HOBOKEN, N.J. (July 23, 2020) – Launch angle. Exit velocity. Bat speed. Spin rate. Swing efficiency. Flight path. Arm angle. Attack angle. Analytics.

To some fans, these words or phrases represent a new era of baseball overrun by numbers and projections. For the Stevens Institute of Technology baseball program, however, these phrases are crucial for on-field success.

Michael Cornish, who is set to begin his senior year at Stevens in the fall of 2020, pitched the idea of an analytics team to head coach Kristaps Aldins in the fall of 2017. It has since grown to a group of six individuals comprised of Cornish, assistant coach Charles Thielmann, volunteer assistant coach and Stevens alumnus Jayson Yano, sophomore pitcher Mike Faria, junior pitcher Roy Iversen and junior applied mathematics student Greg Bender.

Aldins, who has been involved in collegiate baseball in some capacity since 2000, came to a quick decision to move forward with the analytics team at Stevens. The shift to analytics can prove cumbersome to some coaches who have seen their methods work well previously without the usage of new technologies. At Stevens, however, the decision to use the knowledge of the well-rounded individuals already on campus to enhance the performance of the team was an easy decision.

Working directly with Cornish, Aldins and the rest of the staff searched the campus for interested individuals who had the unique knowledge base of baseball as well as mathematics and analytics. The duo found Bender a short time later and the team flourished from there.

"There are so many new technologies available to us that we didn't have access to five, let alone 10 years ago," Aldins said. "Our coaching staff ultimately concluded, at a prestigious university like Stevens, we needed to search our campus for hard-working, smart, technologically-savvy, passionate and baseball-knowledgeable individuals. By working together with these bright minds, we felt that we could better use technology to our advantage."

The technologies Aldins, more affectionally known as "Coach Taps", is referring to are systems such as Rapsodo, Motus, Blast Motion and 6-4-3 Charts, which are designed to help the team improve its on-field performance both in the traditional game environment, as well as on the practice field. Just three seasons after the program was launched, the coaching staff uses these programs to present real-time data to the student-athletes in an effort to help them understand how they can improve their game.

"We usually have display boards up so that players can see their numbers in real time and make adjustments," Cornish said. "The data we collect is also used in formulating our team training plan, and in discussions with players at the beginning and end of the year, and in the future we are hoping that we can develop a clear link between performance data and in game decision making."

Rapsodo, the most commonly known analytics system in the baseball world, is a ground-based camera that can analyze data such as spin rate, spin axis, spin efficiency, horizontal and vertical break, and velocity for pitchers. For hitters, Rapsodo gathers data such as exit velocity, launch angle and projected flight path. All these things combined are presented to the student-athletes in practices to help players understand the "why" behind their successes or failures.

Faria, who serves as a player representative on the analytics team, has seen significant improvement on the mound in his own Rapsodo sessions as well as on the team.

"As a pitcher, Rapsodo has become a mainstay not only for me but surely the whole staff," Faria said. "Seeing how we are able to improve each [student-athlete] first-hand, by improving technique, and developing pitches, it's clear that Rapsodo is pivotal to our team's success. On a personal note, seeing the numbers output live allows for a little bit of extra competition with myself to push for higher velocity, better spin, and more."
 
Motus, meanwhile, is a sleeve worn by a pitcher while throwing, to track things such as arm angle, arm speed and shoulder rotation. It is used to build consistency with players who may struggle to repeat their motion. Pitchers who can repeat the same motion consistently while throwing have a greater chance of improving things like location and pitch velocity. According to Cornish, the analytics team logs all entries for each player and track them in real time, rather than the student-athletes "trying to guess at feeling their body move the same way over and over."
 
A new system the analytics team began working with during the abbreviated 2020 season is called Blast Motion. This sensor goes at the end of a player's bat and reads out metrics about a player's swing such as bat speed and attack angle.
 
"Attack angle is one of the crucial indicators of a solid swing," Cornish said. "In 2018, there were zero MLB players with a negative attack angle, and they typically average between 11 and 18 degrees. We then can turn around and show that data to the players to help them understand why they are or are not getting the results they want on the field."
 
