Metrics and Biomechanics with Baseball Performance Lab

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Visit spinquest.com for more details. All right, welcome back, welcome back, welcome back. Special guests here today, we're at the house again. It's just myself, I don't have Jared with me, but, uh, I got two special guests. I mean, you guys are just hitting some golf balls out at U-Club. I got Micah Gibbs and my guy Liam Muklow.

What's up?

Thank you guys for coming here at my house.

Yeah, always good to be back in Red Street.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

That's it. Micah, you've been on the show before, so you kind of know what it's about. We were in the studio last time, but you were, uh, you're actually head of player development at LSU at the time, correct? So we're going to get into depth a little bit about your new job here with Liam, uh, at the Baseball Performance Lab in Baton Rouge. Super sick setup, I love it. So I can't wait to get in. Um, and Liam, thank you for coming down. You're Canadian, so we're not going to hold that against you, but thanks for being down here. Liam is actually a two-time national award winner, uh, with the PGA of Canada, including being named Teacher of the Year in 2014. He's one of the instructors for the TPI's Power Coach certification at the World Golf Fitness Summit. Don't get uncomfortable with me, uh, introducing you here.

No, man, I'm just glad a pitcher brought guys who were putting the power back in hitters' hands.

I know, right? That's weird. I know, this is ironic that I'm like giving all this facts about all these—

that would be like the enemy or something. I know, right?

They're trying to burn the place down.

It's holistic for the game. I'm a holistic approach guy, you know that. So Um, but nah, so, so you're a pretty special cat, man. I'm excited. Uh, Kvest advisory board member, you're a BodyTrack advisory board member, two-time presenter of the, the World Scientific Congress of Golf, and, uh, you make me feel less intelligent when I'm around you.

So it's a lot better being a geek now than it was in high school.

Yeah, it's really interesting, right? Like, I know, Micah, you're one of the smartest guys. I feel like you got roasted all the time when we were younger. I told you that on the show the last time. I was like I feel like I should have just been taking pages out of your playbook. I'm 10 years behind.

I remember, uh, right when we left college, uh, we were living together and watching Mad Money, and you're kind of, kind of hating on me for it.

I made fun of you. I was like, get away from me, I want to watch Lost, right?

And then 5 years later, you're now— you're watching.

I know, and I'm just like, dude, I should have just taken pages out of your playbook. Can you imagine back then if I would have known what I know? Everybody says that, right? Yeah. Anyway, all right, so Liam, talk to me, dude. All right, so you started the Golf Lab. Talk to me a little bit about the— what the Golf Lab is, its technology, and your background in golf a little.

Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I, I tried to make a playing career, you know, for a while. I guess I probably could have been a lot smarter about it, but when I decided that it was time to, you know, get into coaching, I felt like my ability afforded me all these amazing opportunities that were only there for some of the best players in the world. And so the initial business concept was like, let's make this available to the public, because at the end of the day, they need it more than we need it. I don't feel like if you're good, you're good. If you're not, you're not. And so So they really needed the training. And, you know, technology was a big part of it because when we're coaching sports, so much of the decision-making process of the athlete is emotionally driven. So to have like third-party quantitative data that tells us exactly what happens allows us to step away from the emotion and make our decisions based on logic, which allows us to, you know, progress forward.

I love that. We were just talking about that and I was like, let's just step in here, let's get going. Because no, I really do. And I think, you know, we've talked about that, um, you know, why we jumped on this thing and why I'm so passionate about mental health. I, I, I, I, you know, kind of fall under the category of mental health as a holistic brain functionality, you know. So that's what you're kind of talking about, regulating emotions that way you can make the best decisions and ultimately gets the best performance out of your athletes, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, for the most part, when, when we're dealing with athletes, with the exception of junior development, there's very rarely a case where the person's skill level is not in line with their goals, right? So 95% of people I've ever coached in any sport have the actual ability to achieve their goals. What they struggle with is accessing their talent. Yeah, they don't need to build more talent, they need to learn how to access it. And of course, you know, the brain controls everything, so yeah, that's where we want to tackle.

I love it. So give me a little bit about, like, what— so if I were to come into the Golf Lab, if I was a golfer or whatever, what do you guys do over there? What do you guys specialize in? And then kind of, you know, how you translate that into the next thing that you're working on.

The short answer is on a t-shirt: we'll make you suck less.

You keep saying that, but I hadn't got I don't have a t-shirt yet. Yeah, yeah, it's in the mail.

No, the, the first thing, you know, is we're gonna— we're just gonna do a lot of testing.

Okay.

Right.

Like, is that more biomechanical? Is it more— is it like strength testing? Is it functionality? What is it?

Yep.

A little bit of everything. Yes, just yes across the board.

We're gonna— we're gonna go through the full gamut of everything from measuring the exact frequency of every single club in your golf bag to shooting ping pong balls.

Awesome. Yeah, I want to talk about that too. I know you guys do that over the BPL. Yeah, do you guys call it BPL yet?

Yeah, yeah, BPL.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, that's where like we named it that because we're like, no one's gonna say Baseball Performance every time. Better make sure we have an acronym.

100%. And I really love that you guys really— I'm not— I told you this, I'm not fucking around— I really believe that you guys are gonna like have an influential social media following because you guys have that handle of Baseball Performance Lab. I know that seems stupid, but like from a marketing standpoint, I think it's so valuable.

Yeah, that was—

I mean, it's crazy. You guys didn't have to pay for that or anything, right? It was available, right?

Like, the website was not cheap.

Okay, okay, so the website wasn't cheap.

Okay, our competition in the, in the World Wide Web is actually the Boston Public Library.

Oh my God, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, I know, that's a tough one to go against too.

We're going through, I was like, damn, there's been books for a long time.

Yeah, that's exactly— they've been around for a while. Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Um, So talk to me, Micah, like you, you were at the, you were the director of development at LSU for LSU baseball and you guys just got this badass facility over there. You got your performance lab, you got all that stuff, your cameras, and then you went over and now you're working for the Baseball Performance Lab. So tell me about the decision to go over there, how Liam recruited you, all that stuff.

