From Tee-ball to Trackman: Baseball’s Analytics Revolution in Amateur Play

With a 3-1 count to Ohtani, it looked like Ottavino wanted nothing to do with the American League MVP until he hung a slider that Ohtani ripped into the right-side gap. However, the crowd’s excitement was quickly extinguished when Boston’s second baseman, Christian Arroyo, was standing in shallow right field — some 30 feet away from his usual position — to reel in the missile off Ohtani’s bat and secure the win for the Red Sox with an easy throw to first.

On the scorecard — one of baseball’s most timeless tools and an old school way of recording a baseball game — Ohtani’s rope was penciled in as a routine ground ball. But anyone who witnessed the play could testify that the scorecard didn’t tell the full story; there was nothing routine about the final out. Thanks to new school technology that had only emerged into America’s Pastime just a handful of years before this 2021 game, Arroyo knew just where to stand and robbed Ohtani of the game-tying hit. 

Baseball analytics had collected data from hundreds to thousands of Ohtani’s swings, hits and at-bats to conclude that the Japanese sensation was far more likely to pull the ball towards right field rather than send it over to the left side. Therefore, while the crowd was getting rowdy and Ohtani waited for the pitch, Arroyo was positioning himself right where the computers told him Ohtani would hit it and the no-man’s-land of right field was now occupied.

Introducing “The Shift,” one of the first concepts that came from the ever growing phenomenon of baseball analytics. A handful of MLB careers ruined and a collection of angry fans later, and shifting your defensive players across the diamond was banned by the league in 2023. Now while the shift undoubtedly threw fans and pull hitters of the MLB for a loop, some would say the rise of baseball analytics has resulted in more good than bad.

Kluber, longtime ace for the Cleveland Indians/Guardians, struggled to find his stride in the bigs. His 4.43 earned runs average and measly 19.5 strikeout percentage from 2011-2013 were stats concerning enough to threaten the fourth round draft pick’s playing time in the MLB. Sabermetrics, implemented by Cleveland the season following another rough year for the righty, gave Kluber and his pitching staff a new perspective on his mechanics and pitch arsenal.

The following five seasons from 2014-2018 saw Kluber’s career take a complete 180. Kluber’s spin rate, mechanics and control were statistically better, and his approach on the mound was noticeably different. Analytics from PITCHf/x, a pitch tracking system, indicated that Kluber was throwing his fastball too much and not relying on his far more deceptive slider and cutter mix.

Kluber stopped looking to overpower hitters with a fastball that just wasn’t getting it done, and rather focused on improving the spin rates of pitches that the computers found to be most effective. The Sabermetrics additionally told Kluber and his pitching staff where he should be throwing these off-speed pitches to keep hitters out of rhythm and not ready for the fastball that they used to crush.

Over those next five seasons, Kluber became a 2-time Cy Young award winner and a 3-time all star who pitched to a wicked 2.84 ERA and held opponents to a .223 batting average. A career on thin ice was propelled partly due to Sabermetrics uncovering a level of Kluber’s game that no one knew about.

On the other side of the ball, slugger Justin Turner managed to leverage Sabermetrics in a way that saved his career and left him regarded as one of baseball’s most consistent hitters in the late 2010s. Turner’s four year stint as a New York Met was hard to watch as he posted a .269 batting average and .377 slugging percentage during his time in Queens. Promoted as a hard hitting prospect, Turner surely swung the bat like someone with a lot of power, but the numbers proved the third baseman was doing anything but adding pop to the Mets’ lineup.

Turner signed as a free agent with the Dodgers in what looked to be the last straw of an unimpressive career before the 2014 season. Sabermetrics reworked Turner’s swing before he laced up the cleats for the Dodgers, and encouraged him to work on his discipline and pitch selection at the plate. Studying pitchers at a more technical level, while reworking his swing to increase launch angle, did wonders for Turner who quickly turned into one of the league’s most selective hitters and revered power bats.

He hit .302 from 2014-2021 with the Dodgers, and significantly boosted both his walk and home run rate while in Los Angeles. Sabermetrics took a guy who was seemingly swinging blindly up at the plate, and gave him a nuanced approach to hitting that brought new life to his dying career.

Kluber and Turner are a small sample size that illustrate the remarkable advancements Sabermetrics have brought to America’s oldest sport. Careers being revitalized on the game’s biggest stage caught the attention of baseball programs around the nation, and Sabermetrics soon were filtering their way through college baseball teams.

Baseball analytic tools like Trackman and Rapsodo were brought in by top teams including North Carolina, Ole Miss and Vanderbilt, before making major impacts on smaller programs like Dallas Baptist University and Cal Baptist University in Riverside, California.

Entering his junior year, Dom Antonecchia decided to get involved with CBU’s baseball program. A lifelong baseball fan and player, Antonecchia was ready to get back into the game he loved — this time as a team manager. The sports analytics student found himself handling routine activities for the baseball team, from doing laundry after practice to warming players up before games; Antonecchia was just thankful to be involved.

However, he felt most at home behind the laptop and Trackman. His background and interest in sports analytics was finally being put to use, and the team quickly caught on to how useful Antonecchia’s knowledge of baseball analytics could be for the program.

“Coming out of the 2023-2024 season, I wanted to try and take on a bigger role. Nobody had ever done analytics, and they had always been used at a lower level at CBU,” Antonecchia said. “But I was able to leverage the relationships I had with some of the players and coaches to pitch myself being the head of analytics. It’s been a great opportunity for me to grow, and also for the team to get their hands on this technology and research.”

And like the pros during the early implementation of sabermetrics, Antonecchia and the CBU team didn’t waste what the technology had to offer. Antonecchia, receiving the full approval to dive head first into Sabermetrics, saw instant pay off for the Lancers’ pitching staff.

The data-driven approach that Antonecchia enforced during the 2024-2025 season resulted in the 7th best ERA pitcher in the nation and 28th best ERA pitching staff in the country. The Lancers put Division 1 baseball on watch, and the technology they had at their disposal played a massive role in such eye-popping stats.

“At the beginning of the fall, our head coach was actually pretty suspicious of the analytics,” Antonecchia explained when going into the complexity and expensive nature of the equipment. “He’s always been a bit more old school, but showing him the capabilities of the new equipment and not overstepping when it came to player development sort of bridged that gap.”