We are saving a tremendous amount of time. We have increased the turnaround time for our reports, and the reports are more detailed because of the machines, Marcos says happily. SportMaster Pro Handheld computers are gradually becoming a part of scouting, as well, though more so for the advanced scouting of opponents than for amateur scouting. Recreational Technologies of Olathe, Kansas, has developed SportMaster Pro, a handheld computer with a touch screen that allows scouts to track an entire baseball game in real time. Later, the data can easily be analyzed to see which pitches a batter prefers to hit and which ones have the best chance of producing an out.
Scouts can use the stylus pen to write notes on the machine.
They can also monitor pitch speed by connecting a radar gun to its USB port and even record video by attaching a digital video camera. Obviously, baseball teams have been compiling data like this for several years, but Rec-Tech s products remove much of the toil. The reports produced by the software are conveniently designed to be identical to the ones coaches already use today. With it, scouts are also able to access an amazing number of historical graphs and charts. If you wanted to, you could pull up all the fastballs that, say, Mike Mussina has ever thrown to Jim Thome, and look at the results, says company president Craig Pippin.