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  • Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff WriterJun 26, 2024, 07:00 AM ET

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      ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the L.A. Rams for ESPN from 2016 to 2018 and the L.A. Angels for MLB.com from 2012 to 2016.

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.”

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Texas coach Steve Sarkisian: Arch Manning has ‘grandpa’s gene’

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April 18, 2025

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Texas coach Steve Sarkisian: Arch Manning has 'grandpa's gene'

AUSTIN, Texas — Steve Sarkisian enters his fifth season as head coach at Texas with the program facing big expectations after reaching the semifinals of the College Football Playoff in consecutive years.

The Arch Manning era has officially arrived in Austin, as he’ll be the Longhorns’ full-time starting quarterback this fall. Manning is humble enough that he has won over the locker room and self-assured enough that he’ll occasionally wink at Sarkisian after a good play in practice.

“Almost like, ‘Did you like that?'” Sarkisian chuckled about the winks.

With Texas headed into its second season in the SEC, there is a stout roster, strong returning cores on both sides of the ball and the reality of playoff expectations hovering again. There’s also a defense that’s experienced and explosive enough that Sarkisian says, “I don’t think Arch is ever going to have to go into a game thinking we have to outscore ’em.”

We’ll know right away with the Longhorns traveling to Ohio State for the marquee game of Week 1. Here is Sark on Manning, the state of the program and why Texas has established itself as a top 10 program again.

Question: Arch Manning’s moment is finally here. He’s waited patiently for it. He’s the focal point of both the offense and the locker room now. How’s he embraced the new reality?

Sarkisian: I think there’s something that’s unique about Arch. You can watch him throw and you see when you get up on him in person, man, he’s a bigger guy than maybe people think. When you watch him throw, the arm talent and the deep ball is there. Then you watch him move and you’re like, wait, this guy’s a better athlete than I thought. Definitely got grandpa’s gene. It’s not the uncles, he got grandpa’s gene. There’s an infectious leadership that he has, that I don’t want to say is unintentional because he intentionally leads. You can feel that. But the unintentional leadership ability he has, players gravitate to him, they want to be around him.

They like him for who he is, not for the name on the back of his jersey. And I think that’s something that he provides. He’s a fiery guy. He enjoys playing the game. Even in practice he’ll make a throw, and he’ll look over at me and wink at me almost like, ‘Did you like that?’ And so we have really good rapport, but I understand now because of my rapport with him, why the players have really good rapport with him. He just has a natural ability to engage with people.

Q: What’s that rapport like?

Sarkisian: Sometimes it’s verbal, sometimes it’s nonverbal. But I think that’s part of the responsibility as a quarterback that when you look at a quarterback and why is it this position in sports that is so coveted? It’s because your job is really to instill belief in the locker room, your job is to instill belief in an organization or a team or in a staff, and then ultimately your job is to instill belief in a fan base. And I think that he does that very naturally. It’s not something that is manufactured or fabricated. It’s very natural for him to go along with all those other things, the skill set, the ability to do those things. And so, I’m excited for him. I just want to make sure that we’re really strong around him, that he doesn’t feel the weight of the world to have to go perform. I want us to play really well around him to enhance what he’s able to do.

Q: Will there be some grace for growth? Some people already are pegging him the first-team All-SEC quarterback. He’s spent his whole life as a Manning, so he’s prepared, I guess, but do you think he’s prepared for the first interception in Columbus? Or the moment when on-field adversity hits? Do you think he’s ready for the level of both praise and criticism that will come?

Sarkisian: I think one, the exposure he got last season was helpful. He got two career starts. He started as our quarterback in the first SEC game in the history of the school. And those were not all perfect. Granted, there were some great moments. He threw nine touchdowns and almost a thousand yards. There was a couple of bad picks in there, too. And in the end, I think he understands he is not riding the emotional roller coaster of the opinions of others and staying [with a] level of consistency in his approach, in his play, in his ability to pick people up. Easier said than done when you’re not in the real fire of it all. But we are fortunate that he got exposed to some of that, and he threw a couple bad picks, and it was OK.

Q: He missed a few blitz pickups, right?

Sarkisian: Yeah, and he gets hit in the back and things like that. Like he’s learning. And yeah, there’s probably going to be some grace needed. Unfortunately, it’s probably not going to be grace granted outside of our building. Inside of our building, sure, there will be, but outside of the building, the pundits are going to be the pundits, the fans are going to be the fans, the opposing fans are going to be the fans. But inside our building, I think the support that he’s going to get is going to be one that he’ll definitely appreciate.

Q: One impactful change this spring has been Duane Akina being back on the field. He was here from 2001 to 2013 and coached an elite assembly line of defensive backs. What’s it been like having him back?

