Need A Swing Fix? There’s An App For That - BaseballAmerica.com

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Don Slaught was a numbers guy as a player, when he hit .283 over 16 big league seasons (Photo byMorris Fostoff)

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Need A Swing Fix? There’s An App For That

May 1, 2015 by DeMarco Williams

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Don Slaught’s current job is going pretty well, so you won’t find him complaining much. Butshould you prod just a bit, he will hint at one regret.

“I wish I could play with the knowledge that I have now,” says Slaught, a platoon catcher in themajors in the 1980s and ’90s who tallied more than 1,000 hits with teams such as the Royals,

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Need A Swing Fix? There’s An App For That - BaseballAmerica.com

http://www.baseballamerica.com/majors/need-swing-fix-theres-app/[6/29/2015 10:08:36 PM]

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Rangers and Pirates. “There were things that I was still doing wrong that could have helped meeven more.”

What Slaught is modestly omitting is that his batting average did steadily ascend during hiscareer. In fact, he hit .264 in 1986, .283 in ’88, .300 in ’90 and a robust .345 in ’92. By the timehe retired in ’97, Slaught’s resume included six seasons where he had at least 200 at-bats andhit over .300.

Slaught has always been a numbers guy. Even when he was a spry young fellow at UCLA in theearly 1980s, he was enamored with statistics. “I did a study with my professor on the marginalrevenue product of a ballplayer,” he says. “In other words, we took five years of major leaguedata and we threw it into a supercomputer.”

Mind you, the only WAR people knew back then was an R&B/funk group out of Long Beach. “Ifyou gave me the ERAs, the team batting average, home runs and that kind of stuff,” Slaughtsays, “we could predict winning percentage with 90 percent reliability.”

That love of data is essentially what led Slaught to the venture RightView Pro, a SouthernCalifornia company that’s been part of the movement to slowly change the way batters approachthe plate for more than a decade. With smartphone camera lens kits, memory cards, apps andother easy-to-use gadgets, the video analysis system seems to have hit its stride.

Coaches and players see the inefficiencies in swings and have the capacity to make adjustmentswith relative ease. And because it’s licensed by Major League Baseball, RVP can produce side-by-side video comparisons with studs like Andrew McCutchen and Robinson Cano.

But no matter if we’re talking about the Seattle Mariners or West Seattle High, it all comes downto seeing your errors and making proper adjustments.

“Back in 2003,” Slaught says, “Greg Walker got the hitting coach job with the Chicago White Sox.He called me like three days later (and said), ‘Don, Frank Thomas is all messed up. How do I tellhim?’

“I said, ‘You don’t tell him. You take a picture and show him what he used to do when he washitting .350 and what he’s doing now hitting .250. Just put it in his locker and he’ll come downand say, ‘What is this?’ and you’ll get your chance.’ ”

He did. Thomas finished the year with 42 home runs and 105 RBIs.

Union Men

Much like RVP, Zepp is another California-based company giving young sluggers a visual tutorialabout what they’re doing properly and not with the bat by reviewing swings through the use of 3-D analytics found on an app and on-device sensor.

“There’s a lot of power in being more aware of what’s going on with your swing,” says PaulPapageorge, Zepp’s senior vice president of marketing. “Whether you’re a player or a coach, toget the breakthrough, to be able to better understand your swing, it means so much. We’vealways tried to coach and teach and learn things like ‘short to the ball’ and ‘attack angles.’ Now,we’re actually able to measure it instantly and see if we’re improving in those areas.”

Once Papageorge names a few of the line’s endorsers—the list ranges from 2014 AmericanLeague MVP Mike Trout to Tim Walton, head coach of the 2014 NCAA champion University ofFlorida’s softball team—the products essentially sell themselves. But on the off chance that shinytrophies aren’t convincing enough, Zepp’s simplicity sure is.

Once the sensor is attached to the end of a bat—Zepp also analyzes golf swings and tennisstrokes with detailed measurements—and the player hits the field, thousands of pieces of dataare collected and conclusions for improvement are drawn.

Do you need to angle your bat more to pull to your left? Are you repeatedly missing your sweetspot? Could your hips be preventing you from distributing optimal force? With a click here and alook there, anyone can find their answers.

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Need A Swing Fix? There’s An App For That - BaseballAmerica.com

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Of course, companies such as Zepp and RVP aren’t the first ones to address these kinds ofquestions with a futuristic eye. The likes of Hittinguru 3D and Motion Pro, not to mention adugout full of swing-assessing apps, have all stepped to the plate with varying levels of success.But where others have swung and foul tipped, Zepp’s partnership with the MLB PlayersAssociation (nothing like seeing how your swing stacks up to David Ortiz’s) and its overall user-friendliness keep it going strong.

And that’s never been more evident than with the April debut of the Zepp Coaches Center, a sortof site-within-a-site for leaders on all levels for software demonstrations, drill tips and otherhelpful bits of information to employ.

“We understand the life of a coach,” Papageorge says. “There’s a lot to running a practice. Wewant to make it as easy as possible for coaches to adopt the technology.”

Trevor Stocking, Zepp’s baseball product manager, adds: “We wanted to speak their language(with the Coaches Center). We do come from the Silicon Valley, but our background is coachingand getting down in the dirt, and that’s how we want everything to come out.”

But no matter how many times skippers watch videos or how many occasions players downloadapps, when it ultimately comes time to connect an Easton bat with a Rawlings ball, instincts andpreparedness are the most important factors.

“You can’t think and hit,” says Slaught, squandering any worry you may have about youngplayers having information overload at the plate. “You can’t do a complicated task with consciousthought. Basically, when you’re hammering a nail, you’re not thinking about the release of yourelbow or releasing your wrist. You’re just looking at the nail. If you swing and miss, you justswing again.”

With the right data, though, that number of misses should come down significantly.

DeMarco Williams is a freelance writer based in Atlanta.

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obsessivegiantscompulsive • 2 months ago

Nice article. Technology for this is getting so good, I wish I was my son's age sothat I could play around more with that tech.

Regarding "You’re just looking at the nail. If you swing and miss, you just swingagain,” it is not quite the same. If you swing and miss in baseball, you just swingagain. You swing and miss in hammering a nail, you might be missing a finger (orat least it would be severely swollen).

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