Positive signals: Virginia baseball team benefits from new pitch-calling technology | Sports

In fact, Teel doesn’t flash signs anymore. The pre-pitch process is now streamlined, and the rhythm of college baseball has been altered for the better.

This season, UVa is one of a handful of prominent programs — others include fellow Atlantic Coast Conference members Clemson and N.C. State as well as national power Vanderbilt — using GameDay Signals, an electronic communication device and pitch-calling technology founded and created in the Commonwealth, for the first time. And this deviation from a tradition in America’s pastime is likely to be noticed more frequently over the next few weeks as the sport embarks on its postseason and the number of fans watching games on TV grow.

The ACC Tournament begins Tuesday in Charlotte and NCAA regionals commence the first week of June, and as observers come across the Cavaliers while flipping through channels, they’ll catch sight of Teel and whoever is on the mound for UVa armed with GameDay Signals wristbands.

“It’s as simple as it sounds,” Teel said. “If a 1 comes up, I call a fastball and it’s that simple.”

From the Hoos’ bench, pitching coach Drew Dickinson punches in a number to his GameDay Signals coaching device, essentially a keypad of numbers resembling the keypad on a phone. After he does, the number appears on the players’ wristbands and it corresponds with the pitch Dickinson called for.

The innovation has improved pace of play and erased the need for him to give signs to Teel, who’d formerly look back and forth between the bench, a bulky grid card on his forearm that matched Dickinson’s visual signals and the pitcher. Additionally, and crucially, according to Dickinson, by upgrading the way of calling pitches, GameDay Signals eliminated the opportunity for opponents to steal signs.

“I don’t love these things as a baseball purist, but it has to be done, so you can still win games and your players don’t get put in a precarious situation,” Dickinson said. “Before, your players had to look in the dugout [for signs] and the game isn’t in the dugout. The game is in front of you, at home plate and around you and when players had to look in the dugout, I felt like it took players out of the natural baseball element. Now, they glance down at their wrist really quick, and that is natural because it’s around their glove, and it only takes a second.”

The benefits Dickinson listed about GameDay Signals are exactly what the company had in mind, too, when it realized there was a market for the product on the heels of the decision the NCAA made in August 2019 to enact a 20-second pitch clock the following spring.

“The original concept was a way for us to speed up games and address that issue in a way coaches, and more importantly, players weren’t going to hate,” GameDay Signals co-founder and owner Keith Malay, who is based in Harrisonburg, said. “They hated the 20-second rule and still do, and we’re lifelong baseball fans, so we didn’t want to change the game in any fundamental way. We wanted to come up with a way to speed it up without changing the way the game is played too much.”

Where Virginia’s mountains meet a warm sunset on summer evenings in the Shenandoah Valley, intimate, old-timey ballparks sit in stunning and natural, Field of Dreams-like settings as the Rockingham County Baseball League — the country’s second-longest running continuous baseball league only behind the National League — plays its games.

The Clover Hill Bucks have captured 18 championships, the most in the history of the RCBL, and for more than two decades before his tragic passing in May of 2020, Chris Cofer was an imprint for the ballclub and a familiar face at Buck Bowman Park or better known locally as ‘The Clover Dome,’ the 67-season home of the Bucks.

Cofer, an ex-VMI player, had a 15-year stay as Clover Hill’s second baseman and then managed the team to a pair of RCBL championships afterward. He had a day job, of course, as a software developer for Blackhawk Enterprise Incorporated, a small software company that deals mostly with government contracts and works with the Department of Defense.

Malay hired Cofer there, and the two of them as well as Malay’s brother, Kevin who resides in West Virginia, became friendly. Like Cofer, both Keith and Kevin had a military background. Keith served in the Navy and Kevin was in the Air Force reserves, and Keith said he’d frequently go to games at Clover Hill, and his and Cofer’s families got close.

“He came up with the idea,” Keith Malay said. “This is in 2018 and originally back then there was a lot of pressure and interest in reducing total game time. So, it was about speeding up the game and making it more watchable from a television standpoint. They wanted to keep games under three hours and were looking for ways to do that.”

Around the same time, Cofer, who was plugged into the college baseball scene having played in Division I and known coaches in all levels of the sport through his playing career or through recruiting players to join Clover Hill for the summer months, heard the NCAA wanted to introduce the pitch clock.

On top of the effort to quicken games, sign stealing was becoming more and more of a problem, and not just because the Houston Astros were making headlines for all the wrong reasons at the big-league level either.

