Innovation vs. invasion of privacy: MLB wearable technology battle looms
At the All-Star Game this July, Dellin Betances, the New York Yankees’ redoubtable closer, threw 15 pitches. While viewers at home and at the stadium could track their location and their velocity, the more intriguing data about them was caught in a chip attached to the black sleeve enveloping Betances’ right arm.
For the first and, so far, only time this season, the pitcher was wearing a Motus sleeve in a live game. It tracked and captured Betances’ arm angles, could account for possible fatigue, and counted the force on his ulnar collateral ligament by measuring the valgus torque on his right elbow. When Betances completed his outing and wanted to review the information, it was all there on his iPhone, downloaded onto an app.
This is the present and very much the future of the sport and technology. While the larger baseball community is just now understanding how expansive the Big Data era has become and how closely every facet of the game is being logged and benchmarked, the search for new and better technology has already moved on. Baseball isn’t independent of Moore’s Law, either.
“Statcast,” Gerrit Cole, the Pirates pitcher, said, “has blown the door open.”
This season, Major League Baseball allowed wearable technology on the field during games for the first time. Only two products were given clearance: the Zephyr Bioharness, which measures heart rate and breathing, and the Motus sleeve. While the inroads -- or intrusion, depending on one’s perspective -- are inevitable, it still raises interesting and difficult quandaries.
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Like every part of society, technology will only become more readily apparent and ingrained in baseball too. Already, Trackman and Pitchf/x -- once revolutionary -- are commonplace. Statcast cameras, which have turned defense into a quantifiable skill, were installed into all 30 MLB parks last year.
The new issue to solve is how to approach it all. Concerns about privacy and what happens to the newly available information have already popped up. Making it more inflammatory is that the new wearable tech, and whatever follows it, can and will siphon up information on the health of players.
The current collective bargaining agreement between the players association and MLB expires Dec. 1; how to handle emerging technology is part of the talks.
“It’s a very hot topic with the union,” Cole, the Pirates’ union representative, told USA TODAY Sports.
But it’s not simple. Whatever apparatuses are available now could become outdated by the end of the next CBA, depending on the speed of innovation and the length of the deal -- the current agreement is a five-year term. Privacy, the ownership and commercialization of the content any technology derives, and how it’s used are some of the subjects at stake.
In short, once the information is out there, the genie is not going back in the bottle.
The Motus sleeve is a symbol of the current wariness. After conversations with more than a handful of players, union officials, and a Motus executive, only Betances came up as an active pitcher that actually used the sleeve in-game. Not coincidentally, Betances also has a sponsorship deal with the company.
The pitcher, the agency that represents him, and Motus are the only ones with access to the data that the sleeve collects. The Yankees, though they know he wears it, will not be privy to it.
“I’m healthy anyway so I don’t care anyway,” he said. “But it’s just for whatever reason it’s always better to have it.”
Naturally, Betances is bullish on the technology and its encroachment into baseball. He sees it as a furtherance of the strides already made by instant replay and analytics.
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He is also part of a generation of players who are increasingly facile with technology, the ease of the information transference, and the way it’s received makes it even more attractive.
“I think it’s going to blow up,” says Betances. “I honestly think it’s a great idea. I think a lot of kids -- Obviously the more you use it the more they know about if they can prevent any injuries by this information.”
This is what will make the Motus sleeve attractive to players in the future, Ben Hansen, the company’s CTO, says. For pitchers, it can be like a FitBit for the elbow, and after enough instruction -- and maybe some psychological easing -- it will be second-hand too. Just another layer a pitcher wears all day that can passively gobble up useful information.
Hansen, a former Division III pitcher at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, says that he has worked with a dozen organizations this year near the company’s Florida lab and with 27 in all.
Betances has talked about it with a few teammates this year but says no one else has tried it yet. Andrew Miller, an All-Star who was traded to Cleveland in July, gave it some thought. But he, like others across baseball, has his doubts, though he is a proponent of more and more information flowing into the sport, to players and to fans. But like with heart monitors and sleep-tracking, he is guarded about implementation until the rules are spelled out.
“There’s concerns with that in the sense that you don’t want a team to treat you differently in some sort of contractual thing because they don’t think you’re not getting enough sleep or you sleep poorly,” he said. “Maybe that stuff is private. It would be in the best interest of the player probably in some uncommon circumstance. I think everybody realizes there’s a positive to all this stuff. It’s just a matter of how you work it in and who do you give access to and in what form? I don’t think it’s something to be scared of.”
Some teams, like the Pirates, are already well-known as an organization that uses heart monitors to track fitness and fatigue, but not during games. The Yankees have players wear heart monitors in the gym for workouts but not even on the field during practice, feeling they can’t glean enough to make the data worthwhile. They also moved back the start time for their spring training workouts this year to increase sleep. But this about as much as teams can do at the margins.
“We are very proactive in exploring any opportunities that have a chance to improve our product or keep our product on the field healthy,” says general manager Brian Cashman. “We’ve run into interference from central baseball and the players association about what you can and can’t do -- whether it’s heart rate monitors, wearing stuff in-game -- that’s the headaches you have to try to deal with.”
If baseball wants examples of how other sports capture health information, they can look pretty much anywhere. The NFL has allowed performance and workload monitoring practices for years, and last year allowed RFID chips to be implanted in shoulder pads to measure speed and positioning and minute performance data. The Pirates recently hired James Harris, the former chief of staff to Chip Kelly -- who monitored sleep and instituted other health and performance initiatives as Philadelphia Eagles head coach.
Soccer has long been ahead of the trend. The success of Southampton, a formerly middling English Premier League team, has been tied to, in part, its health and performance innovation, using wearable technology to track players but also instituting urine and blood tests and monitoring saliva samples. If this is not a model for some baseball front offices, it is at least an aspiration.
“They do everything and it’s all about maintaining your health and allowing them to perform to the best of their abilities,” Cashman said of foreign soccer teams.
“Their buy-in is: ‘Dude, this is gonna make me better’. There’s no distrust about somehow this is going to come back and haunt me and I’m going to get cut. It’s like, this is somehow going to make me better and prevent me from getting injured. But over here, these guys they have this distrust that the information is used -- it’s used to better the product. Which is him, the player.”
But no association or league has a union as strong as MLB’s players association, and while Miller cautions that technology won’t be a “sticking point” in the CBA negotiations, he does admit it could get blurry at times. The information that wearable technology gathers is not protected by HIPAA, which guards the privacy of medical records. And with MRIs and X-Rays and the medical tests players undergo when signing contracts or on a yearly basis, there is also a feeling that teams already dig deep into a player’s medical history and well-being.
Cole is unsure if he even wants a team to have access to all the information something like the Motus sleeve could produce. He certainly is not comfortable wearing one. Part of the problem is wearing any sleeve itself -- a possible nuisance for habit-heavy pitchers.
Still, he says, perhaps there can be a middle ground. Teams could use technology in the minor leagues as a test case and see what information comes out of it and how useful it is. Minor leaguers, without a union of their own, do not have as many protections.
As for any major league pitcher that is willing to put on a sleeve, Cole is circumspect. The future of baseball and the mixing of technology will be both scary and interesting, from his perspective.
“If you’re going to wear it, that’s the road you’re willing to go down on,” he said. “It’s non-reversible.”
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