Want to Play Pro Baseball? There’s an App for That.
When names are called during next week’s MLB draft, there will be a handful among them that have gotten to that point thanks to pitch-analysis technology developed by a dad with no baseball backgroundWant to Play Pro Baseball? There’s an App for That.
When names are called during next week’s MLB draft, there will be a handful among them that have gotten to that point thanks to pitch-analysis technology developed by a dad with no baseball background
At some point early next week—likely on Tuesday, when rounds 3-10 of the MLB amateur draft take place—a team will select Jordan Martinson, a left-handed starter out of Dallas Baptist University. Martinson, who’ll pitch on Saturday in the Lubbock Regional bracket of the NCAA tournament, has posted sterling stats this season, recording a 2.50 ERA and leading the Missouri Valley Conference with 108 strikeouts (which is tied for 30th in all of Division I). Yet his name likely won’t be called before the back half of the first 10 rounds because he isn’t a big-bodied flamethrower. A senior sign who’s listed at an even six feet, Martinson throws, he says, “87 to 91, depending on the day.” Asked to compare himself to an MLB pitcher, he aims fairly low: Brian Duensing. He’s the type of prospect who needs to make the most of his modest natural talent. And he’s enrolled at the right place to do so.
DBU, which has sent 17 players—most notably Ben Zobrist—to the big leagues, became the eighth school to install a TrackMan ball-tracking system in 2015, when a grateful graduate who’d earned a sizeable bonus in the draft made a donation that covered the cost. When Martinson got to college in 2016, he hadn’t dug deep into how his pitches worked. But at DBU, he began getting a TrackMan-powered report delivered to his locker after each game, which helped him understand his stuff, adjust his approach, and keep track of his progress. He also started throwing bullpen sessions under the electronic eye of a Rapsodo device that provided real-time feedback on his pitches’ spin and movement. At DBU, he says, “you kind of learn analytically who you are.” Martinson and his teammates use information to “get a benchmark of … ways you can utilize what you already have.”
The increasing availability of data on amateur players has changed the players teams target in the draft, drawing attention to talent that scouts might have missed from the stands. But it’s also helping players raise their draft profiles by using technology to hone their skills in ways that weren’t possible until the past few years. And Martinson, his teammates, and a growing number of other players both in top college programs and within MLB organizations are also relying on a lesser-known supplement to some of that tech: an app called PitchGrader, which was developed by a dad with no baseball background whose product is improving players at the highest levels of the sport.
As of this spring, TrackMan systems were installed at 54 Division I schools. TrackMan manager Zach Day says many college coaches are “more willing and open to really push” than MLB teams were when the tracking company branched out from golf to baseball about a decade ago. Although some amateur players are less receptive to that push than others—former Coastal Carolina coordinator of video and analytics Michael McDonald says, “Some of the guys want to see their heat maps, and I show them their heat maps and they get pissed off and walk out”—most college coaches report that the sell to the typical player isn’t hard. “I don’t think it’s as big of a struggle as maybe it was maybe a few years back, because they’re seeing it everywhere,” says former University of Iowa pitching coach Desi Druschel. “People would laugh at me, make fun of me, for certain things I did in the past, and now it’s the thing that everybody is doing.”
At the college level, “everybody” is still a slight exaggeration, in part because college teams don’t have huge R&D departments that can analyze the data and apply it to players. “There is just so much that it provides you and tells you about the pitch that if you didn’t have a statistical mind, or a team or somebody working on it, it would turn into a really advanced radar gun that tells you locations,” says Matt Kane, a junior at the University of Missouri who serves as the baseball team’s manager of advanced analytics when he’s not busy triple majoring in math, stats, and econ.
Day envisions an “army of college students” like Kane studying NCAA data, but not every college has a Kane. Even at those that do, the Kane equivalents come and go. (Kane himself has already interned for the Pirates and will likely land an MLB gig after graduation if he wants one.) TrackMan does bundle some basic reports with the hardware, but for now, there’s a big gap in knowledge even between TrackMan-equipped teams. “You could probably talk to five colleges and each college [would say] something different that they do,” Day says. Some amateur programs rival MLB baseball operations departments in statistical sophistication while others, Day says, receive the system and wonder, “OK, what are we going to do with this?”
