‘Rocket science applied to baseball:' A trip inside San Diego Padres and PLNU's new biomechanics lab

Major League Baseball is in an arms race. Pitching, as we’ve seen with some of the 9-figure contracts handed out this off-season, is getting more and more expensive.

It’s a good thing San Diego has Dr. Arnel Aguinaldo.

“I’ve always had this vision of building a state-of-the-art biomechanics lab, specifically for baseball. It’s kind of my area of expertise, in baseball pitching and hitting.”

Arnel is a professor of biomechanics at Point Loma Nazarene University. More than a decade ago he started piecing together equipment for a sports-specific lab. One day he had coffee with Padres assistant general manager Josh Stein to pitch a more grandiose idea.

On Monday, the scientific seed bloomed.

“Basically, my vision is coming to fruition,” says Aguinaldo.

With funding help from the Padres, PLNU’s Balboa Campus opened a brand new Biomechanics Lab. Everyone in the Friars system, from the majors to the minors, as well as Sea Lions players will be able to train there, and the first time they step inside it might be a little intense.

“If you like to nerd out with this, I mean, this this is really cool stuff. It's literally rocket science applied to baseball,” says Aguinaldo.

We’re talking about a full 20 camera setup here. Full motion-capture technology that shows pitchers how they work from the inside out. Ball tracking equipment including Trackman, Rapsodo, and Edgertronic, devices that instantaneously tell a pitcher how he’s releasing a pitch and what it does in the air. The mound and batters boxes have force platform technology to gauge balance and power distribution. They have bats rigged with sensors to show hitters how to best attack the strike zone.

Or, more simply put:

“We try to find ways to make their bodies move efficiently,” says Aguinaldo.

Padres pitching coach Ruben Niebla was an early adopter of the new tech and how it can help not just improve, but prolong a player’s career.

“At the end of the day, the player has to be educated, the player has to have an understanding of how they move, what's optimal for them,” says Niebla.

Every pitch creates an avalanche of information. But, numbers mean nothing if they’re not applied correctly. The team of biomechanists gathers everything and sends it down the pipeline. Niebla is the filter through which the player only gets the most important morsels.

“Eventually the information gets to me. And with that information, I'm able to have a little bit of a clear picture of some of the coaching,” says Niebla. “I think the most important thing is, how do we water down that information to the root of the problem?”

While the baseball part of fun, this lab at its core is a research facility. While it’s molding better ballplayers, it’s also shaping the next generation of biomechanists and kinesiologists.

“Really, our main focus is on our students. Getting our graduate students some really good experience and state of the art biomechanics and understanding how we can leverage the science in helping athletes improve their performance and lower the risk of injury,” says Aguinaldo.

So, the Biomechanics Lab should help with several abilities including the most important one: availability.

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