Finally, 6-4-3 Charts is a service which provides spray charts of opponents to the analytics team as well as advanced statistics such as hitter tendencies on how often they hit a fly ball versus a ground ball or how often they swing and miss. This service gives the Ducks a wealth of data to use in-game for defensive shifts as well as for better situation pitch-calling against a certain hitter.
 
Bender, who was recently promoted to co-Coordinator of the Analytics Team alongside Cornish, then compiles the data onto an easy-to-understand excel spreadsheet and has already seen an increase in defensive efficiency, despite the season being cut short.
 
"I use these to create custom defensive shifts for each opposing hitter," Bender said. "I look over a player's spray charts against lefties and righties and assign each player a number for the position they'll be playing when that batter comes to the plate against a lefty or a righty.  These are put on a notecard, and every starting defensive player gets a copy of it to keep in their back pocket in the game to reference in between batters.  This helped us see a direct 3.3% increase in defensive efficiency, a level we have not seen in at least the last three years."
 
Several student-athletes have already seen improvements in their game since the introduction of analytics to the program. Rising junior infielder Chris Silos is among those benefitting from the program and was poised for a breakout season in 2020.
 
"I would say the implementation of analytics has helped me better understand my strengths as a hitter, specifically how to manage my strike zone," Silos said. "For example, using Rapsodo to track exit velocity during batting practice allows me to see which pitch locations I tend to hit harder, since it can sometimes be difficult to tell with the naked eye."
 
The numbers back up Silos' theory, who matched his hit total from 2019 in 2020 despite the premature shutdown of the 2020 season. The Bogota, New Jersey native also connected for first collegiate home run. Additionally, Silos needed seven fewer games to drive in more runs in 2020 than he did one season ago, while registering a hit in seven of his 11 starts.
 
The team has plans for even more implementation of analytical data in the future as well. Stevens' biomechanics department is currently in the process of building a motion analysis lab on campus. The team hopes to work with them in the future with Iversen, who is a recent addition to the analytics team, helping to lead the charge.
 
"Player development will be able to be seen [in the motion analysis lab] by studying the muscle activation of key muscles within a pitcher's delivery or batter's swing," Iversen said. "Inefficiencies can then be targeted and used to develop workout plans that can help increase strength in certain, weaker muscles of a given player. The hope is to see improvement of repeatable mechanics, as well as strength from this data collection."

In addition to its impact on individual student-athletes, the analytics team has also positively affected the program's on-field product since its inception prior to the 2018 season. Stevens captured its first regular season Empire 8 Conference title in 2018 with a 15-3 conference record and followed it up by going 13-5 in conference play to earn the #2 seed in the Empire 8 Tournament in 2019. Additionally, alumnus Charlie Ruegger was the second Stevens player selected in the Major League Baseball First Year Player Draft in 2018, when the New York Yankees made the Morris Plains, New Jersey native their 33rd round pick.

"Ultimately Charlie's pitching ability, makeup, work ethic, and potential for future development were responsible for him being selected by the Yankees," Aldins said. "But there were some moments in time where we may have been able to demonstrate a certain metric from the readings we gathered from Charlie's Rapsodo sessions that may have been helpful. As with all technology, it can help validate things that the eyes have seen. In this sense, the work our analytics team did with Charlie and Rapsodo definitely made a positive impact throughout the process."

The new data has caused a shift in coaching philosophies across baseball. Often, prior to numbers telling the story, baseball coaches and scouts would have to rely on their eyes and instincts to determine the positives and negatives about a player. While these instincts are still used every day, they are much more powerful when the numbers back up what the eyes are interpreting.

Yano works closely with the analytics team and has watched his coaching style transform over a short period of time.

