NEW YORK — A year after launching its DiamondFX batter training product, TrinityVR has installed its virtual reality systems for two major league organizations, and one is already reporting some early gains.
One of the franchises deployed the hitting tool in a Latin American academy, where its predominantly teenage prospects reside, and set up a drill in which the batters are prompted to identify each type of pitch they saw. In two months of use, those players improved their pitch recognition skills, on average, from 53 percent to 66 percent, TrinityVR strategy chief Rahat Ahmed said.
“We’re able to relay data to these teams that a typical prospect at age 18, you can’t get that information,” Ahmed said. “It helps the higher-ups at the organization make a decision, ‘OK, who do we pull up to the next level potentially?’”
The DiamondFX system, which was demonstrated for SportTechie, conveys the look and feel of a batter facing a professional pitcher able to wield tailing fastballs, breaking pitches and changeups with all the velocity and tailing action that makes hitting the toughest task in sports. (The highlight for this SportTechie reporter was dribbling foul a 92 mile-per-hour fastball because meager contact is better than no contact.)
TrinityVR is not able to disclose the identities of its clients but said the process of developing the product was very much a collaboration with their front offices, incorporating feedback along the way that culminated in contractual agreements signed earlier this fall. TrinityVR will be meeting with more clubs and interested parties at next week’s annual winter meetings and again in January at CES; last year at the annual consumer electronics show, TrinityVR announced a hardware partnership with HTC’s Vive VR.
“Everybody has the same base product, but what I think is interesting is that, the way our system is structured, I don’t see any two teams using it the same way,” Ahmed said.
The DiamondFX tool isn’t intended just to prepare scouting reports of opposing pitchers so much as its usefulness in scouting and development. A hitter’s performance — from power of swing to bat speed and launch angle — is all recorded to give executives the ability to make comparisons between players and glean aggregate insights about hitting technique.
“I think we’re getting to a point where this technology, especially virtual reality as a simulation platform, is allowing us to [test long-standing doctrine],” Ahmed said. “We are able to capture data sets that literally were not possible a year and a half ago, at least not at the volume and scalability we are doing right now.”
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Ahmed, who worked in finance before VR, touted the mission and specialty of the company — which he co-founded with engineers Julian Volyn, Zach Lynn and Jeff Danis — as the intake of data. He hopes DiamondFX can be used as a complementary tool to the processes baseball organizations already have in place for making player evaluation decisions. The program is already compatible with Pitch F/X data, the league standard for years, and will soon be optimized for TrackMan radars, which power the Statcast system that supplanted Pitch F/X.
“When it comes to sports, especially baseball where milliseconds and millimeters make a significant difference in the outcome, you need to make sure that the quality of the data that you collect is as accurate as possible,” he said. “As a company, that is our No. 1 priority when we build our system.”
A native of Bangladesh who later moved to Texas, Ahmed has Houston-area sporting allegiances and is drawn to the scouting story of Astros second baseman and MVP, Jose Altuve, who was initially deemed too small before eventually proving himself. Altuve proved himself via merit, and the hope is that the VR system can help make more immediately objective personnel decisions.
“We want to be able to find those guys,” Ahmed said.