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Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Invention By Ballplayer's Dad a Hit with Big League Teams

Adam Battersby was a Connecticut high school baseball player with dreams of reaching the big leagues.  The only problem was, he had trouble hitting an inside curveball, a common problem for many hitters.  His father, Greg, was a part time coach, who tried different things to help his son.  He adjusted his swing, moved him around in the batters box and had him try different bats.  The biggest challenge came from not being able to replicate, with any consistency, the types of pitches that were giving Adam so much trouble.  Although batting practice pitchers tried feeding him a steady diet of inside curves, they couldn't maintain the velocity of competitive pitchers, nor were they accurate enough to help him work on his problem areas.

Greg hit upon the idea of a virtual reality pitching machine.  To be sure, pitching machines had been around for decades, but they were mechanical devices that catapulted a baseball toward the hitter.  In baseball, timing is everything and with these machines it was impossible.  But what if he could combine video projection with a mechanical delivery system?

Greg brainstormed with some engineers and the result was the ProBatter baseball pitching simulator.  Now refined to near perfection, the simulator allows a hitter to face the life-sized image of a real pitcher winding up and delivering a pitch on a video screen.  An actual ball is thrown through a small hole in the screen by a computer controlled pitching module which can deliver fastballs, curves, sliders, changeups -- you name it -- at speeds up to 100 mph with pinpoint accuracy.

Today, Greg's invention -- which holds 13 U.S. and 20 international patents -- is used at the highest levels of the game, including six major league clubs (New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians and Pittsburgh Pirates) and numerous Division I colleges.  In addition, numerous training facilities around the country offer ProBatter, helping players improve their hitting from Little League age on up.

And what of Adam?  Did he fulfill his dream of playing major league baseball?  Alas not -- however, today, he runs day-to-day operations for Milford, Connecticut-based ProBatter Sports as the company's president and is true believer in the system he inspired.  Both father and son derive great satisfaction from the positive feedback they receive everyday from ballplayers and their coaches who do everything they can to be the best.
 


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