Want to face Gerrit Cole — between innings? Inside the controversial new tech that could change at-bats forever
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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
The Los Angeles Angels trailed by a run halfway through their May 28 game against the New York Yankees, and Willie Calhoun figured he’d plan ahead. Calhoun, a journeyman outfielder, thought he might be used as a late-game pinch hitter. So he made his way to Angel Stadium’s indoor batting cage and turned on Trajekt Arc, the cutting-edge machine that has quickly become a go-to throughout the industry for its ability to replicate major league pitchers.
Calhoun cued up all of the Yankees’ high-leverage relievers, most of whom he’d never faced, tracking as many pitches as he could over the course of a couple of innings. When he was summoned to face Luke Weaver in the bottom of the eighth, he felt ready. Calhoun took back-to-back changeups for balls, then saw a 91-mph cutter on the inner half and lofted a base hit to right field, a leadoff single that ignited a two-run inning and ultimately gave the Angels a come-from-behind victory.
“I was able to see how it was looking before I got into the box,” Calhoun said. “That machine is nice.”
Trajekt — essentially a pitching robot that can play the video of any pitcher’s windup, then spit out all of his pitches from the appropriate arm angle based on the reams of data available — is now used by 19 major league teams, plus three others in Japan, despite not existing in any form until 2021. This year, the league office has allowed Trajekt to be used in-game, a polarizing decision that has in some ways splintered the industry based on personal interest.
Some hitters, frustrated by an era in which pitchers throw harder and nastier than ever, have celebrated what they consider a rare advancement.
“This is the first piece of technology we’ve had that truly benefits us,” one position player said. “Before this we had nothing.”
Plenty of pitchers disagree, pointing to recent rule changes implemented to create a more hitter-friendly environment, and consider Trajekt an unfair advantage — particularly in-game.
“You wanna have it, fine,” a veteran pitcher said. “But three hours before game time, those machines need to be shut off.”
Trajekt previously required an Internet connection to operate, a violation of Major League Baseball’s sign-stealing policy. Modifying the device so that it could operate offline prompted the league to allow it for in-game use, according to an MLB official. Team executives were notified this past offseason.
“We already allow other pitching machines that replicate pitch characteristics,” Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations, wrote in a statement to ESPN, alluding to another, less-involved pitch-replication device called iPitch.
“Once [Trajekt] moved the system offline during games, there was no longer a reason to stand in the way.”
The effects appear to be minimal thus far. Leaguewide batting average sits at .242, the third-lowest mark since 1900, behind only 1968 (the year before the mound was lowered) and 1908 (at the heart of the dead-ball era). But the strikeout rate against relievers is below 23% — 22.9%, to be exact — for the first time in eight years, a subtle decline some have at least partly attributed to the in-game use of Trajekt.
It’s why one of those relievers, Yankees lefty Caleb Ferguson, is adamantly against it.
“It’s impossible for a pitcher to mimic the at-bat,” he said. “We don’t even really get the chance at all to try to have that upper hand where you can come in and face a guy and read the result, see what’s gonna happen if I face whoever. But they could be hitting my fastball for the next three hours? That’s not fair.”
Hitters say they find it helpful, but they’ll also argue it’s not that simple. The machine — four feet deep, six feet wide and, all told, roughly 1,500 pounds — is too bulky to travel with, making it only an option for teams when they’re at home. Hitters largely don’t swing off it in-game, worried that it might make their hands sore by frequently getting jammed against high velocities. Some have said it’s also hard to pick up the baseball’s spin. And because the image it projects is basically a hologram, it’s much more difficult for hitters to time themselves off a pitcher’s arm slot than it would be in real life.
The Trajekt Arc sits on a track, allowing it to move left to right to spit out pitches.
Then there’s the situation at Arizona’s Chase Field, where the indoor batting cage is not big enough for the Trajekts to be stationed any more than 54 feet away from home plate, rendering the machine useless as a timing mechanism and leaving the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ Trajekt Arc to mostly collect dust.
“Ninety-nine [mph] feels like 120 for us,” D-backs outfielder Pavin Smith said near the end of May. “I don’t love it, to be honest. I liked it more in spring training. It was further back, so it felt more realistic. Now every guy looks like he’s twice as good.”