To paraphrase Ian Malcolm, information finds a way. And for some teams, one way is Wayne Boyle, the inventor of PitchGrader. Boyle is a Long Island engineer who spent decades designing electronic audio equipment and began building apps on the iTunes store in the early 2000s. He was never a big baseball fan, and his son, Sean, never showed much interest in the sport either until Wayne, on a whim, took him to a Mets game late in Sean’s freshman year of high school. Sean was hooked and decided to try out for his school team in 10th grade.
“He fail[ed], of course, because he [couldn’t] hit the side of a barn,” Wayne says. So father and son removed all the trees from their backyard, built a small field where Sean could drill every day, and spent the following summer practicing. Wayne used an iPad to shoot video of Sean’s mechanics, and the two tried to pinpoint the areas where his technique needed work. Wayne’s friends in technological fields joked that he was taking “an engineering approach” to his son’s development.
The strategy worked: The next time his more seasoned son tried out, Sean made the team and went on to star as its third baseman and pitcher. After graduation, he attended a Suffolk County junior college for two years, until word of his success reached DBU, which was looking for arms and dispatched then-pitching coach Wes Johnson to see and sign him.
Wayne supported sending Sean to DBU because of the school’s “pro approach” to using data and technology. But although DBU’s TrackMan system was already installed, Johnson had moved on to another school, and the replacement pitching coach, Rick McCarty, had never worked with the data directly. Because of his background, Wayne was curious about the technology, and when he examined its output, he was impressed by the array of information that could potentially help players improve. “I thought, ‘I’ll help my son out again and I’ll just make an app to help this team be able to use the data properly,’” Boyle says, adding, “What I saw was this inundation of data that can overwhelm people, and I wanted to find a way that was more visual. … I’m looking for things that a coach can quickly scan and pick out and be able to apply.”
As is often the case, an outsider’s history helped Wayne see the sport differently and address a weakness where his skills could be of use. “I knew he’s always been good with numbers,” Sean says. “I was never a numbers person, but once he started getting into that I thought it was going to be really surface-level stuff. But he went way deeper than I could even imagine.”
The app Boyle built automatically ingests data from TrackMan or FlightScope (a mobile, radar-based tracking device) and quickly converts it into easily manipulated visualizations and reports. Although the app includes leaderboards and allows users to slice and dice data, number-crunching isn’t its primary intended use. “We’re less interested in rankings and more interested in other reports and charts looking for potential in a player, weaknesses, strengths, and most importantly, how to develop, utilize, or exploit them,” Wayne says. “To us, the data is only useful if it can be applied toward a goal.”
Wayne intended for the name he gave the app to describe what it did, but he soon came to believe that pitching was too complex for him to give grades. He compares pitching to boxing: Boxers work with combinations of punches, and pitchers work with pitch sequences. The app allows them to sift through a sea of information to tailor and tweak those sequences, while offering hitters a weapon with which to fight back. It’s also a shortcut for coaches who can’t code. “All you have to do is swipe,” says Thomas Boucher, the former manager of advanced technology for the DBU baseball team. He adds, “If I wanted to know something within 30 seconds, I could do it.”
PitchGrader proved so popular at DBU that other schools started inquiring about using it. It’s since spread to, among other schools, Coastal Carolina (the 2016 College World Series winner), Vanderbilt, Duke, Clemson, Arkansas (last year’s NCAA tournament runner-up), and Iowa—“To me, anyone who gets TrackMan has to get Pitchgrader,” Druschel says—as well as MLB teams. It’s now in use by about 15 teams in total, and six MLB teams are either clients or currently testing it on a trial basis. “It doesn’t replace their existing analytics,” Wayne says. “It’s meant to be another perspective and a fast and efficient way to wring the last drops they can out of their data.”
