Reboot Spotlight: Bat Tracking
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Our Reboot Spotlight series is a new one where I sit down with members of the Reboot team and have them discuss their work.
I recently sat down with Jacob Howenstein, one of our Senior Biomechanists, to dive into our addition of bat tracking to our video based motion capture offering.
The following is a recap of this improvement- and how we think it helps pro orgs.
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Reboot Motion does not consider itself to be a motion capture company. In fact, I’ve written explicitly on this before (see: Everything We’re Not).
With that said, our long-term goal is to be the world’s best movement analysis platform, and our current mission is to enable large organizations to excel in biomechanics at scale.
To get there, we need to work tirelessly to solve our partners’ pain points. And one thing we hear over and over again is a strong need for a reliable and flexible way to capture movement data.
This realization is why we built baseball’s best single camera motion capture in 2022.
It is why we improved on it with further validation last year.
And it is why we are taking another step and adding bat tracking to our hitting single camera motion capture for 2024.
Giving Teams a Holistic View
MLB front offices spend every waking hour looking for an advantage. Data capture is one of the many areas where they leave no stone unturned, as it is a key step in unlocking tomorrow’s edge.
In most cases- whether in the game or in the lab- teams have access to HawkEye, KinaTrax, or some other marker-less system that provides what they need.
But most cases isn’t all cases. There are:
Times when coaches are working with players outside of the lab,
Minor league affiliates that don’t have the same tech budgets,
Scouts on the road, who need to merge objective data with their subjective takeaways.
And for those situations, teams still need answers. It is our job to support their efforts in finding them.
While the tracer overlay and skeleton are cool to look at, what is important is what they represent- continuity.
For both pitching and hitting, we already deliver skeletal data that mirrors what clubs receive from their marker-less systems.
On the hitting side, that now comes with bat tracking- returning the (X, Y, Z) positions of the bat tip and handle throughout the swing.
Helping Large Organizations Excel in Biomechanics at Scale
It is our job to help those in the arena- biomechanists, analysts, coaches- help their teams win. We do that by ensuring they have all the tools necessary at their disposal.
Clubs already have in-game motion capture covered. And they already have options for fully built out pitching and hitting labs. What they don’t have is a trustworthy complement for situations when those aren’t possible. And they specifically don’t have one designed for pro organizations that easily fit into their daily workflow and match the data they’re used to.
So, if you’re looking to give your decision makers the tools they need, reach out and see if we can help.