Yeah. So Liam and I met, would have been probably early summer of 2018, just talking about kind of what we could possibly bring, what he could possibly bring to baseball in terms of like what he does with golf fitting. And so we just kind of— he was asking me like what we use TrackMan for with baseball and just kind of getting a feel for where baseball is at. And we quickly realized we were really far behind, years behind. And it kind of opened up this, this conversation of, of bat fitting and, and whether baseball was ready for it. And I said, I mean, Every time I think about it, it's like, how is it— how have we never done anything with bat fitting? How— why do we keep using the same bat over and over? And, uh, nobody ever looks at equipment in baseball. And Liam always said it's the one thing that you can customize as a hitter is your bat, and nobody comes— we're not doing it. We literally would just go grab a bat out of the rack and it's like, I don't like the way this one feels, how about this next one? Okay, oh yeah, that one's a little better. Oh, that one's— yeah, very emotional.

Yeah, very emotional.

And that was— that was the thing for for me is— and you know me pretty well, like I'm not real emotional up or down. You're very, very, very flatline, very objectively driven, right?

So two Ben Steins.

I like that though, that's good.

I was actually thinking about that earlier, but, uh, but, but yeah, so we, we talked about a little bit and, um, and like you were saying, LSU, we start building this performance lab that was based actually more on the pitching side. We got the Edgertronic cameras pitching Rap Soto we already had the HitTrax and TrackMan on the field for hitting, so we really feel like we needed to kind of shore up the pitching side. And I was really excited about that. Got some good videos, some guys on the Edgertronic system, and it was probably a week after we got everything like put in place and everything was about ready to go. Kids are coming back, they're getting all their gear, and then Liam calls me and he's like, hey, uh, what are we doing? Grab dinner? He's like, I want to go grab dinner. I'm coming to Baton Rouge.

I was like, oh, what for?

He goes, well, potentially giving you the worst job offer ever.

I think those are my exact words. Yeah, this is either going to be like the most insulting job offer ever, or we're gonna like put you on welfare to chase your dreams.

Whatever, however you want to perceive this, you know. Right.

And so we, we sat down, we talked about what we've been talking about for a couple months of just kind of the how can we bring bat fitting to baseball. And I never thought it was going to end up in a job offer by any means. I was just trying to help out Marucci and, and Liam after meeting him. And yeah, obviously knew he was on to something. When it— when he told me, it was probably the worst thing I could have said was just like, hey dude, like, I don't know like what the money is, but yeah, like, yeah, just because the, the theory and the thought behind it for me was just like everything Micah Gibbs.

Yes. Yeah, well, I mean, I come into the Baseball Performance Lab and I just feel like it's your— it's your place. Like, that's your home, like your home where you belong. Like, just sitting behind there with the computers doing your thing. Even when I walked in the other day to introduce you to Dr. Belisa, you're unloading those bats and I can just see like the detail that he was putting into, like, like hanging them up, thinking it— I'm just like, this is his, this is his world.

This is it.

It's perfect. So that's why I was like, I love it. So talk to me a little bit about, um, the technology that you took from golf and how you apply that to baseball and how you saw Marucci kind of, you know, playing a role in that and why you guys are kind of over at Marucci.

Well, you know, I mean, it, it started actually at the PGA show where I got a call from a friend and mentor who's like Dr. Greg Rose with TPI is like, hey Liam, get to the booth. I'm like, okay. Yeah, you know, and he introduced me to Kent Mathis, who's an agent with CAA, right? You know, it's as simple as like, Liam, this is Kent. Kent's an agent in baseball and he says there's no such thing as bat fitting. Can you figure it out? Yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah. So, you know, we started—

I love that confidence. He's like, yeah, sure.

I mean, it can't be that hard.

I don't know, I love that approach because some people are— a lot of people don't have that approach, so Yeah, fair, fair.

You're right. So, you know, it started off where we took one of our motion capture systems, um, you know, basically just tricked the software into measuring something not golf. We invested in a launch monitor that uses optical technology similar to what we do on golf side, and the first thing we wanted to figure out was like, does the bat matter, right? You know, so it was as simple as, you know, working with, with Kyle from Marucci, and, and we met up in Arizona and we just had 8 different bats and we just started to get people swinging them and see, like, does it matter? And it turns out it's, it's the same as golf. The absolute fastest way to change performance is to change the bat.

And so when you guys are changing the bat, you guys are talking about distributing the weight, right, and changing the length? Like, can you talk to me about what you guys are trying exactly doing with the bat fitting?

The, you know, the—

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You know, there's fundamental issues with the way baseball even just talks about bats and prevent fitting from happening.

Really?

Well, even, even down to the regulations and stuff, you mean? Uh, no, just the— and part of it is the language and then part of it is the design.

Okay.

Okay. So the only way that people talk about bats is using what's called a descriptive statistic.

Okay.

34 inches long.

Gotcha.

Or it's 33 inches long. It's 31 ounces or it's 32 ounces. So, you know, you can have two bats that are the same length and the same weight but are completely different properties, right? Right. So, you know, the, the industry will use a term like end-loaded or hand-loaded, but again, I'd say similar to like the video cameras that Micah Gibbs was setting up at LSU, those are qualitative metrics. So it's like, I think, right, exactly right, I feel, or it's no actual measurement number, right? And so that's where Through trial and error, we've developed what we call our Balance Point Index, our BPI. Cool. So that's the first time there's actually been an inferential metric. So we now have a way to describe how one bat swings next to another.

That's incredible.

So it's, it's finally a time where we can actually describe how a bat will perform.