The app has become a full-time job for Boyle, who adds features and provides support to his clients with assistance from a few part-time programmers. He charges $7,500 a year for amateur teams and $15,000 a year for pro teams, and subscriptions come with unlimited iPad app installations. Although MLB teams can afford to build their own PitchGrader-esque programs, it may be cheaper and easier for those that haven’t already done so to use Boyle’s fully realized app than to start from scratch with their own.
Although Wayne’s home-brew app has become a burgeoning business, it’s already accomplished its original primary purpose: enhancing his son. During his two seasons at DBU, Sean became a living advertisement for PitchGrader’s potential. When he got to DBU, Sean’s slider was, Wayne says, “OK.” Sean believed that to throw the pitch effectively, he had to shorten his stride and “get over” the ball with his middle finger as one would with a curveball, imparting forward rotation that would make the ball dive downward. But the pitch moved more like a slurve, without the speed and side-to-side break of a nasty slider. Wayne noticed, though, that when Sean released the pitch with extra extension, or distance from the pitching rubber—75 inches, say, instead of 72—the slurve behaved like a true slider.
Sean initially resisted the adjustment. “I was always fighting him, saying, ‘Oh, no, you’re wrong. I’ve gotta shorten up. There’s no other way,’” Sean recalls. “And then we get the numbers back, and it says, ‘[greater] extension on your slider.’ And it was the good slider. And I’m scratching my head, and I’m like, ‘I hate to admit it, but ...’ Without the numbers and actually seeing it, it’s hard to justify. Sometimes you can almost want to fight somebody more without the proof, even though they’re right.”
Armed with the knowledge that the greater his extension, the better his slider, Wayne asked Sean what he was doing differently when he was getting greater extension. Sean explained that he was reaching as far forward as he could, keeping his fingers on the ball longer, and giving it a final flick—as he puts it, almost over-exaggerating the pitch. And once he knew that, he could keep doing it. “Once he started throwing that right slider, he was just wipeout,” Wayne says. According to Boucher, the optimized slider was “absolutely unreal.” Righties batted .111 against the pitch, which averaged about 2,500 revolutions per minute—roughly 100 rpm higher than the major league average.
Sean says it could be “a little overwhelming” to work with his father this way, balancing both their father-son relationship and their coach-player relationship. However, his signature pitch improved to the point that the Yankees drafted him last year in the 25th round—largely, Wayne says, on the strength of the slider. He signed for $10,000 and reported to the rookie-level Gulf Coast League, where he fanned 20 batters in his first 15 innings as a pro. Over the winter, the Boyles published a co-authored book, Applied Technology in Pitching, in which they laid down a lot of the lessons they’ve learned. Sean is now in extended spring training, awaiting the start of short-season ball.
Although the Yankees make basic TrackMan data available to low-level players, allowing Sean to make sure that he’s still hitting his target extension, the data from his outings is no longer automatically uploaded to PitchGrader for his father to see. To get feedback from Wayne, Sean now has to employ a lower-tech approach. “I’ve got to take a photo of the spreadsheet that they offer,” Sean says. “And it doesn’t have everything. … It’s tough, because you’re used to having so much and being able to go into the app and look into things.”
Both Boyles count their favorite Bible verse as Luke 1:37: “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” God may get an exemption, but as the statistician’s credo says, “All others must bring data.” The Boyles are bringing it: Wayne with PitchGrader, and Sean with the pitch the app helped him perfect.
Technology has shaken up college coaching before. In the mid-1970s, longtime UC Davis head coach and former minor leaguer Phil Swimley made a momentous discovery: Pitchers’ deliveries didn’t work the way the experts had always believed. Swimley was coaching San Francisco Giants pitcher Ron Bryant, who sometimes trained at UC Davis before he went to spring training. Bryant had asked Swimley to help him learn a curveball, and Swimley dispensed the instructions that were then common among coaches: Keep the thumb up, supinate the wrist, and “pull down” on the front of the ball. “You’d turn your hand to the side so that, if you’re a right-hander, the back of your hand is to third base,” Swimley recalls. “And you’d go over the top and you’d pull down and you’d finish with your palm up.”
