New UW technology could be a game-changer for baseball players

New technology under development at the University of Waterloo (UW) has the potential to revolutionize how baseball teams scout and evaluate pitching prospects.

Right now, all Major League Baseball (MLB) stadiums are equipped with a system called Hawk-Eye. It uses multiple cameras to capture high-resolution, digital images of players, which can be used to analyze mechanics and other metrics important to evaluating player performance.

Hawk-Eye is a state-of-the-art system that comes at a state-of-the-art price, way out of the range of teams in the lower levels.

That is where PitcherNet steps in.

PitcherNet has been developed through a partnership between UW’s Department of System Design Engineering and the Baltimore Orioles.

John Zelek, co-director, Vision, Image Processing Lab at UW and is the professor overseeing the project. He told 570 NewsRadio the process starts in the stands with a scout capturing images of the pitcher with a smartphone.

“That information would be processed through our AI (artificial intelligence), and then the biomechanics would look at it and they would determine if this person has the potential to have a long career or is there something, in terms of how they throw the ball, that they would be prone to injury.”

Zelek said PitcherNet takes the eye-test scouts are so famous for, and puts actual numbers behind it.

“Provides a way of providing quantitative analysis to the decision maker. So, the scout comes back with their report ‘I really like how this guy throws,’ Now they have quantitative data to look at to see if it balances what the scout is reporting,” he said.

Zelek describes PitcherNet as an information gathering tool, which, given the fact that it uses a smartphone, would make it useful to lower-tier leagues and even high school baseball programs.

The project is still under development with Zelek saying the team is continuing to refine the technology.