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Another article related to the same type of facility - at Wake Forest - that Ken Kendrick is teeing up for WVU baseball............

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Wake Forest uses Pitching Lab to analyze tons of data to help pitchers maximize potential on the mound​

The Wake Forest Pitching Lab opened in 2019, helping the Deacons reach a No. 1 ranking in the 2023 Men's College World Series field.
BY ETHAN JOYCE6.21.2023
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The Wake Forest Pitching Lab opened in 2019, helping the Deacons reach a No. 1 ranking.COURTESY OF WAKE FOREST
As Mike McFerran looks through the camera reel on his phone, he sees rows of progress. McFerran is the director of player development and the Wake Forest Pitching Lab coordinator. He shares clips like these around constantly.
McFerran’s computer desk sits tucked into the back left corner of the lab in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he can see his monitors and the artificial mound. It’s June 1, the day before the Winston-Salem Regional of the NCAA baseball tournament starts, and he’s scrolling through videos either captured in the lab or during game broadcasts.
Wake Forest unveiled the lab in 2019, and four years later, the top-ranked Deacons are now in the College World Series in Omaha, Neb., for the first time since 1955. They have outscored their regional and super regional opponents by a combined margin of 75-16. Much of their success, though, can trace back to this space. The Pitching Lab produced the best team K/9 rate (12.2) and ERA in college baseball — 2.84, almost a full run lower than No. 2 Tennessee (3.63) — as well as the ACC’s back-to-back pitcher of the year in Rhett Lowder.
“Nothing here is by accident,” McFerran said. “We’re deciding on the right things to help guys get guys out more consistently and try to stay healthy as best we can.”
A mixture of tech allows the Deacons to understand their pitchers with intense depth. Two sets of motion capture cameras, about 25 in total, line the top of the rigging around the mound. Markered cameras from Qualisys let the staff develop pre- and postseason benchmarks, while the markerless cameras from KinaTrax are used with more frequency throughout the season.
Another high-frame-rate camera from Edgertronic views the pitcher’s hand and grip. The force plates on the mound are from AMTI. V1 Sports’ video software allows McFerran to compare and overlay multiple video clips at once to display progress between two different points in a pitcher’s development. The all-student data analytics team, made up of 20 people, has the important job of translating the numbers so they’re useful for McFerran and players.
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Two sets of motion capture cameras provide the data to analyze.COURTESY OF WAKE FOREST
McFerran describes a process working backward through the equipment. If a particular pitch gets batters out often, the staff figures out what actually makes it deceptive. Then they can look back at the ball flight and the biomechanics of the pitcher to break down the ideal delivery for that pitch. If a starter sees higher exit velocity from batters midway through an outing, McFerran can go back to the film later and see why.
“The cool thing is when you study the data, it tells you what to look at,” McFerran said.
Pro teams have stopped by the lab, part of an overall $14 million investment in the Player Development Center, in the hopes of building a similar space, much like the Baltimore Orioles did last year. Professional pitchers have even visited for sessions in the offseason.
“Obviously, they’re incredible with what they do data-wise of finding what makes a player unique,” said Allan Donato, an ACES agent with clients who have visited the lab. “I think that’s a big piece. … And then you know, the big part of it, and I think probably more important than even finding that is how to translate it to the player. I think they’re really good at that.”
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Before and after images of ace Rhett Lowder showing his improved pitching form.COURTESY OF WAKE FOREST
The pitching lab, which is co-owned by the athletic department and Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, has been a place of inspiration and growth. Lowder, the staff ace, has often entered the lab with an idea for a new metric, McFerran said. Lowder then pitches his idea to the data and analytics team, they figure it out, and then the whole staff has access to a new data point. (When asked if he could share an example of a Lowder metric, McFerran laughed and said, “No, that’s too close to the sun.”)
The lab has also been used to take a pitcher’s talent to a different stratosphere. Michael Massey transferred before the season from Tulane. Wake shifted him from a starter to a reliever, and working in the lab increased his strikeout total (from 52 in 2022 to 71 so far this season) in almost half the innings (68 to 38).
One of his teammates, Josh Hartle, saw his pitch delivery completely change during the offseason. In the last year, McFerran said the staff changed the arm path Hartle made from drawing the ball back to the follow-through and landing. They also worked on tightening the rotation of his torso to generate more force. McFerran said he watched Hartle master his momentum and pitching arsenal and “you saw greatness start to show its head.”
Hartle, a local product, said after his first motion-capture session as a freshman last year, he received a 10-page report that indicated he did little well.
“We started out, I worked with Mike probably midsummer and just worked on simple movement patterns,” Hartle said. “We worked probably the whole entire fall into the preseason just on moving efficiently. And it was something different every day.”
Hartle is ninth in the nation in strikeout-to-walk ratio, at 6.55. Lowder is two spots below him at 6.24, and two other Deacons are close by: Sean Sullivan at 15 (6.00) and Seth Keener at 20 (5.38). Hartle, Lowder and Sullivan all earned ACC first-team honors, while Keener was a third-teamer.
This staff has blossomed inside the lab. And as it competes in Omaha, that group has now proven that it can handle whatever data is placed in front of them. That, McFerran thinks, is where the real success comes from.
“We’re not afraid to give them information at all,” McFerran said. “Because they take and they run with it. And they come up with ideas that maybe we couldn’t think of, or at least they better understand themselves as pitchers, which is really our ultimate goal.”
 
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