The Tampa Bay Rays are reportedly in a position to change the way the game of baseball is studied, as they are looking into using a motion capture system called Kinatrax to breakdown the mechanics of their pitchers and opposing pitchers.
Here are details from Yahoo:
In the quest to keep arms healthy, the Tampa Bay Rays have always positioned themselves ahead of baseball, emphasizing a comprehensive shoulder-strengthening program long before other teams caught on. Now the Rays are hoping technology can give them a step up, too.
The Rays will be the first team to install Kinatrax, a markerless motion-capture system, in their stadium, sources told Yahoo Sports. An announcement touting the move is expected Monday.
Kinatrax uses ultra-high-speed cameras and aims to capture the sort of biomechanical data that previously necessitated the placement of reflective markers on different body parts. Should Kinatrax do what it purports to, it would revolutionize baseball by offering looks at pitchers’ in-game biomechanics instead of those revealed in laboratory settings.
By installing Kinatrax at Tropicana Field, not only do the Rays get to analyze their own pitchers, they can track opponents’ biomechanics. Exactly how they will interpret the data is unclear, especially in the immediate future, but years worth of data could provide patterns that show typical biomechanical traits of pitchers who get hurt vs. those who stay healthy. One of the Rays’ analysts, Josh Kalk, was a noted guru in analyzing PITCHf/x data before he joined the team in 2009.
While Kinatrax’s current version measures the angles and velocities of bones and joints, future versions hope to calculate stress and strain on tendons and ligaments – a potential landmark leap that theoretically would show signs of pitchers whose ulnar collateral ligaments are in peril.
Live in-game data from Kinatrax will not immediately be available. Each pitch is 1.3 gigabytes per camera, and with eight cameras, there are upwards of two terabytes of data per game. Kinatrax will upload data from a game into cloud storage, and it will be ready for the Rays to analyze the next day.
This is absolutely fascinating to see, as it could completely change the way teams study the game and prepare for pitchers. While we aren’t sure how much this will effect the game just yet, it is intriguing to know that technology like this exists and is available for usage.