Major league players can now review video at their lockers or nearly anywhere using Pitch Review. It costs $ 700 a season.
One of the many routines that baseball players follow before a game is to wander into the video room at a stadium. There, hitters can watch video of their recent at-bats, and pitchers can get a look at the tendencies of coming opponents.
But a growing number of players are spending less time slumped in front of a desktop computer and instead are preparing at their lockers, in their hotel rooms or on team planes, and nearly anywhere else by using their iPads and software created by Bloomberg Sports.
About 150 major league players and coaches, like Travis Hafner, Jose Molina and C. J. Wilson, pay $ 700 a season for a subscription to Pitch Review, which tailors baseball’s statistical database and video of every pitch thrown to the needs of each player.
With the touch of a few buttons, hitters can watch recent outings by pitchers that they will soon face, or pitchers can review hitters’ at-bats. The video can be sorted by pitch type or result, hit type or result, ball-and-strike count, number of outs and runners on base. If players want, they can watch entire games in at-bat-size chunks, one after another.
“It just ratchets up the information each team has and makes the chess game even more interesting,” said Bill Squadron, the president of Bloomberg Sports. “It’s very individual because each player can use it the way they want.”
Bloomberg Sports, which licenses the data and video from Major League Baseball Advanced Media, was already selling an analytics product to teams. Pitch Review, which is a subset of that product, was introduced for the iPad last season and updated this year.
Players who downloaded the video using Wi-Fi viewed 207,000 events, or pitches, in June, 45 percent more than in April. About one-third of the subscribers are pitchers, 35 percent are front-office staff and coaches, and catchers make up a big part of the rest.
John Buck, the veteran catcher who guides the Mets’ young pitching staff, was one of the first players to use the product. When he came up with the Kansas City Royals several years ago, Buck had stacks of DVDs in his locker, which he would view on a laptop or DVD player that he lugged around. Often, the DVDs were of games that were played two or three days before. He also thumbed through scouting reports.
With Pitch Review, games are often available to download within 20 minutes of their completion, which means Buck and other players can prepare while en route to their next opponent’s city. Last year, Bloomberg added a function that allows players to download video so they can watch it in places where Wi-Fi is unavailable, like on a plane.
Buck continues to read scouting reports, but Pitch Review lets him see things that may not be in the reports. For instance, a scout might say that an opposing pitcher has a good slider. But Buck said he may want to know where he throws it, in what situations and to which batters, and whether the pitcher is hitting the catcher’s target.
“As a catcher, I want to see why he missed a pitch within the flow of the game,” Buck said as he flipped through at-bats by the Arizona Diamondbacks from the previous night’s game. “If a hitter is hot and he’s hitting, or he’s cold and he’s swinging and missing, I want to see where. If he is being overly aggressive, I want to see that and use that against him. “
Pitch Review, Buck said, is also useful to study rookies and other players he had not seen before.
Buck says he also watches his at-bats to make sure his form is consistent. If he thinks something is wrong, he uses the send function to e-mail video of some of his at-bats to a former teammate who now works as a hitting coach.
With his batting average near .200, Buck said he preferred to focus on his hits, not his misses. To do that, he can press the “highlight” button.
“If you want to end the night feeling good, you just sit there and watch basically this highlight reel of home runs, doubles, good swings,” Buck said as he replayed a recent two-run homer he hit in a lopsided loss.
Heath Bell, a Diamondbacks reliever, said he did not watch his own pitches. Instead, he watches recent at-bats by hitters he may face in a coming series, particularly those late in games.
Bell and Buck said the system had shortcomings, most notably mistakenly labeled pitches. Pitch Review shows video from television feeds, and teams have video taken from other angles. This helps Bell analyze his arm angle.
Bell said he liked the convenience of studying on the iPad, but that he did not want to get too reliant on watching video.
“In the last five years, there’s been too much information, people are reading too much into stuff,” he said. “Sometimes, gut instinct works.”
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