⚾ Bringing Major League Math to the Local Diamond

If you’ve watched a Major League Baseball game recently, or last night’s WBC game, you know that the technology tracking every pitch is incredible. MLB uses an Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system, and the data it produces is stunning to look at. (If you’re curious, you can check out MLB’s pitch visuals here and their ABS page here).

But step away from the major league stadiums and look at the youth and amateur markets—by far the largest segment of baseball—and you’ll find exactly zero technology.

What you will find is a massive umpire shortage. The hardworking humans behind the plate are doing their absolute best, but the reality is that human eyes frequently miss calls by 6 to 12 inches.

At HeyBLU, that is our actual competition: a 6 to 12-inch margin of error.

You might be wondering, how do we actually know our app is getting the call right? To prove our math, we built an internal engine called AccuracyCore. Under the hood, it’s a Python script that ingests all of our pitch data and compares it against our “golden datasets”—multi-camera, augmented reality videos that allow us to virtually throw the exact same pitch endlessly. By doing this, we mathematically validate every single release against a perfect, controlled baseline.

The results? In controlled lab tests, AccuracyCore proves we can track pitches with sub-1-inch accuracy, sometimes getting all the way down to 0.4 inches. We are literally running major-league-grade math.

Why do we need sub-1-inch accuracy in the lab? Because the real world is messy.

Out on the local diamond, our users aren’t running million-dollar stadium camera arrays; they are non-technical folks using consumer-grade iPhones. The lighting changes, chainlink fences get in the way, and people bump the tripod.

Because our core engine is so hyper-accurate in the lab, it acts as a shock absorber for the real world. Even when environmental noise degrades the camera inputs, our software degrades gracefully.

Our ultimate goal in the wild is a 3-inch error rate or less. Why three inches? Because three inches is exactly the width of a baseball. By reliably hitting that 3-inch threshold on a standard smartphone, we are literally turning 6 to 12-inch human errors into perfectly called youth baseball games.

We don’t need a million dollars of stadium infrastructure to win this market; we just need our community to help us test.

We are starting our journey strictly as a training tool. We need to crawl before we walk, and getting this app into the hands of real players and parents is the only way we learn. Because you are our earliest supporters, you are the absolute perfect test cases for us.

If you or your kids are out on the field, we would love for you to give HeyBLU a try. We are incredibly eager to hear how your first attempts at setting it up and using it go.

Let’s play ball.