Photograph by Tommy Duda
By 2020, Sean McLaughlin’s hard six years as a minor league pitcher had only taken him as far as Atlanta’s Double-A affiliate, the Mississippi Braves. That same year, the Braves introduced its minor leaguers to pitching technology that tracked spin rate on each pitch. “I never had the raw talent for [the MLB], so I worked on the margins with technology,” McLaughlin says. “I know it extended my playing career three more years.”
After analyzing his own data, McLaughlin realized that, despite the punch packed in his 95 mph fastball, his release point resulted in a pitch easy for hitters to pick up and hit. After he dropped his arm slot and mixed in more breaking balls, McLaughlin’s results turned around, with less earned runs and more strikeouts; his teammates began flocking to him for advice.
In 2021, McLaughlin was approached by his Mississippi teammate Spencer Strider, who was in his first professional year. Strider wanted help with his slider; along with director of pitching development Paul Davis, they worked on creating more spin and vertical drop. Two months later, Strider made his debut in Atlanta. “I realized then I was probably a better coach than player,” McLaughlin says. “It was tough to admit at the time, but I also saw how it paid off.”
After retiring in 2022, he cofounded Maven Baseball Lab with Tyler Krieger, a high school teammate and fellow former minor leaguer. At the baseball tech startup, located in the Westside, hitters and pitchers undergo a 12-swing or 12-pitch assessment under the eyes of 16 cameras, which produce data on biomechanics, spin rate, vertical break, and more. Maven’s client list includes Braves players Matt Olson, Max Fried, and A.J. Minter, along with other MLB stars like Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt.
Many of Maven’s clients are teammates and friends from the cofounders’ playing careers. Olson, a friend of Krieger’s, worked with Maven to fix a sway in his swing that hurt his timing. The next season, after analyzing his film and charting his swing path, Olson led the league with 54 home runs. Fried worked with Maven going into 2024 to maximize his delivery for all seven pitches in his arsenal by tracking spin, movement, and biomechanics.
“Our goal is to measure what’s important to the player,” McLaughlin says, “and make the data about their goals rather than trying to fix everything.”
In 2023, after a rough spring training with the Braves, Strider called on McLaughlin again. McLaughlin compared videos of Strider’s outings to his offseason assessments on a force plate mound and saw that Strider was exerting too much force in his legs at the beginning of his delivery. When Strider’s form is most efficient, he free-falls into a deep bend and then explodes off his back leg.
“Spencer could finally visualize something that he couldn’t verbalize, and he immediately realized what he was doing,” McLaughlin says. “I’m not too far removed from that experience myself. Baseball is such a mental battle, and giving players a controllable variable can be everything to them.”
This article appears in our July 2024 issue.