That's awesome. So how is Marucci involved? I want to— I'm going to get to you next and kind of explain us, because, you know, our listeners, hopefully a lot, you know, a lot of listeners are familiar with the Baseball Performance Lab, but I think it would be really cool to kind of walk through what you do if there was a consultation, you know, session. But how was Marucci— before we get to that, how's Marucci kind of involved in this? Are they— they're making the bats and helping you guys distribute, you know, like do it, figure all that stuff out?

Yeah, I mean, they— where it's end-loaded, you know, at the very start when we started out down this path, it just, you know, we started working with them because it was initially just a mutual contact. Cool. And then as, you know, as we got deeper into it, I'd say really it was just a fit in corporate culture. Yeah, you know, so, you know, obviously a premium brand. They take a ton of pride in their product. They put way more work into making sure that what is ordered is what they deliver, right? Um, you know, so that kind of won us over. And even simple things like the first time I was at a facility tour and we go to see what they currently have for a cage, well, there was like a 1,200-square-foot gym. Yeah, you know, for, for the way we approach things, I'm like, okay, this this is just showing me there's a match, right, in their culture to who we are. So, um, you know, it was just— it was, it was—

it just seemed like a natural fit. And I, I agree, and I mean, it makes sense. You guys are right in the backyard there. They do have a beautiful facility, and they're doing a great job over there, and you guys' facility is obviously a nice accent piece to that. Um, so you kind of mentioned that there's the weight room there. So Micah, talk to me a little bit about if I was— if I were a hitter and I was coming into town, or if, you know, Ryan Goins comes into town, tell me what happens. He comes into Baton Rouge and he comes in for a consultation with you.

Right. So, so we have 3 different levels of service. We have our BPL bat fitting. That's an hour and a half time frame. You come in, we have a little interview, talk to you, get to know you as a hitter, figure out what it is, what we call the key performance indicator. And what, what that means is what, what do you need to see to change a bat? What's going to take you from saying, okay, I don't need this bat any longer, I need this, this one, or these bats. So pretty cool. Yeah, that's the biggest thing, I think, kind of getting—

what was that called?

Uh, key performance indicators. Really cool. So, um, and that's also from the golf space.

So nice, you guys do that at the golf one too?

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I mean, there's a ton of similarities, but it's really like treating the sport like a business, right? So if you go talk to anyone that owns a successful company, they'll tell you what is their single most important financial metric. So like on our golf academy side, I can tell you it's membership. So you know what, we need to sell clubs, we need to sell lessons, we need to sell a bunch of stuff. But if our membership number is where it needs to be, that's our key.

It's our key metric.

Yeah, everything else follows. So it's about, you know, we could look at any hitter and we've got so much technology we could identify 30 things that would be— I'm air quoting now— wrong, right? Let's say opportunities for improvement. But the art of coaching is really finding what is the one thing that I can tackle that'll improve all these other metrics.

Cool.

So that's kind of what the key performance indicator, right?

Yeah. So naturally a lot of people are going to err towards exit speed or ball speed, right? Because they— I mean, we see that a lot. You see launch angles are kind of the more popular ones. But, uh, with these technologies we can go into spin axis, spin rate, we can go into barrel delivery, bat delivery, like approach angle. We can look at— I mean, we can use K-Vest, look at kinematic sequence. It's what, what is important to you.

Place, let's measure the full feedback loop of him. Okay, so right, if you look at like what's involved, okay, well we've got a ball, okay, we're using Rapsodo to measure that. So we can measure the angular displacement, velocity, spin, and axis tilt. So we know how the ball left, which ultimately is what people are coming in and investing in, right? The ball to do something different. Okay, well we can actually measure the bat. So now we understand how did the bat move to hit the ball the way it did. And then we can move one step back in the chain using motion capture in order to be able to be like, OK, how did the body move to move the bat the way it did to hit the ball the way it did?

Right.

OK, then we go even one step farther and we get into the kinetics. OK, so you can't— without force, there is no motion. All right, so like there is right now, we're sitting here at the table. I can't yell at this water bottle cap to move.

Move.

It's not going to move. It's only going to move if there's force. That's why we put force plates in the ground. Okay, so we can work all the way back to understand, okay, well, this is how the hitter pushed into the ground.

Yep.

So that force caused the motion, the motion of the body caused the motion of the bat, the bat then hit the ball, this is what happened to the ball. So with that full feedback loop, there is no more assumption, there's no more guessing. Everything we ever do is an evidence-based decision.

I love that. I like That gets me going, right? So, so, okay, so that's the next, next step. Sorry.

Yeah, no, so once we've, once we've decided on that key performance indicator, uh, if for the, for the BPL bat fitting, we will start the bat fitting process.

Okay.

Um, we have a, we have a second level that would be our skills combine, so it's a little bit more, uh, detailed. So you're going to come and you're going to go through the interview process like I mentioned earlier, but then we're going to look at physical screening. So that's where the on-base use screening comes in. I know we talked about that on the last podcast a little bit.

So you guys do do that? That was one of my next questions. You guys do the— you kind of touched on it. You do kinematic sequencing, stuff like that, or biomechanics stuff, right?

So we'll, so we'll do the, the OnBase UScreen just so we can kind of have a feel for that player, give him some feedback as to what he can improve physically. So we can set them up with a local physical therapist. We can show them a couple things that maybe, uh, in the swing, uh, that could maybe help help them get around that, that deficiency or, um, or issue in their, in their body movement. So it's like a lot of these things in coaching, we've always just been like, we'll do this, we'll know, like, do that, try to do this. Well, they can't physically do it, right?

Yeah. So yeah, yeah, we talked about that yesterday when I walked in, right? One of the screenings of the pelvic tilt, right? And a guy not being able to move his upper body and stabilize his lower body, you're ex— you're expecting him to do a movement that he just physically cannot perform, right?

