The numbers, and there are tons of them, behind South Carolina baseball resurgence

There might not be crying in baseball, but there’s math these days – lots and lots of math.

One of the oldest and most hidebound games in the history of sports is adopting technology to such an immersive degree that virtually everything in the game is now being measured and tabulated and spit out of computers for evaluation by players and coaches. Even the venerable home run has been broken down into a mathematical equation — a 95 mph exit velocity plus a 35 degree launch angle equals a slow jog around the bases.

What in the world are “exit velocity” and “launch angle”? Mark Kingston the baseball player had no idea. Mark Kingston, the University of South Carolina baseball coach, can give you chapter and verse.

“My last few days as a player, we started using video to evaluate players,” said Kingston, who finished up a five-year Minor League career in 1997. “To me, that was the start of using technology to help you. Before that, you went out on the field, you took batting practice, you took ground balls, and there was really no way off the field to help yourself. I think that advent of video started people figuring out, ‘How can we do things off the field to help players and help coaches evaluate how games are won?’ Slowly from there it went into evaluating data and then all the way up to modern day.”

The modern day includes technology like TrackMan, HitTrax, Synergy, StatCast and BATS, some of which South Carolina’s baseball team is using for the first time in Kingston’s first season. The Gamecocks (26-18 overall, 11-10 SEC) have won six of their past seven games heading into this weekend’s series against No. 4 Ole Miss (35-11, 12-9).

The TrackMan and HitTrax systems both are new this season “thanks to a very generous donation from one of our supporters,” Kingston said.

The TrackMan system alone costs between $25,000 and $30,000, according to online estimates.

“Our guys were on board right away. These days, kids like information,” Kingston said. “They like to get things that can help them. As soon as they got to see, ‘How hard am I hitting the ball? Where can I make improvements?’ They were all in on it.”

Well, maybe not right away.

“I wasn’t too sure of it at first because I didn’t know how accurate it would be, but after using it for a couple of weeks, it really gives you good feedback on what’s important and what’s not important,” senior first baseman Madison Stokes said. “When you get instant feedback, it gives you an idea in the back of your head. We really try to take advantage of those machines they’ve given us.”

The machines like Stokes, too. He has the highest exit velocity on the team, a fact he couldn’t have bragged about to his teammates last year because the Gamecocks weren’t measuring it. Exit velocity is the speed of the ball when it leaves the bat; and Stokes’ best this season is 113 mph, tops on the team. His average of 96 mph is also a team high. Forty-four percent of his batted balls have left at more than 100 mph. His next-closest teammate is at 27 percent.

Exit velocity is just one of many data points measured by TrackMan. For pitchers, it tracks not just pitch speed but spin rate and how far from the pitching rubber the pitcher releases the ball.

“Spin rate is kind of a fad thing right now,” South Carolina assistant coach Mike Current said.

Spin rate is simply that – how fast the thrown ball is spinning. That’s important because it affects how much the ball falls between when it leaves the pitchers hand and when it crosses home plate.

“So much of hitting is your eyes and your brain predicting where the ball will go. At a normal spin rate, your eyes get used to predicting where that ball will go. A 90 mph fastball gets to the plate in .4 seconds,” Kingston said. “A lot of it is predicting where it’s going and taking your swing there. A spin rate that is higher or lower than normal almost tricks the eyes. That’s why spin rates are important. You want to find guys who are above or below the average spin rate, because now a fastball that a hitter predicts will land in one spot is a little bit below that and you get a ground ball or higher than that and now you get a lot of pop-ups.”

While the coaches might not be able to teach a player to have a higher spin rate, they can advise a pitcher with a high spin rate to work high in the strike zone because their pitch will stay up there and give that effect of a rising fastball, which doesn’t rise at all but doesn’t fall as quickly as the batter’s eyes have predicted that it will based on spin rate.

The measurements taken by these new technologies aren’t estimates either. They are precise. For instance, TrackMan tells the coaches that Adam Hill releases his pitches 6.34 feet from the rubber, while Carmen Mlodzinski releases his pitches 5.49 feet from the rubber. So, while both pitchers top out at around 95 mph, Hill’s pitches look faster to a hitter because they are released closer to the plate. That information can help pitching coach Skylar Meade work with Mlodzinski on extending his release point.

“This information is all so new, we’re still trying to get our hands around it,” Current said.

USC’s Darla Moore School of Business is helping. Stacey Mumbower, the school’s director of the Center for Applied Business Analytics, leads a team at the business school that is working to crunch all the numbers generated by the new technology and give them back to the baseball team in a more usable form.

“She’s been awesome,” Current said.

While the TrackMan is just one of the Gamecocks’ new tools, it’s the one that Kingston would pick if he was transported back to the game’s beginnings, when all of this would have looked like alien technology.

“Because it helps your hitters and your pitchers,” he said. “I think that would be the one you would take. I’d love to see, ‘What was Babe Ruth’s exit velocity when he hit one of his 700-plus home runs?’ I’d love to see how far they went. I’d love to see Sandy Koufax or Cy Young, ‘What was their spin rate compared to the modern day?’ That would be really cool to see.”

The Gamecocks are not the most technologically advanced team in college baseball, but they’d like to be, their coach said.

“We want to be known as progressive as any team in the country while maintaining still an old-school approach to baseball and work ethic,” he said. “We’re by far not the only team in the country using this. A lot of programs with the proper resources are trying to get every edge as well. At this point, I wouldn’t say we’re the lead dog in this whole thing, but we’re trying to catch up as fast as we can.”

This story was originally published May 3, 2018 at 6:05 PM with the headline "The numbers, and there are tons of them, behind South Carolina baseball resurgence."