Sarkisian: Having Coach Akina back has been awesome. It’s been great in the building and the timing felt right. When we lost Blake Gideon [to Georgia Tech], we still had Terry Joseph on staff [and a] connection between he and Pete Kwiatkowski was a perfect fit. I had heard about [Akina] as a coach on the field, but I had never really seen it. And he’s a very kind of even-keel guy in and around the building. But when you watch him coach, the energy that he provides at practice is infectious. It’s what you always wanted in all of your coaches. And so the fact that here’s this guy, the oldest coach in our staff and he’s running to the ball, he’s demanding excellence out of every player, I think has just been infectious. Not only amongst the staff, but I think the respect that the players have, knowing the history and track record that he’s had of great players … here when it was DBU to what he was able to do at Stanford. He’s been an awesome addition.

Q: Identity-wise on defense, will this team be built around the defensive backs?

Sarkisian: I would argue it might be the best position group we have on our team right now from sheer talent. Now we have some experience there with Michael Taaffe coming back, Derek Williams getting healthy, Jelani McDonald‘s experience, Jaylon Guilbeau‘s experience, Malik Muhammad‘s experience. But below those guys, I think our ability to recruit that position the last two years is really evident. The guys look the part, they all are impactful players on special teams and so [Akina has] inherited a really good room of talented players, competitive players that are going to help us down the road.

Q: Texas went through a nearly two-decade drought for first-round offensive linemen. Now there’s a flurry of them coming out and seemingly emerging. How do you feel about the offensive line and skill around Arch?

Sarkisian: We feel good, obviously, on the offensive line. There’s a couple new faces, but again, we got exposure to a couple of those new faces early on. And so the experience of [senior guard] DJ Campbell and [senior interior lineman] Cole Hutson are big. The experience that [sophomore left tackle] Trevor Goosby got, Trevor was blocking real guys in the last month of the season, which was good for him. The emergence of some new faces is going to be good. These guys were all high-level recruits, and now it’s time, and that’s OK.

Q: There has to be some optimism at tailback, right?

Sarkisian: I think that the backfield will be better, in some degree. We got two guys coming off of injuries in CJ Baxter and Christian Clark, and we really think highly of both of them. We have a 1,000-yard rusher coming back, Tre Wisner, and we have a true freshman kid who’s going to be a sophomore in Jerrick Gibson, who played some really significant meaningful snaps in some big games. And so I feel really good about the running back room.

Q: They’ll be some familiar faces at receiver, too, right?

Sarkisian: I think having DeAndre Moore and Ryan Wingo back is going to be big. And then we got some guys that, it’s time to step up and it’s their moment. I would say the one room that we probably have our biggest question mark in is in the tight end room. So the offense is there.

Q: What’s the vibe on the defensive side?

Sarkisian: I think more importantly is who we are on defense and the growth of who we have been as a defensive team from Year 1 through Year 4. Going into Year 5, we have real playmakers on the defensive side of the ball, whether it’s Anthony Hill, Colin Simmons, Trey Moore, and we touched on Michael Taaffe, we touched on Derek Williams and Liona Lefau and Ethan Burke. We have some real players on the defensive side of the ball, to where I don’t think Arch is ever going to have to go into a game thinking we have to outscore ’em. We need to play good football, and as a team we can win a lot of games. It’s not going to feel like the weight of the world where if we don’t score 40, we’re in trouble. We’re going to be in plenty of high-level games where 24, 28 points is going to be good enough to win. Now do we want to score 35, 42, 49? Of course. But I don’t think we’re always going to have to. It’s managing some of those games the right way to make sure that our defense can play to their ability.

Q: Let me wrap with a macro question. How do you feel going into Year 5? At age 51, you’ve said you were ready for this job as a head coach, having endured some adversity in your career. Can you reflect on the collision of the consistency you’ve had the last few seasons with your preparedness and maybe where you see it’s going at this moment?

Sarkisian: You never know why you’re really here. Why are you hired? There’s been great coaches before. All guys who have been really successful at other places. Why weren’t they as successful here? And then: Why are you here now? And I jokingly say, this administration thinks they hired you for a reason, and what the issues were, but in reality, a lot of times they don’t know because they’re not looking behind the curtain. They don’t know. And as we’ve gone through this journey going into Year 5, we’ve really tried to look forward and be forward thinking rather than look backwards and say what’s wrong? What was wrong? What’s going to be right?

And along the way, there’s been all these changes in college football that have happened, right? Literally, we got hired in the middle of COVID. So we were dealing with COVID. We were dealing with the new facility getting built. We didn’t have a team room, we didn’t have a locker room, I didn’t have an office. Then here comes, they say the transfer portal, but nobody really knew what that was and so we didn’t really know how to tap into it. Then here comes conference realignment, and we’re in the midst of moving from the Big 12 to the SEC. Then here comes College Football Playoff expansion, and we’re going from four teams to 12. Then here comes NIL, and what does NIL look like? And here comes collectives and how do you manage collectives and what that looks like. And now here comes revenue share. And now here comes a potential different expansion to the College Football Playoff.