Swimley knew a professor who was knowledgeable about biomechanics. The professor had gotten a grant from football-helmet manufacturers to study how helmets break, and he was using a high-speed, 16-millimeter camera to film himself hitting the helmets in various ways. Swimley asked whether he could borrow the camera to capture Bryant’s delivery. When he filmed the pitcher at 3,000 frames per second and played the footage back, he saw something unexpected: Bryant, a lefty, was doing the opposite of what coaches told players to do. His shoulder rotated inward and his wrist pronated, with his thumb down and his palm facing out toward first base.
Swimley thought Bryant might be an exception to the usual rule, so he filmed two more Giants pitchers, Bob Knepper and Gary Lavelle. He saw the same thing. All three of those pitchers were lefties, though, and baseball lore stipulates that southpaws are strange. In search of a more representative sample, Swimley took a spring off and went to big-league spring camp in Arizona, where he filmed pitchers from the stands at 250 frames per second. “[I] found that everybody, no matter what pitch they threw, their shoulder’s rotating inward and their thumb rotates down and around,” Swimley says.
In early 1980, Swimley took his footage to the annual American Baseball Coaches Association convention, which was held that year at the New Orleans Hilton. The video was grainy—high-def was still decades away—but it was clear enough to convince an audience of shocked coaches, including Miami Dade Community College head coach Charlie Greene (like Swimley, a future ABCA Hall of Famer). Greene, who’d been coaching since the 1950s, remembers thinking, “My god, I’ve been teaching that now for many years, and coaching, and I didn’t realize that the hand did that.” When he saw the pronation, he adds, “I said, ‘I do not believe what I’m looking at,’ nor did anybody else in the audience.” In the aftermath, Swimley’s footage became the talk of the building. All of the coaches congregated in the hallway to discuss what they’d seen, leaving the next presenter to address an empty room. “The poor guy that followed, he had prepared all year to speak at our national convention, and the only person in the audience was one of his coaches,” Greene says.
Swimley hadn’t just stolen the spotlight at the convention; he’d also changed pitching instruction. “We were teaching it wrong, but we couldn’t understand why kids weren’t learning,” Greene says. For him, the revelation “changed everything. It just gave me a whole new perspective, and I started to get better results.” Swimley started incorporating what he’d learned into his teaching. He’d show players pictures and tell them, “this is what’s happening,” he says. His pitchers stopped restraining their arms’ natural motions to comply with their coach’s counterproductive instructions, and as a result, Swimley says, “We got better spin.” A camera had accomplished what more than a century of experience and subjective accounts couldn’t.
Thanks to more capable cameras and the advent of digital tracking devices, history is repeating itself. “It’s like a new book that’s been written,” says Missouri pitching coach Fred Corral. “What this new book does for me is it enhances and explains what we’re throwing together. It just kind of connects the dots.”
At Iowa, where Druschel considered PitchGrader an indispensable part of his daily routine, another pitcher who’s probably about to be drafted owes his outlook to technology. Right-handed starter Cole McDonald recorded a 6.96 ERA and lost his job halfway through his 2017 sophomore season, but as a junior, he lowered that mark to 3.23 and entrenched himself as the team’s Sunday starter. The difference? One of Druschel’s student analysts, Walker Gentz, had dug through the data and noticed that McDonald was throwing his fringy breaking ball with different shapes the first and second times through the order. One of the shapes baffled batters, and the other got hit hard.