Trajekt, costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 a month and requiring a three-year commitment, is typically set up 56 to 57 feet away to account for pitchers’ average extension. Standard game balls can be used, but players have taken to a softer version of Rawlings’ baseball, the L10 Pro. Unlike iPitch, a stationary two- to three-wheel machine, Trajekt sits on a gantry, allowing it to spit baseballs anywhere from four to seven feet off the ground, and can move left to right along a track.
Teams can input Hawkeye data, which MLB uses to collect in-game metrics, and they can implement information from Rapsodo and Trackman devices, which also catalog metrics, from players’ training sessions. Videos of pitchers’ windups come from the cameras that are stationed behind home plate at every major league ballpark, with teams capable of uploading the videos that correspond to each pitch to project the precise arm slot. Teams only have access to their own data. The more the machine is used, the more accurate it becomes at replicating pitches.
What it’s like to face New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole (well, at least a holographic version of him).
Often, though, hitters are seeing what they believe is the best version of each pitch.
“It really varies,” Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Jason Heyward said. “Some look similar, some don’t. You’re seeing them throw the ball, but I still think it’s completely different in the game because there’s room for error. Pitchers mean to throw a ball here, and they throw it here. They mean to throw it here, and they throw it here, all that kind of stuff. So I think that’s where it’s not very realistic. It’s like video game pinpoint every time. But still — just getting a visual, an idea, of what someone has and how that may come out is cool. It’s helpful, for sure.”
Ten years ago, a teenager named Joshua Pope came up with the concept behind Trajekt while debating his high school friends about how many pitches it would take to get a hit off Marcus Stroman, then the ace of his hometown Toronto Blue Jays. Pope, now 28, wondered why there wasn’t a physical manifestation of all the publicly available pitching data. He attended the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, in part to learn from the mechanical engineering professor, Dr. John McPhee, who developed a hockey slapshot robot. Pope then received a grant of $60,000 Canadian dollars, raised additional financing, built a mock-up and launched the company Trajekt Sports in 2019, becoming its CEO.
During a tutorial at the 2019 winter meetings, Chicago Cubs director of innovation Bobby Basham became intrigued by the ball-inserter technology that allows for gyro spin, a revolutionary advancement that separated Trajekt from any pitching machine that came before it. Basham ultimately became Pope’s first customer, bringing it to the Cubs in the spring of 2021. By 2022, seven teams had it. A year later, it had grown to 12. Now it has spread to nearly two-thirds of the industry.
Pope’s company — co-founded by one-time classmate and current chief technology officer Rowan Ferrabee — now has 15 full-time employees and produces 20 machines a year. Forty of them are in use within MLB, with some teams having as many as six — one on the major league side and one at every minor league affiliate. Some are considering renting additional ones to use out of their academies in the Dominican Republic.
Pope said approximately half the machines are used at regular-season ballparks and the other half are used in the minors. He has heard of Triple-A catchers who use it to get a feel for the stuff thrown by the major league pitchers they’ll catch after getting promoted; pitchers who look at the shape of their own pitches to get a better feel for how they’re seen from the batter’s box; and, notably, teams shuttling prospects through reps against major league pitchers at their spring training complexes to get a baseline for performance.
“Obviously the most exciting ones are when a big-name player is facing a starting pitcher that day and in the first inning they hit a home run because they predicted a slider coming and they leveraged that off Trajekt and got a result,” Pope said. “We have countless anecdotes like that. But I think the more nuanced one, of evaluation and preparing for the game even prior to making it to the big leagues, is also something that we find really exciting, because it gives more opportunity to more people to have a chance at extreme, high-level practice, which is hard to get.
“Players can only throw full speed so often, and their reps are limited in training. And therefore it’s very tough to develop to that next level.”
A spring training ACL tear prevented Rhys Hoskins from playing for the Philadelphia Phillies in 2023. But when the Phillies made a playoff run late into that season, Hoskins held on to faint hopes that he might contribute. His month of October was spent at the team’s spring training facility in Clearwater, Florida, hitting off the Trajekt machine in hopes of getting as acclimated to major league pitching as possible if summoned at a moment’s notice. He began by holding a clicker instead of a bat, pressing a button to indicate swing decisions to help him distinguish balls from strikes, then progressed to full-on hitting, seeing up to 200 pitches a day.
