⚾ The “Wrong Side” of the Plate and the Backyard Bullpen

When HeyBLU struggled to work at my own home fields, I knew I had to teach the app a new trick.

At Strawberry Rec in Tiburon, our Minor’s field has a solid line of bright white sponsor signs on the left side only. We mount the phone on the 1st-base side looking out toward left field—which means the camera stares directly at those signs. A white baseball flying across a bright white background? The ball might as well be invisible.

My own field. My own app. Barely worked.

Last week our game got moved due to weather to a nearby middle school. Finally, I thought “a real test”. But at 5:00 PM, the setting sun parked directly above left field, blinding the camera with white spots and glare.

0 for 2. Good thing baseball gives you three strikes.

Why we always set up on 1st base
Originally, we anchored HeyBLU to the 1st-base side for one simple reason: Most batters are right-handed. That angle meant a perfect view of the zone 90% of the time.

But that was before our math grew up.

Today, our engine is smart enough to nail the final pitch location based on the entire flight of the ball—from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt. Lefty or righty doesn’t matter anymore. By the time the ball crosses the plate, BLU has the data it needs to accurately call balls and strikes.

There was just one catch. To prevent the app from tracking the catcher throwing back to the pitcher, we trained it to ignore “wrong way” pitches. Move the camera to the 3rd-base side, and that entire visual reality inverts. A pitch looks like a throwback. A throwback looks like a pitch.

If it weren’t for this mathematical hurdle, I’d have had in-game 3rd-base tests done weeks ago. We needed a seamless way to let coaches and umpires set up the tripod wherever the sun, the signs, or the field geometry demanded. Heck, I needed it.

The fix: the app figures it out
Because HeyBLU maps the physical plate in 3D space, the math engine inherently knows exactly where it is standing.

As of today, when you move to the other side of the field, the app reads its own negative X-axis coordinate, whispers to itself ”I’m on the 3rd-base side,” and automatically inverts its own physics filters.

No toggles. No menus. For my demo today, I just tapped “Play Ball.”

When the Commissioner took the mound
I happened to be doing this test as a live demo for our local Little League Minors Commissioner (who also coaches his kid’s Majors team).

I handed him the secondary phone running our “Remote Control” Command Center app. I stepped on the mound and threw four pitches. Flawless tracking. He could tell from the dugout—or from outside the fence—where HeyBLU called the strikes.

He wanted to throw, so we swapped. He threw three pitches while I held the remote. Perfect calls from the “wrong side.”

He just watched major-league-grade math happen in real-time on a local dirt field. And as all good baseball people do, his brain immediately started spinning with possibilities:

• “I could use this in the bullpen during a game to see if my relief pitcher is actually hitting his spots before I put him in.”

• “Dads could set this up with a net in their backyard to track their kid’s bullpen sessions.”

The tech is disappearing
That’s the holy grail for a sports tech startup.

He wasn’t thinking about augmented reality, machine learning, or inverse matrix math. The technology faded into the background. He was just thinking about how to win baseball games and develop his pitchers.

We set out to build an app that acts as a shock absorber for the messy real world. Moving the tripod to dodge a sponsor sign—and having the app instantly rewrite its own physics engine to adapt—proves we are doing exactly that.

The beta is moving fast. If you want to put this in your own backyard bullpen, all you have to do is ask. Free beta spots for serious testers before we start singing “Put me in, Coach, I’m ready to play” for real this time.