Professional Grade Pitch Tracking Hits The Broader Market With Rapsodo

Rapsodo

Analytics-based training will soon be available to baseball players and coaches at every level of the game, thanks to a product unveiled at the recent American Baseball Coaches Association Convention in Nashville. Rapsodo Baseball is a new portable device combined with an iPad application to measure baseball pitches and track real time metrics, including spin rate and axis. This latest offering from Rapsodo, a data-driven company that designs sports technologies formed in 2010, builds upon Rapsodo’s previous work in the field of golf.

Rapsodo Founder Batuhan Okur explained to us that Rapsodo focuses on delivering a variety of sports training and simulation technologies in an effort to allow users to better understand their performance through reliable statistics. When starting Rapsodo, Okur intended to understand “how to enable athletes to get better at what they do, in an affordable way.”

Rapsodo’s initial focus was on engineering the first affordable golf launch monitor, SkyTrak. “I started Rapsodo with the idea of developing a product for golf. At that time, I was practicing a lot and I felt the need to interact more with my game.. Some existing technologies were impressive, but the five-figure price was a serious barrier,” said Okur“After years of development, I was excited when the golf launch monitor was brought into reality by the team at Rapsodo. Our team met the exceptional challenge of featuring the same accuracy provided by the professional-grade solutions on the market, at a more affordable price.”

On the shift from the golf market to baseball, Okur noted that as such a beloved sport, with a huge following, the dynamics of the game offered a natural evolution for Rapsodo’s existing technology. “There is no doubt that data analytics is playing an increasingly important role in every sport. But when it came to identifying which sport would be the best fit for further innovation and new standards of reliability and affordability, baseball stood out. Like no other, baseball is a game of numbers: from coaches to players, analytics are used to make a difference in training, in drafting, in recovering and are determining for athletes aspiring to a career in the sport.”

Rapsodo Baseball has made numerous evolutions from its conceptualization until its release. Over the year and a half spent creating Rapsodo Baseball, Okur explained that “there were many iterations of this technology. We did many experiments [and the final product] is the result of hard work from our engineers.”

“Rapsodo Baseball is a proprietary combination of radar and camera for high speed imaging. What makes this product unique is that this combination allows for a smaller sized product, and thus a device that is lightweight, portable and easy to set up. These precision technologies working together are able to capture accurate pitch data. Rapsodo has elaborated specific algorithms to figure the data specifically to baseball. Among other patent-pending features, the product tracks the ball seam to measure both spin rotation and spin axis” explained Okur. The Rapsodo Baseball device is  delivered with a tripod stand so it can easily be assembled in an optimum position for measurement (i.e. “six feet from the back of home plate, behind the catcher”).

Rapsodo’s cutting edge tech delivers professional grade data to its users and is accessible to all, making this “the first affordable solution that brings elite training technology to all levels of baseball.” Typically, this sort of technology is reserved for professional baseball organizations and not available to teams at other levels. The unavailability of similar technology to non-professional level teams created a gap in the market for Okur’s technology, allowing Rapsodo Baseball to democratize the availability of advanced pitching analytics. According to Okur, while there are similar devices available on the market, such as radar guns, most only collect single measures of data. Raspodo Baseball provides accurate metrics on a wide range of player data.

After combining the captured images and other data recorded, a user can view the pitching insights immediately on a tablet or mobile device on Rapsodo’s free application via either a Wi-Fi or USB connection. The data and visuals presented to the user includes pitch velocity, pitch count, spin rate, spin axis, 3-D trajectory, vertical and horizontal break, and strike zone analysis.

Rapsodo Baseball’s key features include a multi-player mode, with pitching profiles and detailed history for each player, presented in either a metrics table or visual mode. The data can also be filtered by date to focus on progress over a particular period of time.

Typically, professional-grade devices of this nature are often a fixed installation at stadiums that generally only record data collected during games but not practices. However, Rapsodo Baseball is portable, can be used on a field or indoors, and is simple to set up. Rapsodo Baseball can measure players at all levels – from amateur highschool players to MLB pros – so no adjustments are necessary while using this technology at different levels.

Okur stressed, “we are here to be a part of this fantastic community and to help the sport grow. We would like to help coaches and players at every level and fuel the development of a new set of players who are better than ever.”