Thursday, June 5, 2008

SmartSports hopes its SmartKage electronic batting cages are a hit

By Efrain Viscarolosaga

Think your high-schooler has what it takes to play in the major leagues? A Westford company can prove (or disprove) it with hard numbers and technology.

SmartSports LLC has developed an electronic environment — called a SmartKage — designed to quantitatively measure a baseball or softball player’s ability. Its technology goes far beyond the radar gun and stopwatch, according to company officials, and after five years of quietly building its base, the company has landed $400,000 in private funding to begin rolling out its product.

Private investors include Stuart Porter, a managing partner at Boston-based Denham Capital Management, who has been working with the company since its inception in 2003.

The company has secured contracts with 170 independently owned training facilities across the country to host the SmartKages and will begin installations in the fall. The eventual goal is 300 sites in North America. The company expects that if all goes according to plan it will be profitable a year after the first units are installed.

The four-person company is led by CEO Corrine Vitolo, a sports marketing veteran and founder of Performance Promotions Inc., along with founder and COO Larry Scannell, a former minor league baseball player. The pair is secretive when discussing the details of the technology, but said it uses a combination of motion capture and Doppler radar technologies to create a “sensorized batting cage,” capable of measuring dozens of different metrics, including bat speed and power ratios, reaction time and balance for hitters, and ball movement, break angles and the spin axis for pitchers.

The product comes in two iterations: a retail version for high school players and a professional version for colleges and major league teams. The retail version aims to help high school kids quantify their athletic abilities and submit their results to colleges, much like they do with their academic test scores, said Scannell.

On the professional level, officials said they have been encouraging several major league teams to adopt the technology. While most want to use the SmartKage for scouting and to track the health and effectiveness of their players, others have been creative enough to inquire about the possibility of using them in game situations, such as in the bullpen as a relief pitcher warms up.

While such scenarios are purely hypothetical at this point, scouting trends in baseball and other sports have been embracing the use of data acquisition and compilation. Sabermetrics, a method of compiling and examining baseball statistics in a purely objective manner, has become mainstream in Major League Baseball. “With Sabermetrics and other systems, you’re going on past performance, but once you have (real time) quantifiable data, you can start looking at current trends,” Scannell said.