhauling the hitting vernacular and codifying Williams’ original ideas about how best to swing and do damage.
“It makes my job so much easier,” Donfrancesco said.
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
HitTrax’s latest product builds on the original system — already popular at baseball academies and with high school and college teams — by reducing the footprint from three cameras to two. The system is now more portable and also more potent with advanced artificial intelligence computer vision algorithms. The cameras, usually set up to the side of a cage with a view of home plate, track the entry velocity and location of the pitch but also its exit trajectory off the bat in real-time. An add-on feature, the video capture and analysis module (VCAM), syncs the data with a video clip of each swing.
The enhanced algorithms also enable outdoor use of the tracking technology when previously it had been limited almost exclusively to indoor use. The new system can even be scaled down to use on a mobile phone, although with a few second latency for results, as opposed to the near-instantaneous turnaround with the full camera. (The company, based in Northborough, Mass., employs three former college players from Holy Cross, including one who is a software engineer. “I have this subject matter expert who can code,” Donfrancesco said. “It’s the holy grail.”)
About a quarter of major league clubs use HitTrax, Donfrancesco said. Baltimore Orioles slugger Mark Trumbo, the 2016 MLB home run king, has spoken about his offseason work with HitTrax. Bobby Tewksbary, the hitting guru who worked with 2015 AL MVP Josh Donaldson of the Toronto Blue Jays, uses one in his facility. Chicago Cubs infielder Javier Baez posted a photo to Instagram of his batting cage work at Wrigley Field with a HitTrax device clearly visible to the side.
(@javy23baez) on “How do you train with that data to optimize the swing?” Donfrancesco said. “That’s the challenge now.”
Built into the simulator is also a game engine for home run derby competitions and imagery of major league ballparks, where one can follow the projected path of the baseball after it leaves the bat as if you were playing in Fenway Park, Dodger Stadium or anywhere in between. The hope of such entertainment features — with more promised in the coming months — is to inject fun back into training and lure more youngsters to baseball and softball.
“We wanted to gamify it,” Donfrancesco said, adding: “(Our mission) is not only to produce very precise, very accurate, very real-time data, but it’s also to get these kids back playing the game.”