The Rays already have had a
comprehensive shoulder-strengthening program. As a small market team, the Rays are keen on keeping controllable pitchers healthy.
The Rays will be the first team
to install Kinatrax, a markerless motion-capture system, in their
stadium, sources told Yahoo Sports. An announcement touting the move is
expected Monday.
Kinatrax uses ultra-high-speed
cameras and aims to capture the sort of biomechanical data that
previously necessitated the placement of reflective markers on different
body parts. Should Kinatrax do what it purports to, it would
revolutionize baseball by offering looks at pitchers’ in-game
biomechanics instead of those revealed in laboratory settings.
Motion capture itself is not a new technology. Motion picture studios have been using it for a long time for CGI and animated films. In those applications, an actor is placed in front of the blue screen with various dots on a body suit. The cameras pick up the dots (which are aligned to body parts like legs, arms, joints, etc.). Those dots are then imported into a computer which creates realistic bone skeleton motion in which CFI layers can be applied to create characters.
By installing Kinatrax at
Tropicana Field, Passan writes, not only do the Rays get to analyze their own pitchers,
they can also track opponents’ biomechanics. The collection of data could provide patterns that show typical biomechanical
traits of pitchers who get hurt vs. those who stay healthy.
While Kinatrax’s current version measures the angles and velocities of bones and joints, future versions hope to calculate stress and strain on tendons and ligaments – a potential landmark leap that theoretically would show signs of pitchers whose ulnar collateral ligaments are in peril.
Live in-game data from Kinatrax
will not immediately be available. Each pitch is 1.3 gigabytes per
camera, and with eight cameras, there are upwards of two terabytes of
data per game. Kinatrax will upload data from a game into cloud storage,
and it will be ready for the Rays to analyze the next day.
After years of healthy starting
rotations helped propel them into the playoffs, the Rays in the last
year-plus have seen a rash of starters go down. First was Matt Moore,
who is close to returning from Tommy John surgery. Ace Alex Cobb
underwent Tommy John early this season, and fellow starter Drew Smyly
has been sidelined with a shoulder injury for a majority of the season.
Nevertheless, the Rays are tied
for first place in the American League East at 35-29 with the New York
Yankees, whose opening day payroll was three times the size of Tampa
Bay’s $76 million.
