John Hankins had a request for MLB playoff teams this October:
Hankins is one of the inventors and founders of PitchCom—the device that clubs started using this year so catchers can transmit calls to pitchers instead of visually giving signs. The set-up is fairly straightforward. The catcher presses buttons on his wristband to communicate pitch type and location, which the pitcher will hear through a receiver tucked into his hat, and the same goes for any relevant fielders. (The shortstop and second baseman will typically also be wearing receivers.) While not every team started out the year with PitchCom, more hopped on board as the season wore on, and by September, the device had become so common it was almost unremarkable.
But October presented a new challenge for PitchCom: The playoffs are loud. They’re loud. In an environment where teams are desperate for every possible competitive advantage, no one wanted to go back to ordinary, visual signs that would be at risk of getting stolen. But if they were sticking with PitchCom in front of tens of thousands of noisy, championship-hungry fans… how were they going to hear?
Hankins and his co-founder, Craig Filicetti, had been thinking about the problem for months. They worked on a series of adjustments over the course of the season: They reconfigured the audio, getting a sound engineer to optimize the pitch calls for loud environments, and designed several versions of a modified receiver with an earpiece that could amplify the sound even more. And they also made one very simple suggestion: Cut a little hole in each ballcap so the receiver wouldn’t be muffled by fabric. But perhaps no one on a baseball diamond can be as particular, or as paranoid, or as prone to suspicion as a pitcher: There was pushback to the early suggestions.
“We begged teams to cut holes in their hats,” Hankins recalls, clad in a PitchCom t-shirt and hat before taking in an NLCS game at Petco Park. “Just a hole in the hat.”
They ended up making some adjustments to the plan before October: They ditched the full earpiece, instead settling on a version with an amplifier chamber and a small tube, which still requires (yes) a little hole in the seam of the ballcap. The players ultimately liked this one much better. By mid-October? Just about everyone was on board.
“[It’s] like a little tube coming down through a little hole in our hat that goes basically right into our ear. We know these playoff environments get really loud,” Phillies starter Zack Wheeler said. “But I’ve been just fine hearing it … Somebody came up with that, I don't know who did, but we started using it.”
It was Hankins and Filicetti. And following lots of tweaking and incorporating feedback, they’re pleased with how it’s been received, even in the noisiest of environments.
“It seems to be working. It really has,” Padres catcher Austin Nola said during the NLCS. “We might have had one little issue, but I think at the end of the day everybody has really liked it. It takes away from having to put signs out and the ability to steal signs from second base. I think it's been a good addition.”