Baseball Sales Pitch: Ball Registers Speed

The next time the neighborhood blowhard pops off about the 90 mph fastball he threw in high school, tell him to prove it.

By February, Rawlings Sporting Goods Co. expects to have on the market the Radar Ball, a baseball that features a small digital display between the seams showing how fast it was thrown.

The company displayed the ball this month at the National Sporting Goods Association’s annual convention in Chicago.

Analysts say the baseball could make millions of dollars for Rawlings. It may also break millions of hearts of would-be and coulda-been major leaguers.

“There’s going to be a lot of fathers who have blown egos when they throw in front of their sons,” Randy Black, vice president of marketing for St. Louis-based Rawlings, said Tuesday.

The Radar Ball was invented by 25-year-old Dave Zakutin, who experimented with the idea of a speed-sensing baseball as his senior project at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Zakutin contacted Rawlings, maker of major league baseballs for 20 years, then brought down a couple of friends to play catch with the ball in front of Rawlings executives.

The ball has the size and feel of a regulation baseball. To use it, the catcher stands (or squats) 60 feet, 6 inches from the pitcher, the standard distance from pitching rubber to home plate.

A sensor is built into the baseball that measures time from the moment the ball is released until it is caught, Black said. A microprocessor inside the ball then divides the distance by the time and displays a reading in mph.

“You grip it like any of your pitches, you throw it, and you get immediate feedback,” Black said.

Rawlings also plans a Little League version that calculates the speed from 45 feet. And the company plans to market a similar softball, due in stores by April.

A fastball’s velocity has been a source of fascination long before technology was up to speed. In the 1940s, Cleveland Indians ace Bob Feller snapped off his best fastball while a motorcycle zipped by at 100 mph. The fastball won.

More recently, radar guns have been the preferred means of measurement. But outside professional and major colleges, few teams can afford the $1,000 price tag for a quality radar gun.

Black said the Radar Ball will retail for $34.99 to $39.99, making it affordable for high school and American Legion teams, or even for use in the back yard. It’s durable enough to take the pounding of errant pitches in the dirt and off backstops, but because of the technology inside, it can’t be hit with a bat.

As for its accuracy, Rawlings claims the ball consistently registers within 1 mph of radar guns. The Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays have tried it and liked it, Black said. In fact, the Dodgers kept a prototype long after it was due back during spring training.

“They wouldn’t give it back,” Black said.

One analyst said the baseball could be one of the hottest products to hit sporting goods stores in years.

“It’s just a very good, useful training tool,” said Tim Conder of A.G. Edwards.