Rose-Hulman alum turns to current students to develop mobile bat testing system
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The founder of a Chicago-based company is turning to his alma mater to further develop and refine his company’s primary product.
Keenan Long is a graduate of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and in 2020 founded Longball Labs, which works with Major League Baseball players to optimize variations in their baseball bats in order to improve performance.
For the last few years, Long has turned to senior mechanical engineer students at Rose-Hulman, who have helped him not only develop a lab to do this kind of research, but then turn it into a mobile system that the company can take directly to players.
“The Rose-Hulman students helped us turn our lab, which was an entire room, into a basically a box that can go anywhere and be deployed as needed,” Long said. “And that has been huge for our business, to be able to go to where the bats are instead of having to ship the bats in.”
Origins of Longball Labs
Long founded Longball Labs after spending six years as a research and development engineer for Easton, which makes non-wood baseball bats. It was there that he found that very small changes in the physical parameters of bats can have a big impact on how far a bat can make a baseball fly.
He then conducted a research project in which he learned that while a batch of wood bats produced at the same time might be abled as identical, there various smaller metrics that show how different they really are.
Long said controlling for those metrics—such as differences in wood density between different bats or within one bat itself—can help increase the performance of the player by about three miles per hour in exit velocity.
“Those differences can affect the weight of the bat. They can affect the distribution of the weight, the balance point of the bat, all of these things,” he said. “I like to say it’s like a symphony of variables that come together to determine how that how the ball will react to that bat.”
Longball Labs has developed a high-precision bat analysis laboratory that can detect the tiny discrepancies. Then, by conducting performance testing with MLB hitters, the system can identify the performance potential of individual bats, according to the company.
With that knowledge, Long said, players can extend the distance of a ball they hit by an extra eight to 18 feet, which can make the difference between an out and a home run.
The company currently works with dozens of MLB hitters such as Andrew McCutchen, Byron Buxton and JD Martinez, as well as one unnamed MLB team.
Rose-Hulman influence
After completing his research project in 2019, Long said he needed a way to turn mock-ups of his idea into a fully developed, precise, laboratory system. He turned to the familiarity of Rose-Hulman to accomplish that goal.
His collaboration with senior students at Rose-Hulman started around the time that he launched Longball Labs.
“Each year, a different group of senior mechanical engineers–five or six, depending on the year–seek out to do the product development necessary to…at first it was build a lab that can measure x, y and z,” he said. “Then the next year, it was build a lab that can measure x, y and z repeatably and precisely, and can be mobile. That was a huge one.”
Long said working with the students reminds him of his time at Rose-Hulman and the pressure of working on new projects and being tested on them in a short amount of time.
“They applied that exact same grit to these projects, which offered them lots of obstacles to overcome, and they did such a great job,” he said. “It was really invigorating to get to be essentially back in a Rose-Hulman class, this time as more of a proctor type of role, but to just be in that environment where there’s this intellectual horsepower matched with this grit. That’s where innovation comes from.”
Looking ahead
Long said the company’s next goal is to bring more full MLB teams into the fold to work with their roster of hitters. He noted that some teams have reached out to him looking to replicate the same success that other players have seen.
Additionally, Long said there are a few other avenues the company can take with the technology, but the details of that are being kept secret for now.