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The new Padres Biomechanics Lab at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego features both a markered and markerless motion capture platform.
Eliminated from the NLCS last October in South Philly, all because Bryce Harper hadn’t missed a fastball straight at his belt buckle, the San Diego Padres players sat at their lockers in a collective brain fog. There was a hush in their clubhouse for a horrifying hour. But, if someone listened closely, they might have heard the tap-tap-tap of a pitching coach sending an urgent text.
His name is Ruben Niebla, the man in charge of Padres arms, and he was messaging, of all people, a biomechanist. To make an appointment.
"He was saying, ‘I want to send my guys over,’" remembers Dr. Arnel Aguinaldo, a PhD and the brain behind the new Padres Biomechanics Lab at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "He said, ‘Once they get back tomorrow, can you see them on Monday?’ I said, ‘Yes, we’ll set it up.’ He wanted to get them in while they were hot: Nick Martinez, Joe Musgrove, Blake Snell. He wanted their data while they were hot at the end of the season."
That, in a nutshell, is modern baseball: no stone, or arm, left unturned. Wake Forest’s pitching lab was the first of its kind in Division I baseball. But, in the Major Leagues, motion capture is starting to evolve as an art form, and the Padres-PLNU collaboration is aiming to be one of the most comprehensive labs.
Deploying a hybrid markered and markerless motion capture platform developed by the Chicago-based company Qualisys, the Padres-PLNU Biomechanics Lab is a relative ecosystem that will quantify skeletal movements for pitching, hitting, fielding and, according to Aguinaldo, "a number of different movement patterns that typically other labs don’t do."
Mike Martin, the biomechanist who is Qualisys’ director of baseball operations, went a step further and called the lab a "big footprint" for MLB teams, whose trendsetters in the past, according to Aguinaldo, have been the Dodgers, Astros, Rays and Cubs. What makes the Padres lab most unique — besides the dueling motion capture — is the integration of force plates, electromyography, Rapsodo and HitTrax that when paired with skeletal movement data can get to the bottom of what causes injury and what causes Shohei Ohtani-like success.
"Is this the future of baseball? I think the future is already here," Aguinaldo said. "It's a copycat league. And so I can tell you the Padres are prioritizing biomechanics as many teams have such as the Astros, Orioles and Rays, to name a few."
Although the Padres-PLNU Biomechanics Lab won’t open on the oceanfront PNLU campus until the end of October 2023, it has operated for roughly two years as a mobile unit at the Padres disposal. Aguinaldo — who began working with the Rangers and White Sox as far back as 2016 — initially introduced the Padres to biomechanics in 2019 at the team’s Peoria, Ariz., spring training complex. Aguinaldo said one of the initial guinea pigs was the No. 3 overall pick from 2017, MacKenzie Gore, who at the time, had yet to excel in the minors and donned markered reflective dots for the purposes of experiential motion capture.
"The first thing [motion capture quantifies] is the joint angles," Martin said, not speaking specifically about Gore. "And what this encompasses for us is kinematics: what type of movement is going on? And this could be what's going on at the hip, what's going on with the shoulders. What's going on from the pelvis related to the trunk? To the arm, to the hand? What is leading what? Are we using the ground? Are we moving from the bottom up? Or are we pulling from the arm? Are we leading with something else that could be causing an injury?"
Markered motion capture, according to both biomechanists, was the "gold standard," and the Padres bought in from there because they wanted to protect the most precious ligament in baseball: the UCL.
"We’re all familiar with the prevalence of pitching-related elbow injuries," Aguinaldo said. "It's an epidemic. Quite honestly, the human body's not built to withstand the stresses imposed when pitching off a mound 90, 100 times a game. But with the technology of biomechanics, we have the ability to quantify how much stress is being imposed on the elbow and how much that pitcher can withstand. You can never prevent an injury, but we can help the team develop strategies to minimize that risk."
Markered motion capture can identify the red flags — such as how far a pitcher’s arm is dropping on a pitch — but the reflective dots can be restricting, which led Qualysis to develop markerless AI-based motion capture done through a video-based system at 300 frames per second. That means pitchers can be evaluated in-game, via AI. It’s the best of both worlds.
So currently at the mobile Padres Lab, pitchers such as Musgrove, Snell and Yu Darvish — the strength of a disappointing Padres team whose offense is in freefall — are evaluated with both markered and markerless motion capture every 8 to 10 weeks, from spring to the final day of the season and then again in the offseason.
"So now our lab has a database of all these guys we're seeing over time," Aguinaldo said. "And this new lab will be ready in time for this next offseason. But we won’t only be seeing the big league guys, we'll be seeing the guys from AAA, Single-A, the guys they just drafted."
The idea is to have constant reference points. For instance, Musgrove dropped a kettlebell on his foot this spring training and fractured his big toe. When he began throwing again weeks later, the Padres were afraid he could compensate and injure his arm. So they sent him to Aguinaldo’s mobile lab, where the biomechanist was able to determine that Musgrove was throwing identically to how he threw in the 2022 playoff series against Philadelphia. In other words, Musgrove was as "hot" in his motion capture outfit as he was last October in South Philly, ensuring he could start pitching in games pronto.
Niebla sent Aguinaldo another text to say, well done.
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