So like if a guy can't pass the physical or the pelvic tilt test. We had— that's what we were talking about. So he said the, the team that he's with currently is trying to get him to create more launch, like create a higher launch angle to drive the ball more, more extra base hits, that type of stuff. We can't physically create any pelvic tilt, so it's going to be difficult for him. If he does try to create more launch angle or more, uh, uh, try to get a little more loft on, on the ball and drive the ball more, he's going to do it in a way that's less efficient, right, for his body. But also it's going to probably create him to swing and miss more, which is a big thing that he does well, is it doesn't strike out, right? So now it's like crazy. Yeah, so if it's something you can't physically do, you're probably going to break down something else that was a, that was a positive for you. Exactly. Now you're going to take away from something else.

We could, uh, the risk of getting off topic, we could just shrink the diameter of the barrel by 1/32 of an inch and increase his average launch angle by 3 degrees.

There you go. Yeah, so that's—

try explaining that to a baseball player and he'd be like I don't want to talk to him anymore.

Yeah.

Can you translate that to Micah Gibbs and give me baseball terms?

Like, right.

Yeah.

So, well, so that would be our—

yeah, exactly.

Right, exactly.

Here, go hit ball hard.

Stick hit ball.

Yeah.

So that, so, well, that would be— so we'll get in that a little bit more probably with the third level of service. But that second level, uh, so after on-base use screen, we talked about physical limitations, uh, we're going to like, uh, the TPI power test. Uh, which basically tells us how much power do you have and where is it coming from.

Yeah.

Is there a missing part in that chain too? So talk about, uh, the 3 different tests will tell us basically lower body, midsection, upper body, like where that strength is, if there's a missing link that maybe you need to try to develop a little bit more.

That's insane.

I love that.

And you know me, I'm a nerd with the biomechanics and the kinetic chain. So like, I— and you know, I love that stuff. You and I worked on that before you took the job over here when you were still at LSU.

So Yeah. So, so after that process, then it would go into our bat fitting again. Then there's the final service, our— that would be like when Ryan Goins comes in from the White Sox. If a guy from Marucci, they're one of their pro players that is on their advisory board, like whenever they come in, right? Anybody that wants to get that highest level of service, I mean, they're coming in, they're getting a full tour of the Marucci campus. They're going through the lathe, checking out how the bat's made, all that. So they get that feel for what's going on. And how the process happens from, from that side.

Right.

They're going to come in, they're going to go through all the things that we listed in the skills combine. And then finally, we're going to put them through the bat fitting. But what we're going to do is at the end of it, they're going to get a custom-made bat from Marucci with their name on it, however, whatever they want to call it. It's going to be their model. So that's, so that's in the Marucci database. So next time they're calling, instead of saying, hey, I want the 34-inch, 31-ounce BPI of this, and the AP5. Yeah, no, no, it's going to be the Renato custom cut, right?

You know, do you have numbers based off of like what you guys are doing for their bat fitting so that way they know this is my 34, 31.3, or that's all whatever your numbers are, how you guys do it, right?

That's where BPI comes in. Okay, because right until—

sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Until, until there was BPI, there was no independent variable to match off of. Okay, you know, what we've been able to evolve to is now blending both performance and preference. So, you know, we'll go through bat fitting, we'll determine the guy's optimal BPI is whatever. Let's say it's like 82. It's a— it's on a scale of 100, right? Um, so let's say it's 82. Well, but he likes a different type of knob. Well, when we go in and custom CAD design a file, now we understand the actual volume of wood that's used. So as we increase the volume of wood in the knob, and we know the density of the wood bat, we understand how much we have to distribute the weight on the barrel in order to actually maintain the exact same bat.

That's what I'm laughing at. I'm like, it's— it blows my mind though. I know it has something to do with technology and the availability of those things now, but it blows my mind that we've never even thought about that, right? Like, I like a bigger knob on the bottom. Yeah, that's going to make it heavier towards your hands, like, you know.

And it's the only— it's the only personalized piece of offensive equipment in the entire sport.

I love it. That's crazy. And now BPI You guys are— I mean, I, I believe it, so I think it's going to be an industry standard. Have you guys trademarked that or anything?

Like, hell yes.

Okay, good. I figured— I know that was a stupid question, but I just wanted to make sure before we're talking about it so much and we're putting it out there. And yeah, I just want to make sure.

I mean, and it's, you know, it's, it's actually been approved for certified.

Hell yeah.

You know, that means—

that's awesome, dude.

It can be applied to any bat regardless of who the manufacturer—

that's what I was— that was my next question. So you— so it can be manufactured, but it's not exclusive to me?

Yeah, we got We got— we've actually got a prototype of an automated BPI scale where basically it's like you put a bat on this electronic scale and it's gonna give us the exact length, weight, and BPI in under 2 seconds.

Holy shitballs. You gotta have those in the dugouts then. Everybody will be like— they're gonna be everywhere. That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, have them at Dick's and every— like, dude, that's right before a kid buys a bat or whatever. Eventually, you know, that's the vision.

Well, exactly. It's like you know. So even when you talk to amateur golfers, yeah, they know what their swing weight is, right? And swing weight's ridiculous, right? It was some dude in Scotland 150 years ago pounding scotch, came up with some dumbass idea, and he used a 14-inch counterbalance. It could have been 12, it could have been 16. He just picked 14 laying around.

Yeah.

And then he came up with this really stupid way, like, you know, we're not going to go with numbers, we're going to come combine letters and numbers just to confuse the shit out of people. But people know their swing weight's like D2, right? I don't know what it means, how it's measured, but it's like a standard. You go to every single golf club manufacturer's website, they print the swing weight for every single club that's on there because that's what, that's what affects the golfer's feel.

Yeah.

And that's how they make purchase decisions.

I love that.

You know, it's the same way with bats.

You're playing on the emotion. Yeah, you're playing on the emotion a little bit. Yeah, the player.

Yeah, absolutely. That's how, you know, that's consumer behavior.

Exactly.

It's— nobody needs to play baseball. It's a luxury recreation sport, and all the decision-making are going to be based on emotion. Yep.

I love it. Um, is that, is that the final process kind of, um, of the— you said so the last thing is that part where they get— they're in the system kind of?

