A few years back, the video above (highly recommended to wear the appropriate glasses while watching it) was produced by the The New York Times, entitled as “How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters”. This 3D iteration accompanied a story on Rivera’s successful signature cutter. This rendering demonstrates the acute similarities between his fastball and cutter that appear to be for the hitter at the plate.
At the time, though, a training tool for hitters that uses realistic graphics and allows them to get hundreds upon thousands of repetitions in a single session didn’t exist. To date, still, there lacks a substantive, software-based answer to aid batters, considering they get limited repetitions at practice, as is, due to time. Many players, frankly, don’t ever receive real practice seeing pitches with game spin on them, only seeing sliders, changeups, and et al during games when it’s time to perform. In batting practice, the coach throw fastballs anywhere around 55 to 60 MPH; and it looks that much different.
Once a professional baseball player, himself, however, Xan Barksdale, Founder of Tennessee-based startup SeamTrak, tells SportTechie his own admission that he was poor at recognizing off-speed pitches and would have benefitted from this kind of product, especially, too, in light of having an epiphany from the Rivera case study.
Pitchers, though, have virtually always had an advantage in baseball. Thus, that’s why it’s common rhetoric to believe the following notion: a hitter can succeed only three out of ten times and still make the Hall of Fame. From an eye-hand coordination standpoint, hitting a baseball certainly ranks near the top as one of the most difficult skills to harness in sports, increasingly becoming more arduous over the years. Major League Baseball pitchers’ fastball velocities have risen each season, the past decade, in fact; and there are now more 100 MPH flamethrowers than ever before.
As the velocities continue to rise, hitters will have even less time to react and hit the ball in front of them.
Still, there are a couple prevailing reasons as to why hitters have trouble recognizing pitches.
“They get very limited practice seeing off-speed pitches because a coach can’t throw game-speed curveballs, changeups, etc. They only way to see them is to hit off of a pitching machine; and that’s very difficult because the timing and look is different than when the ball comes out of a pitcher’s hand,” says Barksdale.
Secondly, Barksdale continued: “In a game, a 90 MPH fastball leaves the pitcher’s hand and is in the catcher’s mitt in less than 400 milliseconds. It’s extremely hard to replicate this in practice, so many players only see these pitches during a game…when they’re expected to hit them.”
Conversely, the science behind hitting sheds light about this process, as concisely illustrated by this SeamTrak graphic:
Like in Victor Cruz’s case, vision training configured by software applications enhances performance to baseball players as well. A 2014 study within Current Biology conducted by a group of psychologists distilled that hitters from the University of California, Riverside’s baseball team were able to augment their abilities, both their batting averages and their reading of eye charts by 30 percent. These advancements were possible after they went through over two dozen 25-minute vision training sessions via the computerized program. The players that weren’t partaking in this process didn’t demonstrate marked improvement.
What’s more, another study done with the University of Cincinnati’s baseball players showed similar results, which included involvement from Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench, too. Six weeks of varied vision training led to their batting averages spiking up by 34 points compared the season prior, well north of what other NCAA teams were able to progress by without this kind of training. Not to mention, errors declined by 15 percent and fielding assists boosted by eight percent, on top of the offensive production.
It should be noted, meanwhile, that the number of swings and misses a pitcher gets is in part due to how “good” the pitch actually is, whether pitchers recognize it or not. When a hitter has a hard time recognizing a specific pitch–like Cleveland Indians pitcher Corey Kluber’s slider–they are going to swing and miss more often.
Nevertheless, alternative methods to address a hitter’s intuitive knowledge of pitching haven’t been up to par, in terms of directly combating it from the user’s perspective.
“There have been other attempts at helping baseball players’ vision, but none of them have been very effective, in my opinion. Coaches would write numbers on baseballs and have the player try to successfully read the number as they hit,” states Barksdale.
“Or, they would put colored dots on a ball and expect a player to successfully call out the correct color as they hit the ball. However, this doesn’t train the player to recognize the different spin on baseballs coming out of a pitcher’s hand and it doesn’t translate into a better game performance,” Barksdale added.
With SeamTrak being privately funded by Barksdale alone, though, he has worked with two separate groups for its development. The first being an animator, where he created the graphics and ensured the user experience is as realistic as possible. The second of whom were the developers that wrote the code and brought this product to fruition. SeamTrak was designed to be “sticky” for users, so they would enjoy using it, have fun, and would encourage them to be on it often, which would, in turn, help them maximize the best results derived out of this experience.
The end goal, therefore, for a SeamTrak user is to feel like they’re playing a video game, while actually training to become better hitters.
Accordingly, there are three training modules available for SeamTrak users, which expounds on differing point of views pertinent to a batter seeing the next pitch.
Standard Training Mode allows players to advance at their own respective pace, making sure they can perform at a rookie level before moving on to a non-elementary experience. Once they have mastered one level, they will have less time to correctly answer and must be more proficient to advance throughout the training mode.
For Infinite Gameplay, users can go until they get one pitch wrong. When they do get one that’s incorrect, or do not answer in time, the game is over and they must start over. As the game progresses, it becomes more difficult because the user has less time to correctly answer.
In Rapid Fire Gameplay, players have one minute to correctly answer as many as possible. They gain points for correct answers and lose points for incorrect answers.
Barksdale explains that there are two purposes of the game modes: “To make fun for younger players, so that they will be encouraged to log in and train. Secondly, these game modes put pressure on the user to get the pitch correct, quickly. This is designed to help them stay focused in higher pressure situations.”
Currently, SeamTrak has the following pitches: four-seam fastball, two-seam fastball (both four-seam and two-seam look similar for left-handed and right-handed pitchers), curveball from either hand, and the same for sliders and changeups.
So inside the training mode, a lefty and right-handed pitcher’s throw will appear with the appropriate spin on the ball, making real to the end-user. As they advance among the levels, the expedited time frame enables pitch recognition to be less pronounced. During the MLB level, the spinning baseball is shown for a fraction of a second to simulate the equivalent of a 90 MPH fastball.
“SeamTrak is one more training tool that a hitter can use. Like any training tool, the more often they use it, the better they will become,” believes Barksdale.
Many amateur hitters have reported using SeamTrak up to five days a week on day when they practice. Some of their professional clients have told Barksdale that that they use it as a pre-game “warm-up” to get used to seeing pitches before they play in real life. Also, SeamTrak’s leaderboard intends to tap into the player’s competitive nature, where reaching certain achievements dovetails the benefits that can be gained from being on the platform to train for extended intervals of time.
From a monetization standpoint, SeamTrak stands on following a subscription-based model. Users will be able to sign up for a free two-week trial, so they can test it out before subscribing. There are different packages based on if the user is utilizing SeamTrak for an individual, small or large group, or an entire organization. Organic search and SEO have been the primary methods leveraged thus far to gain traffic from potential early adopters, building its user base from there.
“There have been a few analytics companies that are devoted to PITCHf/x and TrackMan, but they measure what happens after a pitcher releases the ball, and don’t have any influence on training,” says Barksdale, acknowledging the other baseball startups that tackle surrounding aspects between the hitter and pitcher relationship.
In some respects, SeamTrak’s software is an introductory step to baseball circles compared to what EON Sports is doing for football in virtual reality. SeamTrak, too, could definitely be integrated with VR down the line, provided this ecosystem becomes highly reliable and affordable to the end-user. SeamTrak wants to be available to players of all levels, with virtual repetitions for hitters being limitless.
SeamTrak is a tad late for a hitter to avoid a strike from Rivera’s cutter, but it’s on time to be the vehicle that trains hitters to identify what’s the next pitch.