CARLSBAD – When pitchers and catchers report to spring training this week, they’re likely to spend much of their time on high-speed camera, staring at a digital tablet, or both.
Major League Baseball’s annual spring pilgrimage to Florida and Arizona has always been characterized by players experimenting with and honing new skills, arriving in considerably better physical shape than they ended the prior season and shaking off the frost of winter.
The sport’s most recent decade, however, has also been dominated by a quest for players, coaches and their teams to use data and biomechanical training to approach the limits of human performance, both for hitters and pitchers.
While it’s known primarily as a golf technology company, Full Swing Sports is now entering this metaphorical and somewhat literal arms race.
An Aid in Aggregating Data
“What a lot of coaches have to do now is they have to invest time, effort and money into taking all that data and aggregating it so they can get the full picture,” said Kyle Attl, Full Swing Sports’ director of strategic partnerships. “For Full Swing, we wanted to bring all that into one solution.”
Full Swing recently debuted its KIT portable launch monitor for baseball, using radar technology to provide data in real time about how hard a player hits the ball, the angle and direction at which it leaves the bat, how fast a pitch spins and the quality and efficiency of a hitter’s bat-to-ball contact.
The KIT also records video of each swing taken or pitch thrown and provides three-dimensional graphics based on a player’s performance, enabling users to view where a batted ball may land on a real baseball field even if they’re only training inside a standard batting cage. All of the KIT’s information is displayed both on a connected tablet or computer and sent to a user in the Full Swing app after their session is complete.
Performance data for hitters and pitchers has been available to professional teams and players, as well as high-end training facilities and large college programs, for several years in the form of tools like the Trackman launch monitor, Blast Motion bat sensors and Sony’s Hawk-Eye technology, an optical tracking system installed in every MLB stadium.
But those systems are often prohibitively expensive for anyone other than professional players and their organizations or wealthy amateurs, costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The KIT’s $6,499 price point, by contrast, allows Full Swing to serve the entire market, Attl argued.
“The people at the facility level, high school level, maybe the college level, DIII and below where their budgets aren’t as huge but they’ve wanted a Trackman or a HitTrax or, in general, they just want the data for their players because that’s where the game is going and that information is helpful, the biggest part is that price point for them is going to be huge,” he said.
The KIT system is also appealing to professional players and organizations, he added, because it provides streamlined data to users almost instantly along with video, whereas existing tech provides similarly comprehensive data but often requires a professional data analyst to translate it to players and coaches.
“We’ve hit with big leaguers in the cage, we give them a demo, and then the hitting coach’s son happens to be there, so you’ve got a big leaguer, and then a 10-year-old and then a big leaguer going in right after him, and (we’re) able to capture each swing without needing to put a Blast Motion sensor on a bat or change any setup,” Attl said.
Roots in the Golf World
Full Swing was originally founded with a focus on golf training technology and still maintains that focus, with its office sitting adjacent to the Crossings at Carlsbad golf course.
The company has grown to become the official licensed simulator of the PGA Tour and an official technology partner of the TGL, a hybrid golf league co-founded by the PGA Tour, sports and media executive Mike McCarley and professional golfers Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy that incorporates elements of both traditional golf and simulated indoor golf.
Full Swing has long been partnered with Woods, who has praised the realism of the company’s golf simulation and launch-monitoring technology.
The baseball version of the KIT launch monitor, which spent roughly two years in development, marks Full Swing’s official foray outside of golf, driven in part by the mechanical similarities between golf and baseball swings.
The system has already garnered the attention of Marucci Sports, the baseball equipment company co-founded by former MLB players Kurt Ainsworth and Joe Lawrence and the official bat supplier of Major League Baseball.
In early January, Full Swing and Marucci Sports announced a strategic partnership between the two companies, under which Marucci will serve as the exclusive sales and distribution partner for the KIT system.
“We’ve built Marucci around understanding what players need to perform at their best,” Ainsworth stated. “The Full Swing KIT complements our commitment to innovation and gives athletes access to precise, usable data. This partnership allows us to expand the tools available to players in a meaningful way.”
Attl said Full Swing’s primary goal in launching the KIT is to create a paradigm shift among baseball players of all ages and experience levels.
“Our goal is to modernize the game and disrupt the market, and I think that’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “The baseball space in general really needed a push forward, and I think it’s really fun to be a part of the group that’s going to be doing that.”
Full Swing
FOUNDED: 1986
CEO: Ryan Dotters
HEADQUARTERS: Carlsbad
BUSINESS: Sports data and simulator technology
EMPLOYEES: Nearly 300
WEBSITE: fullswingsports.com
CONTACT: (858) 675-1100
NOTABLE: Full Swing has a long-standing partnership with Tiger Woods, who uses the company’s golf simulation and swing tracking technology as part of his training program.
Eli is an award-winning reporter primarily covering the tech and life sciences industries. He previously worked as the San Diego City Hall reporter for the regional wire City News Service. He has also covered public health, transportation and state and local politics in the San Francisco Bay Area for Local News Matters, the nonprofit arm of the regional wire Bay City News Service, where he also oversaw the development and daily content management of the outlet’s public health and COVID-19 news and resource webpage. He is also a contributing writer covering Minor League Baseball for the analysis and commentary website Baseball Prospectus. Eli is a graduate of San Francisco State University and a native of Northern California.