And well, so what we'll, what we'll do is at that elite level service, those guys will finish their bat fitting. We'll talk to them about— once we find that BPI, we'll talk to them about through that, well, through that interview process, we'll find out like their, what their kryptonite is, like the pitch they really struggle with, the cold zone. And it's like, if, if the player wants to, we can make them a bat that helps them with the cold zone, helps them against that kryptonite type pitch. I know, like, like Ryan was in, uh, I think it was 2 days ago.

Yeah.

And, uh, went through the fitting and basically we were like, his thing is like, I cannot hit the, the high spin rate, right? Fastball with carry through the zone. I just really struggle with that. And so we built him one with a lower BPI that helps him get to that pitch, and the delivery of the bat helps him get to a pitch higher in the zone.

Keeps you guys—

no, but, but we— so we built him that. We built him one based off of a guy with sink, and then one that's basically just his game bat that is pretty much towards the middle of that. And, uh, so he can— so now he goes off for the season with 3 bats instead of 1 that he's got to maybe change his swing or approach or whatever. Instead of— now you just keep doing it. Just hit stick, ball, bat, hit it.

I love that. I mean, I love it from a science and a— and I'm— and an investor from Marucci perspective, you know. Um, but as a pitcher, it blows my mind. I mean, I mean, we've had advantages, you know. We've had Rapsodo before the hitters, you know. Pitching was a little bit ahead, I think. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but I think pitching was a little ahead with the metrics and data, right?

Right. Well, uh, Rapsodo kind of got the— in baseball, it kind of got it going. Yeah. Um, and TrackMan— we've, we've always used TrackMan so much more from pitching side, especially at LSU. And, um, we were just trying to figure out where, like, what we could use from the hitting side because everything was just exit speed and launch angle. It's like, well, there's 100 other columns of data. Like, what does all this stuff mean? I was just trying to learn all that stuff and figure out what we could do to affect it. Now it's always going to be tougher because hitting is the reactionary side of it. You guys are always in control until I can say, hey, start now, or like, hey, oh, not so fast, right?

Right.

We always do that when we're hitting in a cage. We're like, oh hey, can you a little bit more time between flips and it's like—

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When you're hitting, like, you don't— you don't gotta tell the pitcher when to stop. So you guys always have a little bit of an edge there with that, but you were definitely trying to catch up.

Yeah, I like— I mean, so Jared and I were talking about one of our episodes that, uh, that we did here at the house. He was telling me that he just got done swinging over there, and he was— you were telling him that in his cold zone, whatever, blah blah blah, you can literally make bats— hey, this guy has a good spin rate slider or whatever, and I struggle with those down in the zone. I don't know if this was a specific story, I'm just saying like for an example. And he knew that if you use a certain bat because he just was missing certain balls, like, hey, this bat is who I need to use against this pitcher because he has this pitch that I struggle with, right? And I was like, dude, fuck you guys. Like, that's crazy. Like, you're telling me that my— now my out pitch, you're just going to be spoiling because you have a new bat? That is like, you know what I'm saying? Like, that's crazy.

This might only resonate with the golfers out there, but can you imagine how hard golf would be with one club?

I'm not— I wish I knew. Yeah, well, actually, no, I mean, I do know. I've played golf enough to know that that would still suck.

Yeah, we carry 14 of them. Yeah, I don't think we quite need 14 bats, but yeah, you know, again, dating myself, but I have no clue why I would use the same bat against Greg Maddux as I would against Randy Johnson.

No, I mean, it's right.

Yeah, like, why?

No-brainer.

Yes.

And I think when we were younger, that's what— I mean, we were always right when you were taught, you was like Oh, get the light bat. This guy throws fast. You got to be faster. So like the, like the idea was there when you were 10, right? I don't know. Like, oh, at least that was our thing when we were growing up. It was like, this is a fast pitcher. You got to use the smaller, lighter bat so you can swing it faster. Like, and so the concept is there. It's just a matter of adding the science and the quantitative, quantitative.

It's the ability to have these new technologies that'll be able to give you that, that evidence-based decision. So it's like, I mean, I've hit from both sides of the plate and I use two different bats. But I knew that for me it was like, well, I have two different approaches. I'm different, like, but I never like was able to get those exact like numbers behind it as to why, because I didn't have that yet.

Right.

And then hand loaded is hand loaded and how— right, exactly. Balanced is balanced. We don't know.

Right. And each side, everybody's going to be different too. Like, so if you're hitting, you know, like for a personal guy that hits on both sides, like one side is going to be stronger. So that's exactly, you know, one hand is going to be stronger on top, bottom, whatever.

Right.

It's interesting. That's crazy. Um, I just forgot my next question I was going to ask you because it— oh, Talk about, talk about how some of the things that you are doing with the force plates and how the specific data— because, because I would come in and I would see the stuff on the board, but I didn't really know how it was applying to the swing and the load and those things. And I love the— I was fascinated with the distribution of the load, you know, like front end, back end, and all that. So talk to me how the force plates kind of measure that and what, what data you guys give guys.

Well, I mean, uh, you know, a lot of it first off is starting by working back down the chain. Okay, any, anytime we're going to analyze anything, we start with the ball because that's what we're playing with, right? And then if we see, if we see an issue with, um, with the way the bat's delivered, we'll then work back through the kinematics, the body movement. And if we see an issue with the body movement, then we can look at the ground force which causes the movement.

Gotcha.

So, you know, if we, if whatever it is, if I think like it, you know, let's say like if a player is losing space, right, you know, their lower body gets in, the crowd's bad, they can't release the barrel, whatever it is, well, I can, I can go and I can take a look at the heel-toe horizontal force to understand what direction they're applying force to the ground and how that could cause result in body movement. So, you know, a simple thing like that would be giving a right-handed hitter the cueing that when they plant their left foot, I want them to push forward at home plate, because then the reaction force from the ground is going to drive their lower body farther away from home plate and give them space.