"Overall, our analytics team has empowered us, as coaches, to use information to our advantage - we still very much coach with our 'instincts' or 'feel'," Yano said. "If the data and our instincts differ, it allows us to re-evaluate our decision making and determine the best course of action in a very objective manner. But when data and our instincts align, then it's a no brainer decision. Overall, and most importantly, analytics has helped me answer the 'why?' question with our players. Most players want to know 'why do you want me to make this change?' - with the data, I can show the player 'why' a slight swing change would benefit them and how it translates to in-game performance."

For Aldins, though, the on-field success only tells part of the story of the analytics program.

"To say this analytics team is only about winning baseball games would be doing it a great injustice," Aldins said. "What this is really about is what it can do for our baseball student-athletes, individuals outside of our baseball program who want to be part of a team at some capacity, our coaches' professional development, and hopefully eventually be something that the Stevens community can be proud of. The creation of this analytics team is about providing opportunities for people to be part of something special, building relationships, and working together as a team towards a common goal."

Additionally, it provides students with the opportunity to improve their resumes and go on to work for professional sports organizations if they so choose. Major League Baseball organizations have been at the forefront of the analytics movement for some time. All 32 organizations have some type of team focused on things such as sabermetrics and other data-driven aspects of the game and are using the same systems (Rapsodo being the most prevalent) Stevens is using. The training, Aldins says, can prove to be invaluable.

"The type of experience that members of an analytics team acquire could, without a doubt, help an individual gain the necessary skills to make a career in baseball and maybe catch the eye of a professional organization," Aldins said. "This is something that is not uncommon these days at universities like Stevens as many major league organizations are currently mining the college ranks to help their own organizations succeed."

With just two full seasons of actual games with the analytics team intact, the work has just begun for Aldins and his crew. In an ideal world, the data will be used in the future to identify direct areas of development for each student-athlete and use that data to understand how it correlates to in-game deficiencies.

"We hope the analytics team is able to collect more in-game data [in the future]," Yano said. "Currently, our technology is only collected in a practice environment in which we replicate gameplay as best as possible. For us to understand where practice performance and development translates to in-game success, we have to be able to track in-game performance and player development metrics. Tracking things such as exit velocity, attack angle, launch angle and more is the next step"

"Additionally, we hope our analytics team can continue to provide detailed scouting reports on our opponents," Yano continued. "Ideally, we would want to have more detailed scouting reports such as swing percentage, whiff percentage, spray charts by count/pitch velocity/pitcher handedness and more. This can allow us to shift based on platoons, count, pitcher, and we can enhance pitch calling with it as well if we can get hitter hot/cold zones against pitch types and location."

Ultimately for Cornish and Bender, the passion for baseball and being a part of the team is the most important aspect of the job. The duo, along with the entire baseball staff, uses their talents to help the team improve and give the student-athletes an experience they might not be able to have at other NCAA Division III universities.

"It shows the coaching staff's commitment to winning, along with the student-athletes' openness to new methods of winning as well," Bender said. "I'm here simply to help them because I love all the different ways that these numbers can be used, because any edge we can get is another way for us to pull out a win and improve the a player's on-field abilities, which is all that really matters in the end."

Cornish echoed Bender's statement, citing his personal experiences as a main reason for his passion.

"For me, founding the analytics team was about turning my passion and skills into a productive output," Cornish said. "I am extremely proud of what it has become; a full-fledged team that is expanding to include talented underclassman who want to showcase their knowledge in an unconventional format outside of the classroom."

"I pitched my idea for a Stevens baseball analytics team in-between my second and third major arm surgeries, at a time in which playing college baseball was a fading dream," he continued. "I knew my days on the field were numbered, but I was not ready to give up on being involved with baseball yet. I love being a part of a team and having the ability to help my college succeed in any capacity is a great honor for me. Helping these athletes get the most out of their training and perform at their highest level come game day gives me pride and benefits everyone involved in our program."

Looking into the future, it is nearly impossible to know where technology will take the world of baseball. The amount of different data points and numbers and how they're studied and applied are changing seemingly daily. One thing is for certain though, as the data continues to rapidly evolve, the Stevens baseball analytics team will continue to adapt and change with it.

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