To figure out what was causing the shape-shift, Druschel and Gentz trained a Rapsodo device and a high-speed camera on McDonald as he threw in the bullpen and discovered that the righty was unwittingly deflecting the ball at the moment of release. “There’s no way you could feel it, there’s no way I’d ever see it or anyone would ever see it with the naked eye, but when we get it on 480 frames per second, you can see his index finger, which he thought was off the ball, would hit the ball right at the end and it would destroy his axis, not to mention his spin rate,” Druschel says. Once Druschel diagnosed the problem, McDonald practiced with balls that were marked with lines that allowed him to see the spin axis, and his mercurial breaking ball became a clearly differentiated curve and slider that he could alternate at will.
PitchGrader’s impact on player development has helped make DBU, which went 41-18 during the regular season, one of nine teams to qualify for six consecutive NCAA postseason appearances. Martinson, a product of that development process, says that in high school, his coaches noticed that he was “consistently beating guys above the barrel,” blowing fastballs by them up in the zone without impressive radar readings. At DBU, TrackMan revealed the reason: His fastball had a high spin rate, which makes it sink less than it looks like it will and also makes it harder to hit up in the zone. “It shows up on PitchGrader,” Martinson says. “It just verifies, ‘OK, well, this is why you’re good at whatever you’re good at.’ … You can visually see it on a screen, like, ‘Oh, this is how my ball truly moved.’”
Now I can focus on things that make me good from an analytics-type standpoint instead of just throwing the ball down because that’s the old-school way.Jordan Martinson, Dallas Baptist University starter
Without that evidence, Martinson adds, “I don’t think I would’ve been as successful, because now I can focus on things that make me good from an analytics-type standpoint instead of just throwing the ball down because that’s the old-school way.”
Righty reliever Jarod Bayless, a DBU senior who’s likely to be drafted in the late rounds next week, made the same discovery. Before he transferred to DBU, Bayless was frustrated by the lack of forward-thinking coaches in his hometown of Texarkana, and he trawled the Twitter feeds of pitching gurus in search of advice that could help him. But before he faced a single batter in a DBU uniform, he learned via TrackMan that the low-in-the-zone style he’d assumed would be the best fit for his 90-ish-mph heat wasn’t suited to his high-spin stuff. Bayless, Boucher says, “can throw a ball right down the middle and you’re going to swing under it.” It was a superpower the pitcher hadn’t suspected. “I threw one bullpen, and they said, ‘Hey, don’t throw a fastball below the belt ever again,’” Bayless recalls. As a result, he says, “I had the best season of my life, honestly just by throwing around 85 percent fastballs. Just throwing it high.”
If not for that, Boucher says, Bayless “probably wouldn’t have thrown an inning for us … if he tried to be down in the zone, he would have got[ten] rocked.” Bayless has also designed a slider using Rapsodo and high-speed video, and Martinson has used PitchGrader to refine his changeup grip and arm action. Hence the DBU development ethic, as Bayless expresses it: “Just measure everything. Review, and keep measuring.”
Players used to come out of college not knowing nearly as much as Martinson and Bayless. Doug Jones, a third-round pick out of Central Arizona College in 1978, didn’t pitch his first full season in the big leagues until 1987, when he was 30. Jones became an All-Star stopper at 31 and pitched into his 40s, but before breaking out, he slogged through 246 minor league games, learning through failure and gradually whittling a five-pitch mix into an effective fastball-changeup combo. “I’ve learned that in baseball, a lot of adjustments are made on your own,” Jones told the Newark Star-Ledger in 1989. “People will tell you a lot of things, but no one really tells you how to do it. It’s something that you’ve got to develop for yourself.” Jones’s sole advice to future minor leaguers who were similarly stalled was, “Don’t give up.”
Even current major league pitchers had to learn on the job long after draft day. Take 29-year-old Dodgers swingman Ross Stripling. Stripling, who was drafted by the Dodgers in the fifth round in 2012, doesn’t throw hard; his fastball sits about 91, below average for a right-hander. As a rookie in 2016, he started the season in the big-league rotation but scuffled to a 4.85 ERA through eight starts. To give him a break and conserve his innings, the team sent him to extended spring training in late May for more than a month.