That's the thing that's so fascinating to me. You guys do a kind of like a biomechanic breakdown, so you kind of know that stuff about them. Even, you know, I know that probably starts from the ankles up. So you kind of even know probably how their feet arch and different things, right? And that is fascinating to me because the cues are the thing that I've been kind of like obsessed with lately, especially in my training, figuring out the right cues to get the right result, you know, and based off your proprioception and the way you perceive space and stuff like that. So I think that's really interesting to me because you're playing on the brain a little bit. You're cueing different things to get results. That's where you're like, you press down this way to get a force this way.

You can't change, you know, people come to us to change performance, right? You can't change performance unless you change perception.

Absolutely. That's what—

it's where it all has to start.

Gotcha.

And a lot of it is also is like one of my favorite things about operating that environment is the same way in golf is, you know, for Micah Gibbs, he never has to say trust me again the rest of his life, right? You know, I'm sure so many— there's so many times when you're coaching in LSU when you knew you were right but you didn't have any way to prove it to the athlete. And you know, I say like, look, just trust me. Just, yeah, trust me.

Do this weird thing. I know if you do this and feel this, it'll work.

Yeah, yeah, you don't have to. No.

Yeah, look at the screen.

Look at it. Yeah, I know you think you did it, but you didn't.

Yeah, because you didn't. But that's the thing that I'm so fascinated about. We talked about it too. I keep saying that, so fascinated by. But like talking to you yesterday about the thing you were telling me about dead left arm. So activating different parts of your, of your muscle system based off of what you're thinking and cueing. And that's what like I've struggled with, and I'm why I started working with you over at LSU, because I thought I was doing the right hip hinge, and I'm like telling my brain's telling me that I'm doing it, and I'm watching in the mirror wrong, and I'm like, wait, that's right. Yeah, I think that was, that was really interesting to me. And is that what you kind of specialize in over there? You take that data and then give it to the players?

Yeah, so I mean, I think it's, it's such a great link for a coach is I think you have a lot of people that are, they love data and they, and they're big into the data, but they don't know how to Yeah, and then you have a lot of people that know how to coach, which right now you have all these people going to the data and they're forgetting the coach.

100%.

The coach is still probably the most important, right? But what we need to do is figure out a way to like bridge the gap.

Yeah.

So Liam's unbelievable when it comes to the kinematics, the kinetics, the all that stuff, and he's taught me so much from that. And I mean, I've probably absorbed 10% of like what he has in his pinky, right? And even that just has allowed me to like see this force data that I'd just seen on like scholarly articles and YouTube videos and stuff and like really understand it and start to see the differences when like a pro guy comes in. You have a guy that's— what, a guy that was a multi-time All-Star come in and you see him and how his body moves and with the force data. And then you see a kid that's in high school and you just see the differences and you're like, oh wow. Yeah. Oh, you're okay. So, and it's that stuff that you think you see from video, but you can't, you don't really know unless the data is there.

Right.

And the ability to, like Liam was saying, the ability to show someone sitting there like, hey, like your head's moving this much, or you got this much weight in your heel or toe. Like, well, no, like my whole foot's on the ground. No, it's not.

I thought one of the coolest things was when Antoine came in.

Right.

Right. And we're looking, so under the trail foot, we have a pressure plate that's overlaid on top of a force plate. Right. Pressure is vertical force spread across an area. You get like a heat map. So, you know, it's— we're just looking at it. What we could have never seen on video was that, you know, when he was getting, uh, to a negative move, getting ready to make his move back, you know, towards the pitcher to hit the ball, he had all the pressure on the lateral outside portion of his trail foot.

Yeah.

If I want to be a dynamic ballistic rotary athlete exploding to my left, I don't know much about baseball, but I know that I should not start on the outside of my right foot.

That's incredible. And so he was mind-blown because he didn't even know he was doing it, or when you explained that to him, like, dude, check this out.

Yeah, your footprint. Yeah. Um, I don't think you can move very powerful to your left from the outside of your right foot. What do you think? He's like, oh, I think that makes sense.

They just never have thought about it that way and heard it from somewhere like that.

Well, then this is like what I'll always ends up happening. It's like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna use a quarter million dollars in technology to diagnose you, and then we're gonna give you a $2 fix, right? So I literally took a zip tie and I put a zip tie under the ball of his right foot, and I said, just push on this zip tie when you go to hit. And it's just a cue, right?

Just, that's where you're pressing force.

I don't know if he could feel it. Yeah, it could have been imaginary, it doesn't matter, but it just got him to change his perception of what he was trying to do, which then changed performance, which resulted in something.

It was like 5 mph average exit velocity jump. And the thing— and the other thing with that too is if you just look at video and you just compare the two side to side, you wouldn't be able to see a huge difference, right?

Not much.

But then you overlay it and you can kind of see a little bit, but then you get the for— like the pressure map, the force in that data, and it's like, oh, okay, there it is.

That's crazy. And the reason that I think when you guys told me this, I was like, this is a home run, because I think I've lived it. So I think in, uh, like beginning of 2019. Yeah, beginning of 2019, I was still doing my training. I was still coming back from an injury. I saw Colin Rogers in the weight room, and he asked me— he was going over my foot. He asked me to show him my foot, and based off of my arch of my foot, he was like, we've, we found out that depending on the way your arch is, more flat, more arched, there's different cues that we tell guys of where to engage in the rubber. So he told me, based off my toes and the way my foot was shaped, I should be cueing that these two, these two toes on my right foot are the ones that I'm actually pushing down with down the slope, and it allowed my ankle rotation to engage with the rubber better, you know, where you're landing. It was crazy.

Like the least exciting thing ever on a podcast, I'm going to show you a foot screen. Oh nice, can you pass yoga toes?

Oh, what is that?

I don't know.

So basically I slid off my shoe, I've got my foot down flat on the ground, I've got all 5 toes on the ground. I'm going to keep my 4 toes down and I'm going to lift up the big toe. Just like that.

