2026-07-10
Baseball News Scoop
The DeCarlo 1400 Laser Beam Pitching Tunnel Invention.
This invention provides new options for both pitcher preservation, and for winning games, by reversing the pitcher injury epidemic with the popularization of the slower, off-speed, efficient and precision pitching styles, like the ones used extensively in the pre-radar era.
Trajectory visualizations for reversing the pitcher injury epidemic
This invention is the first ever, laser beam filled pitching tunnel instrument for producing very accurate visualizations, with two and three dimensional perspectives, of pitched baseball trajectories, which also include the strike zone and the on-target coordinates. The visualizations will help pitchers to learn, practice, and improve their pitchability.
Now scouts, coaches, and pitchers can have an instant and accurate understanding of complete pitches, and the invention has many applications that will benefit baseball.
Applications and benefits of visualizations
One application is incorporating the visualizations of movement and accuracy into the review, testing, and evaluation process for prospective, recovering, and active pitchers. Other applications include faster homegrown pitcher development, establishing performance baselines, advanced training in stuff and command, improving pitch-to-contact accuracy, helping pitchers to break out of slumps, incorporating arm protection into pitchability, and by free agents as a testament of their current capabilities.
Today’s velocity versus yesterday’s off-speed
Off-speed pitching, as it was practiced in the pre-radar era, is an art form that requires a level of craft and creativity, which because of its abstractness, makes it very difficult to teach, learn, and evaluate. And so, since higher velocities get strikeouts with an easily measured metric, velocity has become the simplest and dominant basis for pitcher selection and recruitment, even though it causes self-destruction.
The laser beam pitching tunnel is an instrument for facilitating the mastering process of off-speed pitching. As such, it will popularize more use of the efficient and precision pitching styles, like the ones used in the pre-radar era, as a training aid for today’s pitchers in how to perform successfully with slower velocities. Just like with the excellent off-speed pitching acumen and talents of Greg Maddox, Jamie Moyer, Jose Quintana, and Jacob deGrom, off-speed pitching, when properly executed, can lead to very successful careers in many ways.
Pre-radar pitching art
The laser beam pitching tunnel is the perfect learning and analysis tool for increasing the finesse, techniques, and control that was popular in the pre-radar era. A time when pitchers had fewer and less severe injuries because they were using more efficient and slower pitching styles. It was a time when pitchers achieved prominence for their mastery of consistently repeatable mechanics of elite stuff and strong command. But then, after the introduction of radar guns, which have come to define today’s era of measurements and data, pitchability, because of its vagueness and complexity, seems to have become less of a priority and more of a lost art.
Rejuvenating the art
The laser beam tunnel helps pitchers to improve their pitchability and rejuvenate the lost art. It helps because now they can see instant close-up views of their pitch trajectories. They can feel comfortable pitching, without radar gun judgement, because the visualizations provide documented illustrations of their performance which can assist them in this art of repeatable mechanics and control. Illustrations that represent the actual trajectory of how each laboratory pitch moved, and where it landed, giving pitchers the opportunity to tweak their technique and try again while their last pitch is still fresh in their mind.
Uses of the instrument
Pitchers can use the laser beam tunnel to refine and practice their techniques for efficient mechanics, movement, deceptive angles, pitch count strategies, mixing speeds and locations, and home run prevention. And it will help pitchers to develop new pitches, improve their stuff and control, recognize their limits, gain recognition for their off-speed skills in efficiency and precision, increase their value, preserve arm health, and extend their pitching careers. And most importantly, pitchers can use the laser beam tunnel to break free from today’s destructive “power versus precision” velocity trap that is fueling their injury epidemic of self-destruction.
Uses of the trajectory visualizations
Pitching baseballs through the tunnel’s array of 1,400 laser beams and light sensors provides the important data point references for accurate visualizations of ball movement in evaluating pitch success or failure. The visualizations allow for experimenting, learning, and comparing how forms and techniques can be adjusted to improve results, and to recognize when points of diminishing returns and physical limitations are being reached.
Measurements and metrics
The coordinates of disrupted laser beams are plotted as data points representing the ball’s trajectory, creating an interactive visualization of exactly where, and how much, the curve curved, the slider slid, the sinker sank, or the sweeper swept, and where the ball touched or crossed through the strike zone, and how close it was to landing at its intended, on-target coordinates. There are no measurements of ball spin, axial direction, and angle for extrapolation, just the coordinates of all of the ball’s specific locations as recorded by horizontal and vertical laser light sensors, in the 0.4 seconds it moves through the 48-foot tunnel.
Specifications
The data collected from the breaking of the beams, spaced 2.375 inches circumferentially, and laterally every 24 inches for the first 30 feet, and 8 inches for the last 18 feet, is plotted into two and three dimensional representations of the traveled path with an error of plus or minus one-half inch. Home plate, the strike zone, and the coordinates of the target location are displayed with the trajectory.
Pitcher’s mound and work station
Pitchers release into the tunnel from a Major League Baseball regulation sized, and constructed, clay/sand mix pitching mound with an on-the-mound, standup, computer workstation, for immediate review of each pitch and for making comparisons with prior pitches. A staff person operates the equipment and the system for data collection.
Target options
Pitchers can choose to pitch to any of the 120 preset location coordinates in the strike zone as outlined by green indicator lights along the top and sides at the end of the tunnel, and further represented by either of two physical targets behind home plate. The targets being a catcher positioning their mitt, or a robotically positioned catcher’s mitt, and with the target coordinates represented by red indicator lights along the top and sides at the end also.
Location
The pitching laboratory is located in my warehouse at 420 Mill Street, NE, Vienna, Virginia.
Chris DeCarlo
703-973-8102
President
DeCarlo Enterprises, Inc.
Trading as Fairfax Propane and Easy Stone Center