“I felt pretty ready in terms of being in the box from a hitting standpoint in order to join those guys if that’s what the organization decided, mostly because you’re just able to replicate some of the speed of the game,” said Hoskins, now a member of the Milwaukee Brewers. “It’s hard to do that with a BP arm or even a normal machine.”
Hoskins, who ultimately wasn’t activated for last year’s World Series run, now regularly uses Trajekt to track pitches between at-bats when he serves as the designated hitter for home games. He has implored the Brewers’ pitchers to use it themselves to “remind them how nasty they are.” Angels pitching coach Barry Enright recently did that with his starters, bringing them all in to watch their pitches from behind home plate as something of a confidence boost to encourage strike-throwing.
Within the next two years, Pope’s goal is for every major league team to deploy at least one Trajekt Arc. He thinks more pitchers will realize its benefits, but it’s still very much a hitters’ tool. High-speed cameras are used to dissect their mechanics, weighted bats have helped to increase their bat speed, Blast Motion (a sensor placed on the knob of bats) became popular for its instant swing metrics. But a hitter’s best chance of keeping up with contemporary velocity and break, coaches say, is training the eyes by seeing those pitches as often as possible.
Virtual-reality hitting machines developed out of that concept, helping to spawn physical pitch-replicators like iPitch. Trajekt has taken it to another level — adding the visual of an opposing pitcher and the freedom of movement that has made it feel more lifelike.
“Some really high-tech machines, tools, toys, don’t really exist on the hitting side,” Hoskins said. “For this to kind of be the first big thing obviously means there’s more coming. There’s always ideas coming; it’s just, ‘How do you execute them?’ But this is a great start.”
ATLANTA — Big Dumper helped drive a big boost to ratings for Monday night’s Home Run Derby.
ESPN said Tuesday that viewership for Cal Raleigh‘s Home Run Derby victory was up 5% from 2024, according to Nielsen ratings. Raleigh’s win over fellow finalist Junior Caminero of Tampa Bay drew an average audience of 5,729,000 viewers, up from 5,451,000 viewers in 2024 when Los Angeles Dodgers slugger Teoscar Hernández topped Bobby Witt Jr. in the finals.
ESPN says the combined audience on ESPN and ESPN2 peaked with 6,307,000 viewers at 9:30 p.m. ET. That made the Home Run Derby one of the most-watched programs of the day, including all broadcast and cable choices.
Raleigh’s father, Todd, was his personal pitcher for the event. The Seattle catcher’s 15-year-old brother, Todd Jr., was his catcher. The elder Raleigh is a former coach of Tennessee and Western Carolina.
Raleigh, 28, leads the majors with 38 homers and 82 RBIs and is the American League’s starting catcher in Tuesday night’s All-Star Game.
Raleigh became the second Mariners player to win the Derby, following three-time winner Ken Griffey Jr., who was on the field, snapping photos.
The 2025 MLB All-Star Game has arrived!
Will the American League continue its dominance over the National League with its 11th victory in 12 years?
All-Star newcomers, such as Pete Crow-Armstrong, and veterans, such as Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, will join the rest of baseball’s best and descend on Truist Park, home of the Atlanta Braves, for this year’s Midsummer Classic — and we’ll have live updates and analysis from Atlanta throughout the game (8 p.m. ET on Fox).
After the final pitch is thrown, ESPN’s MLB experts will share their biggest takeaways right here as well. Let’s kick off the day with some predictions for Tuesday night’s game.
All-Star Game live updates
The starting lineups
Who will win the All-Star Game and by what score?
Jorge Castillo: The National League 5-2. The NL has the better lineup and will win the game for just the second time since 2012, when Melky Cabrera won MVP honors in Kansas City.
Jeff Passan: The National League will win 3-1. The NL has a far superior lineup to the AL, and in an All-Star Game where pitchers are unlikely to throw more than one inning each, the ability to pile up baserunners seeing a pitcher for the first time is paramount. The NL is more equipped to do that than the AL.
Who is your All-Star Game MVP pick?