And I can't do it.

Yeah, I know. So there's no point— I'm just saying, like, there's— that cueing may have been a great—

but I still don't have the control that I need.

Don't have motor control. That's crazy. Okay, so now I'm going to keep the big toe down. I'm going to lift up the 4 outside toes. See that?

Oh my God.

And then I'm going to do that. So here's the— the body is designed to work in an alternating pattern of stability and mobility. Yeah. Okay, so people talk a lot about ankle mobility but then they fail to see if the foot is stable underneath the ankle, right? So if, you know, for the most part, the shoes we wear day in, day out are like casts, right? Right. They bound— they bind our toes together. Our foot becomes completely immobile. We have no control over it. And then what the ankle does is the ankle will lock up to try and provide stability that the foot doesn't have anymore, right?

So I'm like, I'm nerding out because I just listened to this podcast a couple, um, 2 weeks ago and I had a posturologist actually from, um, Montreal. Uh, I'll have to get her net— her name's Annette. I don't know where— what she specializes in, but anyway, I heard her on a podcast. I reached out to her, we had a phone call, and we started talking about that. But her whole thing is the gait. She, she, she's convinced that the gait— your gait determines your whole posture and throughout the kinetic chain all the way up. And so she was talking about that, and like, that's why it's fascinating to me, because I know that, that like, as I did that and you did that. Yeah, I was like, yeah, exactly, like right away. And I'm like, okay, I got a lot of work to do right now.

I, so I first, I first saw that when I was working with our national golf team probably 7 or 8 years ago. And I, you know, what's super cool about what Golf Canada does is for our developing athletes, you know, we have a proper national team with a full integrated support team. So it's super cool getting to sit there and, you know, you're talking about a 16-year-old golfer and I'm in there as the biomechanist and We've got a sports psychologist, we've got a nutritionist, and we've got a strength coach, and we've got the head coach, and we've got the assistant coach. And it's like, you know, the sports psychologist is talking about, well, she just got dumped by her boyfriend and is eating Cheetos, and I'm like, her ankles are fucked. All these things that are going into it. But that was like when Greg Redmond, the physio, he works with all kinds of athletes, he goes, oh, did he check the foot?

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It's there.

Yeah. What does the foot do? Yeah.

So he asked me I do the same thing. I'm like, oh shit, it doesn't work, right? And he's like, oh, this is, this is probably gonna hurt. And he pokes me in this one part of the foot. I'm like, shit, that hurt.

Yeah.

He's like, yeah, well, because of this, that, and the other.

So was it like a nerve thing? Like nerve wasn't going down? So that's what I'm like interested in. I wonder— the reason I think of that and the reason I ask about nerves is I ruptured my disc, and that's when I, uh, 2 or 3 years ago, and I noticed that my left foot started— I don't know, just because I was numb at the bottom. Yeah. And I didn't have nerve, like my nerve was damaged probably. Like, I think that had something to do with like my foot like going, coming back and everything.

Probably. I mean, I, I mean, I know that's going beyond.

Exactly.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, I start thinking about that stuff, I go back to thinking about pelvic posture. Really? Okay. Yeah. You know, is it in such a way where there could be compression on the nerves in the lumbar? Right. You know, I don't know.

No, I know, that's, yeah, that's interesting.

But I mean, there's, if you go digging, like you obviously go and dig and look for experts. Yeah, there's crazy shit out there. I know, like You know, I was talking to you about my buddy Gerti from Iceland, right? He's got, he's got this lady that he brought in from Poland that's doing research on food and how it affects you. And you want to see some real crazy shit? It's like, we did this at my house when he came to visit. We had like, I don't know, like carrots and like french fries and whatever. And as simple as like put your arm out and just a baseline measure for how strong you are keeping your arm. Okay, good. Now take this french fry and put it under your tongue. And it's like, no way. Some people will get crazy weak and some people it won't affect. And if it doesn't affect you, it's like, okay, you can eat french fries. Okay, no, you can't eat french fries. Okay, carrots. Carrots make you weak. Yeah, make you strong, whatever it is. But it's just like, there's—

I'm into that sense a little bit too. And the microbiome, the way— where the way it died— way your body digests certain foods. And everybody's different. That's why they have all those microbiome tests now that you can go get individual testing to know, hey, look, this food— like kale, kale and spinach, everybody's like, oh, so great, right? But like 1 in 5 people in the world cannot digest kale and spinach, so it's actually not good for you, you know?

Maybe it's good so they're not such fat asses, right?

It's true. Yeah, you could say whatever you want on there. Yeah, we do whatever we want here. You should have heard what Dr. Belisa said in our last episode. It was for 5 minutes, we— but it was good. That's what makes things interesting. Um, all right, so Talk to me, uh, last, last couple things, um, specifically about the bat fitting and maybe some more about the metrics of how force plates— and is there any correlation between force plates and the size of the bat and the— and those kind of things?

Shit, we don't know.

Yeah, okay, still, still early in a lot of your research and data.

Here's— so far with what we can tell, the single most important thing is to treat it as a sample set of one.

Okay.

Okay. And this was like even back when I was first trying to wrap my head around a force plate and what the hell would I use it for in golf. I flew to Australia in 2014 to go to the World Scientific Congress of Golf. I talked to every single biomechanist there and the resounding feedback from all of them was the same thing. Treat everyone as an individual, you know, and that resonated when I was talking to Sasha McKenzie and I'm trying to like, I just ask questions to try and figure shit out, right? And I'm like, okay, Sasha, how about this? Imagine I've got identical twins with the same kinematic sequence, the same strength testing results, the same body movement screens. One of them has size 8 feet and one of them has size 12 feet. I know I said they're twins, don't ask me about that. Now what? He's like, oh yeah, that'd be totally different readings on a force plate.

I believe that.

Yeah. Like, okay, good. So it's like, first is like, treat everyone as an individual, you know, and that's where You know, what, what I love about when someone comes in to see Micah Gibbs, we've developed a process, you know, and I'll say our process is as simple as it is for someone to learn how to make a hamburger at Wendy's.

