The World Series has become a global showpiece for a made-in-Canada technology that has revolutionized batting practice and was created by two engineers in their 20s from Ontario.
The Trajekt Arc is the first pitching machine to let batters practice against a replication of the actual pitcher they will be facing – same release point, velocity, horizontal and vertical movement and spin. Batters face a life-size video of the pitcher they are preparing for, and the ball shoots out from a small hole where the pitcher’s release point is.
The simulation of each pitcher is built on data provided to the teams from Major League Baseball and other licensed sources that use high-speed cameras to track pitches (and batted balls) in major-league games, from spin rate to the amount of “break” or fall at the plate location.
Rowan Ferrabee and Joshua Pope are co-founders of Trajekt Sports, based in Mississauga.
Less than five years ago, Joshua Pope and Rowan Ferrabee, friends from a sports engineering course at the University of Waterloo in Southern Ontario, were struggling through a three-year research and development process, with the help of seed money from family, friends, the university and incubator programs. Early on, words of encouragement from the Chicago Cubs and the Toronto Blue Jays kept their spirits up. The Cubs would become their first customer.
Today, with attention generated during baseball’s post-season, a mystique seems to be growing around the machine, creating expansion opportunities for Trajekt Sports, which has its headquarters in Mississauga, Ont., and makes the machines in Cambridge, Ont.
The Trajekt, as it’s become known, was already in near-universal use this season in the major leagues – 25 out of 30 teams leased it, including all 12 teams that qualified for the post-season, and some lease multiple machines for their farm teams. It is also leased by teams in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and a handful of baseball performance centres in the United States. In all, 65 machines are leased, up from 42 a year ago, at US$15,000 to US$20,000 a month over a three-year term for the machine itself and a licence to use the software.
Its popularity has been growing fast. The number of pitches thrown on its machines nearly doubled over the past season, to 1.15 million from 650,000, according to company data.
Major-league teams have increasingly adopted the Trajekt machines, which are made in Cambridge, Ont.
During the post-season, baseball managers, players and broadcasters have been talking up the Trajekt’s usefulness. A Canadian broadcast crew reported that the New York Yankees were disappointed they didn’t have time after their extended wild-card series to simulate the unique arm angle (pitching arm almost straight up over his head) of Blue Jays rookie Trey Yesavage because the Trajekt was at home and the Yankees were playing in Toronto.
The phone has since been ringing with inquiries from U.S. college programs. This week, the company delivered the Trajekt to two Division 1 teams in the NCAA.
“That’s a new market for us, which I think will be huge,” says Mr. Pope, the company’s chief executive officer, who grew up in Toronto and is co-founder of Trajekt Sports with Mr. Ferrabee, who is from Ottawa. “We’re already getting calls daily from different athletic directors and coaches.” The company has 22 full-time staff, including two based in Japan, plus the equivalent of six full-time contractors.
There’s a lesson for Canadian companies trying to succeed in the global sports technology industry, says University of Waterloo professor John McPhee, who serves as a technical adviser to Trajekt Sports.
“Unfortunately, we have very few sports companies in Canada. We could be doing so much more in that space. And I think Josh and Rowan are showing it is certainly possible to break into that space and compete against the big sports companies.”
The idea of the Trajekt goes back to when Mr. Pope, now 29, was a member of his high-school athletic council, discussing with friends the possibility of inviting then-Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman to visit and pitch to them, and see how many swings would be needed to make contact. That’s when the idea of replicating Mr. Stroman’s pitches came to the high-school student. Mr. Pope grew up beside a park and would try to develop pitches with his brother, Adam, who is now the company’s chief commercial officer.
As he watched TV broadcasts show home-run trajectories and pitched-ball trajectories, Mr. Pope figured the data existed to create such a simulation. “Why isn’t there a machine that can do it?” he asked himself. He chose the University of Waterloo’s biomedical engineering program when he learned Prof. McPhee had developed a hockey-slapshot machine for a stick-making company, to try to reduce the number of sticks snapping mid-game.
“If you can replicate a hockey slapshot, surely there’s going to be a way to replicate a baseball pitch,” Mr. Pope said.
The founders' challenge was to find algorithms that could account for all the variables of a real pitch.
Pitching machines had been around for decades, but the pitches they released had only backspin and side spin. The simulation pitching machine would need a “third dimension of spin” – spin in the direction the ball is travelling, known as the gyro or rifle spin because it spins like a bullet.
Mr. Pope turned to Mr. Ferrabee for help.
They faced a broader challenge, too: Developing unique algorithms to replicate every “degree of freedom” of a baseball – allowing for 12 attributes of a ball in flight once it’s released from a pitcher’s hand. Work on the scientific and technical problems began in a school course taught by Prof. McPhee, who holds a Canada Research Chair in biomechatronic system dynamics (the interaction of bodies, machines and computer simulations). As work proceeded through the years, he made his laboratory and high-speed camera available to the young men.
“Every piece of information that could possibly describe the state of a flying baseball the second it comes out of a pitcher’s hand – we had to systematically break every one of those down, and to find a way to independently control them all,” says Mr. Ferrabee, who is also 29 and a graduate of the University of Waterloo’s mechatronics program. (Mechatronics involves the weaving together of mechanical engineering with software and electronics.)
Now, as he watches the baseball playoffs and World Series, even with a Canadian team involved, “I stay as unbiased as possible, but I very biasedly will cheer for teams with Trajekt machines while they’re playing at home.”
In his view, the machine and the data trove it assembles for users as its two cameras record the attributes of the ball as it is pitched and hit (including exit velocity, launch angle and batted-ball distance) can help Major League Baseball address the dominance of pitchers and high strikeout rates of recent years.
“One thing we love about our product is it helps get hits and we think it helps the game get more exciting and more fun to watch,” Mr. Ferrabee says.