Beyond the more obvious impact of the pandemic shutdown on our daily lives, baseball has had to rethink the way it does things. One of those is the shift in scouting from a phalanx of radar guns in high school stands and belly-to-belly meetings at the kitchen table to Zoom calls and Twitter videos with embedded velocity readings from Pocket Radar.
There had already been momentum in that direction long before the world hit the pause button, but both necessity and a little ingenuity from Rob Friedman pressed fast forward on scouting. Better known as Pitching Ninja to the Twitter-literate, Friedman’s Flatground Pitching initiative is “Harnessing the power of social media to break down barriers & prevent pitchers from falling thru the cracks.