Nice.

All right, it's just, you know, the beauty of a good process is where you can execute the exact same thing in the same order, the same way, every single time, and get personalized results. Correct.

Awesome. And that's kind of what you're mastering right now over there. How long you been over there?

Uh, so we opened the doors first week of November.

Oh, it's been that long already?

Yeah, I know, right? Uh, and the crazy thing is we started construction, what, first week of September? Everything went up quick.

Time flies. I'm doing all that stuff with F45 right now. It's the same thing. Like, Nick and I were talking about the other day, and it was like, we started this in May of 19— I was like, what? It feels like it was like yesterday.

So I know, that's crazy to me. So we're the, you know, of, you know, for whatever all the different companies that are out there, we in the span of like 2 months, we already have the third largest professional baseball player data set. So that was any non-baseball organization in the world.

Okay, so that was my next question. I'm going to talk to you about this off air, but do you guys store all the data of the—

hell yeah.

So that's intellectual property?

Absolutely.

Wow, I fucking love you. You're a fuck— yeah, you're, you're the guy. That's awesome.

That's the value.

Yes, 100%. So wow. All right, that's awesome.

Um, we're starting to get you know, we were talking about yesterday, we're starting to start to see some correlations between, let's say, like, uh, grip strength, dominant hand, and BPI. Yeah, right. So we're, we're gonna get to something, I'm sure, where there's correlations. Uh, there's never been statistical data that gives us causality in our R-squared value, but we do have R-values, correlations over 80% with couple of metrics in the golf space, and pretty sure we're on our way to that.

Yeah, yeah, that's— but it's really exciting to me that you guys are— that, you know, how important that is. So, yeah, um, talk to me, we'll wrap up, I'll let you guys get going. Oh, you guys are gonna go get some dinner and everything, enjoy Baton Rouge tonight. So, um, talk to me about the next couple steps, what you guys are doing next, how you guys are going to grow, whether that's you, how you guys are going to do this, and, and a little bit more about your role going forward and expanding this brand, you know.

I think most of the focus is on world domination, right?

Well, obviously that's understood. That's okay. Next thing, we're all going to world dominate. That's facts.

Yeah, so I think, uh, I think next step, I mean, we obviously continue to, uh, run our process, do what we're doing, but I think the next step is, yeah, just to perfect everything. And, um, the next step I think is to maybe hire a couple interns, you know. And, uh, so if anybody's listening that's interested in maybe being a part of the the family, then, uh, that's Micah Gibbs. Yeah, that's all.

That's, that's right, bpl.com.

There you go. But I'm gonna put all that in the show notes anyway, for real.

So yeah, so, uh, any, any youngsters or young at heart that want to get on the road this summer and help us out.

Yeah, you know, we're at a point now where our, our process is refined to the point where it's responsible to take to the masses, right? You know, and so that's where You know, Mike is talking about some of the amateur organizations that we're going to be starting to offer services through as well, of course coming to BPL. Um, you know, on the innovation side, we've entered into 3-year agreements with 2 MLB clubs.

Nice, awesome.

That's basically opened up a whole new world of data access, right?

You know, absolutely.

Now it's like, you know, when we go, you know, like when we're out in Scottsdale and we get to hang out with 7 people that all have PhDs but don't know shit about baseball. Yeah, so that's awesome, you know. So we're just getting that much more information into our system. We really started to integrate a lot of the, you know, a lot of the data that comes like from Statcast. Yeah, from just looking at where— with the hot and cold zones.

And so when you partner with them, they share that data with you so that way you can apply it to yours and you guys can share data back and forth. Yeah, especially if their players are in your system.

Well, yeah, and so it affords us with two major opportunities. It's, you know, over the course of 3 years, we're going to be able to profile the progression of a minor leaguer through to the major leagues, right? And understand—

that's awesome—

yeah, what that works like. And then we're also going to have long-term data sets that are going to allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of matching a bat to situation.

That's the thing that fascinates me. That's where I think— that's what I was trying to say earlier with Jared, but Yeah, yeah.

So it's, you know, that's, you know, that's where we're going to get the, the volume of live in-game data to know, like, okay, a right-handed batter, cold zone, down and away struggles against slider. In 3 years, we'll have enough data to know if matching the same BPI at a 34.5-inch bat instead of his usual 33.5-inch bat is an effective metric for effectively relocating the sweet spot.

I love Jared, but like, that's what I was trying to— I think we talked about it. That's the articulation that I was looking for in that. That was perfect. That was perfect. No, I get it. And that's what I was trying to say earlier, and I just couldn't articulate. I, I couldn't— I know he was articulating it to me correctly, but I couldn't— I didn't understand. But that's awesome.

Yeah, like, you know, at the end of the day, you know, 3 years from now, we'll actually know if you should have more bat to play baseball, right?

That's awesome. Is that it? MO, love it.

That's about it.

Where can, uh, where can everybody find you? Micah, what's your personal Instagram?

Uh, @gibbs_micah.

Cool, I'll put that in the show notes. What about yours? Awesome. And then I'll put all the show notes in about the, the Golf Lab, everything. And then what's the website that you guys had to battle, uh, for?

What was thebpl.com?

Thebpl.com. Seriously guys, do yourselves a favor, go check it out. These guys are really innovating, changing the game. They're over at Marucci Sports facility on McCann Drive in Baton Rouge. If you guys are local, if you guys are interested in flying in, professional athletes, anybody, please contact these guys. They're all going to be in the show notes. I'm going to have the, the website, their Instagram, all that stuff. So thank you guys. I mean, this was— I know we just nerded out for 45 minutes, but this is my style. That's it.

So, yeah, you know we love it.

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully we'll have a part 2 in a couple, a couple months. We'll keep everybody updated. So thank you guys.

Yeah, thank you.

Go Tigers! Sì!

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