Bob “Turtle” Smith Stadium
While watching baseball games, nothing frustrated Jerry Spessard more than seeing fans argue with umpires about questionable calls.
As a local inventor and the father of former Terrapins baseball player Gerry Spessard, a 2008 alumnus, he thought today’s technology could lead to a better system. Two years later, Spessard and a team of university researchers and a retired engineer have developed an electronic home plate prototype that could revolutionize the way baseball calls are made.
Using opto-electronic components, their invention, Eagle Eye, detects the speed and position of a baseball after it’s pitched. When the baseball passes through invisible lights emitted from two slots on the home plate, the light scatters, according to Christopher Davis, an engineering professor on the team. The resulting shape of light enables the plate to determine the correct call.
A ball that breaks the infrared light registers as a strike, Spessard said. A ball passing outside the beams isn’t.
The plate adjusts to correspond with the strike zones of different batters when users manually input physical statistics into a database by physically measuring the strike zone.
Because the developers still face the possibility of human error during measurement, their research is now focused on how they could eliminate this issue.
“No two players wear their pants the same,” Spessard said. “I’m hoping down the road, the players may be receptive to wearing a Velcro [knee strip] with a built-in chip.”
Though it’s still in development, the prototype has already garnered attention from baseball teams and grant competitions after Spessard approached the engineering school for help. This year, Eagle Eye earned runner-up in the Office of Technology Commercialization’s Invention of the Year awards. The team has also received about $200,000 in grant funding through the university’s Maryland Industrial Partnerships program, which had paired Spessard with Davis, who specializes in optical and surveillance research.
With the help of research associate John Rzasa, retired engineer Leroy Chamberlain Jr. and Washington County Technical High School alumnus Jakob Scharmer, the team began developing the prototype in February 2012 and spent the next six to eight months building it. Following completion of the prototype, they enlisted players from the Terps baseball team to test their design.
Spessard aims to begin manufacturing the home plate in December 2013 or January 2014 and make it available to Little League, high school and collegiate teams in 2014. The product already has a patent, trademark and logo, and Spessard has already begun building a production facility in Hancock.
It won’t be cheap, though. Composed of a six-inch-deep polycarbonate vault and covered by a regular home plate, Eagle Eye contains various LEDs and a minicomputer. Altogether, Spessard expects the product to retail between $2,500 and $5,000.
And it could take time for the public to warm up to the electronic home plate concept, said Spessard, who also invented the GameFace, a safety mask for softball players. But he’s already thinking ahead with other ideas, such as an app that would let fans see how fast each pitch is right on their smartphones.
“I want people to buy the product as a training tool for the bullpen,” Spessard said. “It’s going to evolve into practice games, inter-squad games and eventually into real games.”
Freshman aerospace engineering major Patrick Washington said he supports technology that could improve the fairness of the game. But it’s unlikely the Eagle Eye will make it to Major League Baseball, he said, where the calls depend on what the umpire saw and not what video replays or other technologies detect.
The electronic home plate could also have negative effects from a pitching perspective, said Washington, who pitched in high school and follows college and professional baseball.
“You often throw a ball slightly off the plate, hoping that the batter will swing at a pitch he can’t hit well because he has to in order to not strike out if an ump has a large strike zone,” Washington said. “I don’t anticipate batters being hurt by it, since it would make it easier for them to decide whether to swing on close pitches.”
Such technology could also cause umpires to become too reliant on technology, said junior civil engineering major Adam Abramson, who plays on the university’s club baseball team. Umpires might miss other calls and facets of the game, he said.
“Taking away some of the discretion — while it makes baseball technically more accurate — it takes away the human factor,” Abramson said. “I just think it takes the excitement out of baseball. It makes it more dull.”
Ultimately, Spessard hopes his invention will eliminate errors in baseball officiating and cut back on conflicts between fans and umpires.
“When I go to a baseball game, I go to enjoy it, not listen to people constantly yell abusive remarks to the umpire,” Spessard said. “I hope it will add stability back into the game.”
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