While he was there, Stripling met with president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman in what he describes as a “pivotal moment” in his career. “Andrew came to Arizona specifically to see me,” he says. Friedman showed him a montage of pitchers in Tampa Bay (where Friedman had previously served as GM) and L.A. blowing high fastballs by hitters. “He was like, ‘This, you can do this,’” Stripling says. The righty practiced the new approach in Arizona and brought it to the big leagues when he returned. He posted a 3.48 ERA for the remainder of that season and has improved to a combined 3.32 (121 ERA+) in the three seasons since.
“I was just trying to keep my head above water before that, and now everything is much more clear,” he says. Stripling comes from “a numbers family”; his brother has a PhD in nuclear engineering, his dad has a dual engineering degree and an MBA, and both of his grandfathers schooled him in the stock market when he was young. Now the numbers help him get outs. The Dodgers front office prepared a personal report template for Stripling, including heat maps that show him where opponents hit the ball hard depending on the pitch type and count. He tries not to pitch to those parts. He studies the data for hours before each start, and he continues to get feedback from Friedman. In 2018, Stripling made his first All-Star team, and among pitchers with at least 120 innings pitched, only Justin Verlander, Chris Sale, and Corey Kluber had higher strikeout-to-walk ratios.
James Paxton, the erstwhile Mariners ace whom the Yankees acquired last November, was another 29-year-old player who made an analytics-aided leap in 2018. Last May 2, Paxton struck out 16 Oakland Athletics and induced 25 whiffs with his four-seam fastball, the most ever recorded in the pitch-tracking era. No other starter in 2018 managed more than 18. The tracking stats confirm that he elevated his heater that month.
“That was an emphasis of ours,” says Mariners manager of analytics Joel Firman. “[It] was something that was talked about among coaches and was brought to his attention. He evidently took to it aggressively.” Seattle hired Firman in early 2016 to evaluate pitch quality among amateurs, free agents, and opposing players whom the Mariners might target in trades, but he’s increasingly applied his skills to ferreting out flaws in pitchers within Seattle’s system, which he’s been surprised to learn are often correctable. “The success rate of our coaches at immediately fixing those things is very eye-opening to me and something that I didn’t think humans were able to do as well as they’re doing right now,” he says.
That trend toward throwing high-spin fastballs high in the zone is pervasive enough to stand out on a league-wide level. The average MLB four-seamer has averaged 2,259 RPM over the past four-plus seasons. The graph below shows the annual rate at which high-spin (>2,300 RPM) and low-spin (<2,200 RPM) four-seamers have been thrown in the upper third of the zone or above, revealing a clear increase in the former without an obvious corresponding increase in the latter.
Unlike Stripling and Paxton, Twins starter Kohl Stewart, the fourth overall pick from the 2013 draft, was only 23 in 2018, but after walking almost as many batters as he struck out in Double-A in 2017, he says, “I knew some things need to change if I wanted to have success.” Stewart isn’t a stathead—“I haven’t really ever been [into numbers], and I’m still not,” he says—but when he met in spring training with his coaches and Twins senior R&D analyst Josh Kalk, a former Hardball Times writer and Rays analyst, the message was simple. The brain trust told him that some of his stuff resembled Roy Halladay’s—a little flattery never hurts—but that he wasn’t using it to his best advantage.
“They’re doing these types of things for every player, and I think guys are learning more and more how to process information.” Kohl Stewart, Minnesota Twins starter
The Twins told Stewart that his sinker and slider come out of his hand on the same plane and complement each other well, but they recommended that he switch the sinker from a two-seam grip to a one-seam grip to generate more downward movement and induce more grounders and whiffs. They also had him use a high-speed camera to adjust his changeup grip. After getting used to the changes, which he says “felt right,” he blew through Double-A and Triple-A and in mid-August made the majors, where he recorded a 3.68 ERA in eight games. “They’re doing these types of things for every player, and I think guys are learning more and more how to process information,” Stewart says.
