The baseball bat has been more or less the same since Louisville Slugger crafted its first one in 1884. Sure, the bat has evolved through different sizes and colors, but it hasn’t endured a revolutionary change in quite some time. Grady Phelan, inventor of ProXR ergonomic bat technology, is trying to change that.
Phelan, a life long baseball player, learned from experience that the current design of a baseball bat is flawed. Ten years ago, he was swinging a bat and lost his handle on it, almost hitting his youngest son. That’s where the ProXR journey began. Not only with the current bat knob is it easy for players to lose control of bats, they also cause a wide array of hand injuries.
From those observations, ProXR technology was developed through research and prototypes but couldn’t be successful unless the MLB and NCAA were on board.
“In 2006, I was told by a leading bat maker that my ProXR design would never get approved by either MLB or NCAA,” Phelan said. “I researched the rules, had a number of conference calls and sent bats to each committee for review.”
Later that year, Phelan received approval from both leagues.
But that wasn’t the end of the battle. There’s always more development that can be done. ProXR went to Kickstarter hoping to raise $43K for testing to be done on the product. The project fell short, but Phelan said he still thinks of the experience of the success.
“The process made us realize how we were marketing the bat – it’s a technology that we want every player to have access to regardless of their bat brand,” Phelan said. “It forced us to look at how we were talking about the technology and how we were using social media to communicate with players and the media.”
The Kickstarter failure was exactly what ProXR needed to realize its path to success. ProXR found the voice it needed to reach out to both players and bat companies to use the technology.
The baseball world is full of superstitions, which proved to be the next major challenge. Will players change their routine and give this new technology a try?
Mike Hessman, then a player for the New York Mets, changed his routine and stepped to the plate with an angled-knob bat in September of 2010. It was a huge moment for Phelan and the company but not many followed suit after Hessman. Maybe Phelan was focusing on the wrong audience.
“We’ve begun development of metal bats featuring the ProXR technology for players at the youth league, high school and college level,” Phelan said.
If younger players at earlier levels of the game use ProXR technology, in a few years we could see a huge spike in the amount of players using it in the pros. It has to become a part of the baseball culture before players will accept that and the best way to do that is to target the future stars of the game.
Phelan couldn’t be happier with the direction his company is headed. He thought 2013 was a great year for ProXR and 2014 would only get better.
“It really is exciting to have taken this idea, discovered in the backyard, and now see it becoming a requested feature on bats at all levels of baseball.”