Dickinson said college baseball encountered issues because every program has access to Synergy, a company distributing video of every pitch of every game, and there are coaches savvy enough to show up on game day with a blueprint for how to swipe their opponent’s signs after watching the video.

James Madison pitching coach Jimmy Jackson, who knew Cofer and provided lots of early feedback to GameDay Signals during testing of prototypes at JMU, said because teams were struggling to prevent sign stealing, he began thinking Cofer and Malay had serious potential with GameDay Signals.

“I hate to say it, but it’s a known thing in college baseball,” Jackson said, “there were people using technology to steal signs. Everybody was talking about it in Major League Baseball, but it was already a thing in college baseball.

“And you know, at this level,” he said, “that’s just the last thing you should be worried about is somebody picking your signs illegally. You shouldn’t have to worry about it. It’s one thing if your catcher is tipping pitches and they pick something up or your sign system isn’t good enough. That’s part of the game, but when you’re doing other things, that’s just a little much.”

Malay said Cofer wasn’t sure how to build the first ever GameDay Signals device or put his idea in motion, so Malay, his brother and another co-worker at Blackhawk, Rob Beers who is based in Waynesboro, said they’d help.

The race to make Cofer’s idea a reality and finish the first ever GameDay Signals device was on.

The Malay brothers and Jackson laughed when they recalled the very initial iteration of the device.

“It was really rough and really rudimentary early,” Keith said with a chuckle. “It actually started off on a little circuit board with a display hooked up to it that we put into an Altoid can because we didn’t have any enclosures for them back then. We used a Dremel and cut out a little hole for the display, and we taped the board to the Altoid can and then put the cover over it. You couldn’t wear it or anything, but that’s what we started with.”

Jackson said the first coaches unit he saw was an Altoid can also, and that he remembers Cofer making one trek after the other to Veterans Memorial Park, the Dukes’ home venue, to verify whether or not the way in which he and Keith evolved the device would work.

Cofer was a college teammate of JMU coach Marlin Ikenberry at VMI, so Ikenberry and Jackson were all for helping Cofer and Malay along the way.

“Chris would come over to a million intrasquads to constantly test it out with any glitches that would happen,” Jackson said. “And he’d go out behind the left-field fence to see if the signal would carry. All kinds of stuff. We just kept testing it and we were testing the coverings they put on ‘em once they got a little further along.”

The funniest testing Jackson said involved strapping a GameDay Signals wristband to a two-by-four to experiment the device’s durability.

“We set up a pitching machine and shot a ball off of it just to see whether if the outside casing breaks, how does it break?” Jackson said. “Is it going to puncture somebody’s arm if it breaks the right way? We were doing everything with it.”

JMU pitchers and catchers loved their introduction to GameDay Signals, too, Jackson said, and had no problem transitioning to use them during practice and only wondered why GameDay Signals hadn’t been approved by the NCAA for universal game use yet.

During those JMU scrimmages, Cofer tracked how long innings would last when the Dukes had their GameDay Signals devices on versus how long innings would last when the Dukes didn’t wear them.

For the 2019 season, though, the Division III Old Dominion Athletic Conference — a Virginia-based league — was granted special exemption to use GameDay Signals, so the NCAA could test it and so that Cofer and Malay could easily get to schools if teams had problems with the devices.

The implementation was a success and Malay said GameDay Signals cut down the average game time in the ODAC from about three hours and eight minutes to about two hours and 53 minutes. That was after in each of the previous five years, game times in the ODAC lengthened.

“I don’t think I anticipated then the pitcher wearing it,” Adam Posey, the coach at ODAC member Eastern Mennonite University, said. “And that’s something the guys at GameDay Signals alluded to because they recognized it before anyone else did and thought, ‘Hey, you can just eliminate the catcher giving the sign to the pitcher,’ and that’s something I think for them was even more forward-thinking than anyone else in the game was at the time.

“You could put it on every player on the field, too,” Posey said, “and guys could position themselves based on what pitch is coming, so they were really ahead of the game on that and when we were testing it, you could see it was going to have a big application at least at [the college] level because it simplified the process so much.”

In 2020, the Colonial Athletic Association was prepared to allow its teams to use GameDay Signals because Ikenberry and Jackson as well as the other coaches in the conference wanted to try it. But because COVID-19 wiped out the league schedule, GameDay Signals’ test run in D-I never happened, and perhaps, that’s why Malay was so surprised when the NCAA ultimately approved the use of the device this past August for the 2022 season.

“That’s when things got wild,” Malay said.

GameDay Signals got bombarded with phone calls, emails and text messages from college coaches seeking to purchase devices knowing they’d be allowed to use it this spring.