Jesse Rogers: Cal Raleigh. I mean, he’s going to homer … that’s a given. He might even hit two. The “Big Dumper” is going to dump a blast into the right-field stands, putting another exclamation mark on an already incredible season. He won the HR Derby, and he’ll win All-Star Game MVP.
Alden Gonzalez: Pete Crow-Armstrong. He’ll have the most productive offensive night among the NL starters and, at some point, make an incredible catch in center field. Crow-Armstrong is 95 games into his age-23 season and has already accumulated 4.9 FanGraphs wins above replacement. He has become a star right before our eyes — and he seems to love the lights more than most.
What’s the matchup you are most excited to see?
Rogers: Let’s start the bottom of the first inning off with a bang, as Tarik Skubal, the starting pitcher for the AL, will face Shohei Ohtani, who is just 1-for-9 off the left-hander. Does the reigning AL Cy Young winner get an early strikeout of the reigning NL MVP, or does Ohtani finally get to Skubal? Not many matchups are guaranteed in the All-Star Game, but this one is — and it’s about as good as it gets.
Castillo: Jacob Misiorowski against anybody. The rookie right-hander’s inclusion after just five career starts produced a stir across the majors, and all eyes will be on him once he takes the mound. When he does, his 103 mph fastball should certainly play in his one inning. He’s as tough of a matchup as any pitcher in this game.
Who is the one All-Star fans will know much better after Tuesday night’s game?
Gonzalez: The San Diego Padres ended up sending three relievers to the All-Star Game, but there was one clear bullpen representative from the outset: Adrian Morejon. The 26-year-old left-hander doesn’t get much notoriety, but he has been utterly dominant, posting a 1.85 ERA and an expected slugging percentage of .263. He doesn’t strike hitters out at the absurd rates of some of today’s most dominant pitchers, but he gets outs. And he’ll probably get three big ones toward the end of the night.
Passan: Perhaps they already know Misiorowski because his fastball sits at 100 mph and his slider is in the mid-90s, but this is the sort of showcase built for him. One inning, let it eat and show that even though his career is only five starts deep, this will be the first of many All-Star appearances for the 23-year-old.
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Jesse Rogers
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Jesse Rogers
ESPN Staff Writer
- Jesse joined ESPN Chicago in September 2009 and covers MLB for ESPN.com.
The Tampa Bay Rays will play potential postseason games at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, setting up the possibility of a World Series staged in a minor league stadium with a capacity of 10,046.
The move came after discussion of potentially shifting postseason games to an alternate major league stadium, with Miami‘s LoanDepot Park among the sites considered. The Rays are playing their regular-season games this year at Steinbrenner Field, home of the Low-A Tampa Tarpons, after hurricane damage tore the roof off Tropicana Field and rendered it unfit for play in 2025.
The Rays occupy fourth place in the American League East at 50-47 but are just 1½ games behind the Seattle Mariners for the third wild-card spot in the AL.
Commissioner Rob Manfred said Tuesday he anticipates the Rays will return to Tropicana Field, which is being refurbished, for the 2026 season.
By then, the Rays could be under new ownership. While an agreement has yet to be signed, the sale of the team for $1.7 billion to an ownership group led by real estate developer Patrick Zalupski continues to progress, sources told ESPN. The change of team control would not happen until after the postseason, sources said, though there could be a signed agreement in place prior to that.
The Rays would likely stay in the Tampa Bay area after being sold by Stu Sternberg, who bought the team in 2004 for $200 million.
Sternberg pursued a sale of the Rays in the wake of the team pulling out of a deal with St. Petersburg, where Tropicana Field is located, for a $1.3 billion stadium. The sides had agreed to the deal prior to Hurricanes Helene and Milton causing more than $50 million worth of damage to Tropicana Field.
The Pinellas County board of commissioners in October 2024 delayed a vote to fund its portion of the stadium. Less than a month later, the Rays said the delay would cause a one-year delay in the stadium’s opening and cause cost overruns that would make the deal untenable without further government funding. In mid-March, Sternberg told St. Petersburg mayor Ken Welch the team would back away from the stadium deal.