Not only are they learning it more and more, they’re learning it earlier and earlier. For players in tech-oriented amateur programs, those epiphanies won’t have to wait until pro ball. “I definitely think it speeds up the process of player development,” says former big leaguer Steve Bieser, who’s now the head coach at Mizzou. Red Sox assistant pitching coach and VP of pitching development Brian Bannister concurs. “I think you might see more kids who are little more polished-off coming out of college jump through the minor leagues just because the velo is there and the pitch design is there,” he says. “Now they just need some seasoning and they’re ready to go.”
Three of the coaches quoted above (McDonald, Druschel, and Boucher) are former college coaches—not because their teams tired of them, but because MLB clubs came calling. McDonald and Boucher are now rookie minor league coaches for the Cardinals and Brewers, respectively; Druschel just joined the Yankees (and Sean Boyle) in a newly created role, manager of pitch development. Wes Johnson, who brought the Boyles to DBU, is the first-year pitching coach for Stewart’s team, the Twins, who already employed former Duke coach Pete Maki as a minor league pitching coordinator. Last November, Johnson became the first pitching coach ever to jump directly from college to a big-league staff.
In the age of enlightened development, amateur ball isn’t just a rich source of player prospects. It’s also a hotbed of coveted coaching talent. MLB organizations are competing to poach college coaches who’ve worked with the tools pervading pro ball, PitchGrader included. “I’m probably a good example of it,” Druschel says. “I learned a lot from PitchGrader, and in fact in my interview process I used screenshots and video from PitchGrader to demonstrate how I was using the data.”
PitchGrader will probably remain a product embraced by a limited number of teams, for a few reasons. Some amateur teams with limited budgets are forced to choose, as Druschel says, between paying for PitchGrader or redoing their dugout. Others balk at the price because they believe the technology alone will suffice, not realizing that its output can be tough to interpret. And some pro teams turn up their noses because they think they can do (or have done) the job better in-house.
The Mariners are one of the MLB teams that sees value in Wayne’s work. The club became a client this year at the behest of new hire Max Weiner, the Mariners’ pitching coordinator, who had come across PitchGrader on Twitter. Weiner’s conversations with Seattle’s pitching coaches had illuminated a need to “bring life to the numbers,” and PitchGrader provided a polished, intuitive way to counter deeply ingrained misconceptions. “If we’re going to ask a guy to throw his fastball up in the zone, it’s really difficult to do,” Weiner says. “They’ve been praised for doing something different their whole life. They associate negativity with ‘missing up.’ There’s just a lot of dogma that comes with it.”
PitchGrader’s physics engine enables what Wayne calls “active projection,” allowing users to simulate what a pitch would look like if its spin rate, spin axis, velocity, or release angle were altered. The resulting interactive, animated, three-dimensional graphic presents what the pitch would look like from any perspective. “From a pitch-design standpoint, it’s been incredibly helpful,” Weiner says, citing its tendency to expedite buy-in. “It gives a lot of confidence to the pitcher understanding how that specific pitch looks and how it comes out of their own unique release point.”
Weiner says the Mariners—who have also hired former DBU director of player development Trent Blank—make PitchGrader available via iPad everywhere with TrackMan (or, soon, Hawk-Eye) data, from extended spring training to T-Mobile Park. This spring, they presented it to almost all of the pitchers on their 40-man roster. (The MLB staff has room for improvement, ranking 29th in the majors in park-adjusted ERA and FIP.) The organization agrees with Wayne when he says that the app “takes a lot of the trial and error out of developing a pitch or a pitch sequence” by supplying pitchers with ideal values to target, helping them compare past and present performance, and giving them a way to investigate how pitches pair with each other.
Four years into his unlikely second career, Wayne now finds himself answering a common question that he once would have been ill-equipped to tackle: how to get a job in baseball. “Don’t wait for someone’s permission. Do it,” he advises, adding, “Someone’s going to hire you, because they’re going to see the quality of the work.” During draft week, 30 teams will pick players based on the quality of their college work. And in some cases, that quality will have come from the app Boyle built.