Malay, whose primary job is with Blackhawk and only does GameDay Signals as a side hustle, said the company wasn’t quite ready for business to pick up.

“We ramped up as much as we could,” Malay said, “and when we went to market with this in December right before New Year’s this year … they sold out within about two hours and some of the orders were teams we hadn’t worked with before.”

Malay said the teams to get initial GameDay Signals devices in time for the start of this season were UVa, JMU, VMI, Alabama, Clemson, N.C. State, Pacific and Vanderbilt. Other schools like Northern Illinois received its order more recently and in time for the postseason, and GameDay Signals is currently working through supply-chain issues to fill more orders because the product’s strong early results have created a sparkling reputation in the baseball community. There’s great demand for the devices that sell for $249 apiece.

Circuit boards used to be soldered and the manufacturing used to be done in Charlottesville, Malay said, but are now done in Arizona since GameDay Signals’ manufacturing partner moved from the Commonwealth to the Grand Canyon State. But once that part of the process is complete in Arizona, the devices ship to Harrisonburg where they’re programmed by Malay and his team, and then prepared to fill orders.

“We got done playing Florida State and the first thing their head coach [Mike Martin Jr.] asked me was, ‘Hey man. What the hell is this thing?’” Jackson said. “They want to do it and switch to it and the pitching coach at Iowa is a friend of mine and they started using it, and even some of the coaches I didn’t know, they’d get my number from this guy or that guy and they’d ask, ‘What’s this GameDay Signals stuff?’ So, it’s been pretty cool, and I think it’s cool for our guys at JMU to know they were the first ones to be doing this.”

Teel said his responsibilities behind the dish have become easier because of GameDay Signals and how simple it is to use for a catcher, who during the heat of a game must maintain great rapport with his pitchers, throw out trying base-stealers and block balls in the dirt.

“I remember when we used the grid wristbands,” Teel said, “which was when [Dickinson] called a number and you’d look at it and it was really difficult for me to adjust to that and it’d take a long time for me to know what pitch to call, so sometimes you’d screw up. But with these wristbands, it just pops up what pitch to call.”

He said UVa pitchers have embraced it as well, and that because of the quick pace they can operate at now, opposing hitters can be uncomfortable in the batter’s box.

“It’s insane,” Teel said, “because you’ll see with [starting pitchers Nate] Savino and [Jake] Berry a lot, they’ll get the sign and they’re ready to go. And as soon as they get the ball back, the sign is there so they want to go right away.”

Total game time is down this spring for UVa from last year in spite of the Cavaliers being the only team in most of their contests — with the exception of the Clemson series and meeting with VMI — using GameDay Signals and the Hoos scoring more runs, which typically elongates games. UVa is averaging 9.07 runs per game entering the ACC Tournament, and in 2021, it averaged 5.6 runs per contest.

Yet, this season UVa’s games are running about three hours and 10 minutes compared to last year when its contests ran about three hours and 14 minutes.

Dickinson said the Cavaliers’ defense benefits from GameDay Signals also. UVa infielders are equipped with devices, and as an example he said it’s extremely helpful for third baseman Jake Gelof to know when left-handed starter Brian Gursky throws a change-up, because many times a right-handed hitter will roll over that pitch and ground the ball to Gelof.

“It’s what you hope the tech would be,” Dickinson said. “It’s easier and there are less mistakes and we don’t have cross ups or anything that’ll cost you a game.”

GameDay Signals expects to have more clients in the college game before next season and hopes to expand down the road to do business with high school teams and travel-ball squads.

The Malay brothers said they’re so thrilled to see the late Cofer’s idea impacting the sport he loved and that they hope to continue enhancing the product.

“This is fun,” Kevin said. “You do a lot of other work in other things in life and you hope not to be miserable, but you wouldn’t call it fun. For us, this is fun and we get excited about talking about how we can make this thing better.”

Keith said they’re working to generate enough revenue with GameDay Signals to use the money to put Cofer’s daughter through college.

“You could just see Chris had a passion for this,” said Posey, who played in the RCBL and places many of his EMU players into the RCBL, the league Cofer was part of for such a long time.

“He really believed in what he was doing,” Posey continued, “and I think this in some small way is validating that vision he had. He could see it coming before all these guys that had been grizzled veterans in baseball and had been doing it this way all their lives and Chris could see how this was going to play out and predict what was coming.”

Said Cofer’s good friend Keith Malay: “He was a lifelong baseball guy who had a good idea and saw a need.”