[Medium] Baseball’s Next Defining Innovation is Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Tracking the Path of Every Swing is a Must for MLB Teams

I first heard that bat tracking may become a reality in a 2019 article in The Athletic announcing Hawkeye as the league’s new on-field tracking system. The article includes a letter to MLB teams from Chris Marinak, MLB’s executive vice president, strategy, technology and innovation where he says of Hawkeye:

“We expect this next generation system to significantly improve the accuracy and precision of ball and player tracking and unlock new tracking opportunities like bat swing path tracking and player limb tracking.”

He later mentioned that the “swing path tracking” feature would be “released over time” indicating it would not be included in the 2020 launch of the Hawkeye system league-wide.  That was essentially the last I heard publicly about bat tracking becoming a reality in MLB.

Can you identify when a hitter recognizes and reacts to a pitch in the air? What does that tell you about pitch recognition for each pitcher or hitter or pitch type or sequence?

**Since publication, I have learned that most (if not all) teams are receiving bat tracking data from Hawkeye. However, it seems that it is being delivered as raw data that requires each team to make a significant investment of time and resources to convert it into a more usable format.