The Toronto Blue Jays are smacking baseballs and sitting in second place in their division. But months before the start of the 2018 MLB season, the team made a deal with a sports technology company to study swing data, starting with an examination of their minor league players.
The team reached out to Diamond Kinetics, a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based company, and ordered 60 of their swing trackers, small devices that fit around the knob of a bat. The devices use gyroscopes and accelerometers to calculate all manner of swing data—bat speed, swing path, exit velocity, power, and send the information in real time to an app that can recreate the swing in a video simulation.