Cedar Rapids Kernels take some batting practice with a purpose thanks to a little technology

CEDAR RAPIDS — Hip-hop music blares over a wireless portable speaker in The Annex adjacent to Veterans Memorial Stadium.

Only the thwack of bat meeting baseball interrupts it.

“Atta boy!” Minnesota Twins minor league roving hitting instructor Bryce Berg yells in encouragement as Kala’i Rosario puts good wood on a ball thrown at him.

It’s roughly 45 minutes before Rosario and the Cedar Rapids Kernels are about to play the South Bend Cubs. Kernels hitters are taking some swings in The Annex’s two batting cages to get warm.

In one of the cages is a unique-looking black pitching machine spitting baseballs at Rosario. You can’t help but notice some are fastballs, others breaking balls, all in different locations.

This is the Kernels’ new toy, a $15,000 contraption called an iPitch Smart. It’s property of the parent Twins.

“We’ll usually come in here about 5:45, 5:50, spend about 20, 25 minutes in here getting ready,” Kernels Manager Brian Dinkelman said. “Guys will get an at-bat or two against (the iPitch), so they have that feeling of what they will be facing that night in the box.”

Just the latest technological gizmo being employed in an analytics-driven game today in an attempt to better prepare and train players.

By now, you’ve certainly heard about Trackman, the radar system that measures specifics of each pitch thrown in a game and each batted ball. There’s Edgertronic and Rapsodo, which are high-tech camera systems that pick up pitching and hitting movement intricacies and provide real-time data.

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The iPitch Smart, which is being used at all of the Twins minor-league affiliates and by other major league organizations, is a pitching machine that can be programmed to duplicate the exact pitches of any pitcher from whom specific information is available. Which is literally every pitcher.

You’re talking exact miles per hour, exact spin rates and thus movement of fastballs, breaking balls and changeups.

“It sets up to where you can mimic pitches,” Dinkelman said. “Like carry and sink, run, you can mimic a changeup, stuff like that. The guys get a chance to face that before they go out for a game every day. We will set it up to what a pitcher is going to be like. So their first at-bat in the game against them is really like their third at-bat against him.”

“I think it helps them a ton,” said Berg, who was Kernels hitting coach in 2021. “I mean, it’s not the same as (seeing him live), but to be able to get game-like shapes, to see what you are going to see tonight before you actually see it is so huge.”

The iPitch Smart is used in addition to regular batting practice on the field. Pretty incredible stuff.

“I mean, knowing what a pitcher is going to throw, getting that timing down, what his fastball might be like, especially if you haven’t seen him before, is big,” Dinkelman said. “We think it gives guys an advantage. That way when you get in there for the first time, you’re not surprised. You know what it’s going to be like. You are somewhat more ready.”

College programs have begun to use the iPitch as well. Kernels infielder Tanner Schobel said his alma mater, Virginia Tech, employed one for the first time this season.

He finds the machine useful. It’s one thing to read a scouting report on what an opposing pitcher throws, but it’s another to actually see what he throws ahead of time.

“A carry fastball, you can program it for carry, which is really cool,” Schobel said. “It simplifies things, because when you are going out to face a pitcher, you’re just kind of facing the scatter plot of his movement. When you are hitting off the iPitch, it’s kind of the same thing, you’re just hitting off the machine, so when you go into a game, it’s like you’re hitting off the machine again. It relaxes things, and makes them a little easier to train.”

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Berg said the Twins also use the iPitch to help hitters fix their flaws.

If a guy is having trouble in a specific area or with a specific pitch, the iPitch can be programmed to get to those. If a guy is having issues with strike-zone judgement, the iPitch can be set to randomly throw pitches just on or off the plate.

And here’s the kicker. There’s an even more high-tech pitching machine called Trajekt that about half of Major League Baseball teams, including the Twins, rent for a year at a price tag of $100,000, according to Berg.

He showed you video from his phone he had of former Twins player Josh Donaldson taking batting practice in a cage against relief pitcher Sergio Romo using Trajekt. Through a video projection component, a life-sized version of Romo goes through his motion, with the baseball coming at Donaldson from the pitcher’s exact release point, with his exact pitch metrics: velocity, movement, everything.

In Romo’s case, that’d be primarily frisbee-like sliders.

“(Trajekt) runs on a train track horizontally. Then it’s like an elevator, too, up and down,” Berg said. “It’s got this little hole cutout that moves up and down based on release point. Then all it is is you are playing ‘MLB The Show’ (video game), and you just pick what pitch you want it to be.”

Professional baseball in 2023. Ain’t it something?

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