We’re forever evolving. And so the one thing that we’ve tried to do, like I said, is be forward thinking. And not playing catch up, but in essence, think about where are we headed and how do we continually adapt and do what’s best for our players and do what’s best for our team and try to minimize the noise outside the building and focus on what we’re doing here with the players we recruit, with the staff that we hire, with the expansion of the recruiting department and the scouting department with the evolution of understanding how do you manage NIL money to now? How do you manage a cap space and what does that look like, and be ahead of it all, which I think that’s something we’ve done a pretty good job of. We were one of the very first, when NIL got presented, we were one of the very first of utilizing that. … And then how do we still recruit the high schools and believe in high school recruiting to build our culture and to start that process.

Q: That makes sense here, right?

Sarkisian: And I look back at my time with Pete Carroll [at USC] and how important that was in that seven-, eight-year run of the development of players and the old players teaching the younger players. And then I looked at what Nick [Saban] did and how that [Alabama] roster turned itself over, but yet how did he hire really good coaches year after year? Because the cycle of success is you’re going to lose people.

And so we try to tap into history to look to the future. And so far, so good. And we haven’t been perfect, and I don’t pretend us to be perfect, but I do think we’ve done things, a lot of things really well that have allowed us to stay at the forefront of college football. And again, when I got here, I didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder. I didn’t want to live in the portal — one year we’re good and the next year we’re not. We wanted to build something that could sustain and that in my opinion is high school recruiting. We surely have tapped into the free agent market through the transfer portal to fill needs. And I think we’ve had a really good balance there. And ultimately, sure, I want to win a national championship. There’s no question about it. But the fact that we went from 5-7 to 8-5 to … in the semifinals two years in a row, I think lends itself to the consistency of our program and the foundation of our program. Now granted, we want to get into that [title] game, and we want to win that game, but I think we’ve built something here that’s going to be long lasting, that’s going to be sustainable.

And I’ve been telling everybody, my goal is to retire here and I’m 51 today, and I hope I can coach a long, long time. But the only way to do that is to have continued success because here the standard is a standard. You either compete and win championships or you don’t. There’s not a lot of gray area. And so to do that, you got to have the right amount of energy, you got to have the right people around you and allow them to do their jobs. You got to recruit the right people so that you don’t take those massive drops. You might have a blip on the radar, but yet we sustain it in a way that we’re proud of. And I think we’re doing that. But like I said, there’s always more work to do.

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O’s Rodriguez nixes bullpen session, set for MRI

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April 18, 2025

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O's Rodriguez nixes bullpen session, set for MRI

  • Associated Press

Apr 17, 2025, 09:38 PM ET

BALTIMORE — Orioles right-hander Grayson Rodriguez will have an MRI of his sore throwing shoulder after a bullpen session Thursday was canceled.

Rodriguez has not pitched in a regular-season game since July 31 and has been rehabbing from a right elbow inflammation issue, though he made spring training appearances on Feb. 27 and March 5.

“He woke up a few days ago with a little bit of soreness in the shoulder area,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “I’m not really sure at this point. We’re hoping for the best. But we felt like it was necessary to get imaging done.”

A 25-year-old right-hander who was the No. 11 pick in the 2018 amateur draft, Rodriguez is 20-8 with a 4.11 ERA in 43 starts over two big league seasons.

Coming off consecutive postseason appearances, Baltimore has had numerous injuries to starting pitchers: Kyle Braddish (Tommy John surgery) and Tyler Wells (UCL repair surgery) also started the season on the injured list. Albert Suárez (right shoulder) has not pitched for the Orioles since March 28 and Zach Eflin (right lat) since April 7.

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Stricken by bite, Texas’ Corbin nearly missed start

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April 18, 2025

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Stricken by bite, Texas' Corbin nearly missed start

Apr 17, 2025, 08:54 PM ET

Texas Rangers left-hander Patrick Corbin earned his first win of the season Wednesday night, but it was a start he nearly wasn’t able to make.

Corbin and the Rangers believe the culprit was “venom” from an apparent bite on his foot two days before his start that made it difficult to walk.

“They said something bit me, but I still don’t know what it was,” Corbin told reporters Thursday. “I’ve never had anything like that. It was super weird.”

Hours before Corbin allowed one run in 5⅓ innings in a 3-1 win over the Los Angeles Angels, Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said it was “50/50” whether he would pitch because of the condition of his ankle.

Corbin said swelling had developed around a visible bite mark on his foot by Wednesday morning, but that it was “tolerable” after he had his ankle wrapped.

“It was really bad in the morning,” Corbin said. “Just a really swollen foot. … I wasn’t sure if I was going to throw that morning. My wife was really concerned. I came in early [Wednesday] to get some treatment going and [went] from there.”

Corbin said he still felt soreness in the ankle Thursday but was confident he wouldn’t need to miss time.

“I was fortunate to get through yesterday,” Corbin said. “I have some time to recover and be good to go.”

Corbin, a two-time All-Star entering his 13th season, joined the Rangers on a one-year deal in March. He is 1-0 with a 3.86 ERA in two starts.

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