Where Zalupski and his partners — mortgage broker Bill Cosgrove and Ken Babby, an owner of two minor league teams — ultimately take the Rays remains a question central to MLB’s future. Manfred has said he wants the stadium situations of the Rays and Athletics — who plan to play in a minor league stadium in West Sacramento, California, until moving to Las Vegas before the 2028 season — settled before MLB expands to 32 teams.
“If I had a brand new gleaming stadium to move [the Athletics] into, we would have done that,” Manfred said. “Right now, it is my expectation that they will play in Sacramento until they move to Las Vegas.”
Potential Twins sale: Manfred also addressed a potential sale of the Minnesota Twins, which had a “leader in the clubhouse” until earlier this summer. Billionaire Justin Ishbia turned away from the Twins, striking a deal to purchase the Chicago White Sox as early as 2029.
That left the Twins to look elsewhere.
“When it becomes clear there is a leader, everyone else backs away,” Manfred said. “A big part of the delay was associated with them deciding to do something else.”
The commissioner wouldn’t give specifics but believes a deal to sell the Twins is moving in the right direction.
“I’m not prepared to tell you today,” Manfred said. “There will be a transaction there and it will be consistent with the kind of pricing that has been taken [lately]. Just need to be patient there.”
Television contracts: Manfred says the sport is in better position to reach national broadcasting agreements for 2026-28 following the Allen & Co. Conference of media and finance leaders in Idaho.
In February, ESPN said it was ending its agreement to broadcast Sunday night games, the All-Star Home Run Derby and the Wild Card Series after this season. MLB’s other agreements, with Fox and TBS, run through the 2028 season, and MLB wants all its contracts to end at the same time.
“I had lot of conversations [in Idaho] that moved us significantly closer to a deal and I don’t believe it’s going to be long,” Manfred said Tuesday.
Gambling integrity: Though another MLB player — Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz — is being investigated for issues related to gambling, the commissioner insists the system is working and that legalization has actually helped protect the sport.
“We constantly take a look at the integrity protections we have in place,” Manfred said. “I believe the transparency and monitoring we have in place now is a result of the legalizations and the partnerships that we’ve made. [It] puts us in a better position to protect baseball than we were in before legalization.”
Manfred is referencing gambling monitoring companies and the league’s agreements with gambling entities that inform MLB if they find suspicious activity surrounding their players. That is what happened to Ortiz, sources close to the situation told ESPN.
ABS implementation: Though not all players have outwardly expressed a desire for the ABS challenge system to be implemented full time, Manfred believes he has taken their input on the subject.
On Monday, All-Star starting pitchers Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes were lukewarm on the idea — at least for it being used in the All-Star Game.
“I don’t plan on using them [challenges],” Skubal said. “I probably am not going to use them in the future.”
Added Skenes: “I really do like the human element of the game. I think this is one of those things that you kind of think umpires are great until they’re not. And so I could kind of care less, either way, to be honest.”
Manfred insists the challenge system idea came via a compromise after talking to players.
“Where we are on ABS has been fundamentally influenced by player input,” he said. “If two years ago, you asked me what do the owners want to do? They would have called every pitch with ABS as soon as possible.
“The players expressed a strong interest in the challenge system.”
All-Star return to Atlanta: After pulling the All-Star Game from Atlanta in 2021 due to new voting laws, Manfred was asked why the return to the city and state.
“The reason to come back here is self-revealing,” Manfred said. “You walk around here, the level of interest and excitement with a great facility, the support this market has given baseball, those are really good reasons to come back here.”
Diversity Pipeline Program: Manfred was also asked about his decision to change wording on the league’s website in relation to its Diversity Pipeline Program. He cited the changing times for the decision but stated the spirit of the programs still exist.
“Sometimes you have to look at how the world is changing around you and readjust to where you are,” Manfred said. “There were certain aspects to some of our programs that were very explicitly race and/or gender based. We know people in Washington were aware of that. We felt it was important recast our programs in a way to make sure we could continue on with our programs and continue to pursue the values we’ve always adhered to without tripping what could be legal problems that could interfere with that process.”
Immigration protections for players: As for new immigration enforcement policies since President Donald Trump’s administration took over in Washington, Manfred said the government has lived up to its promises.
“We did have conversations with the administration,” Manfred said. “They assured us there would be protections for our players. They told us that was going to happen and that’s what’s happened.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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