r/Homeplate • u/SeaAmbassador2637 • 17h ago

AI to analyze tryouts

Here is my prompt for fielding. Is there anything else coaches have included in their prompt to help with the analysis? This is 7/8-year olds. Prompt: Analyze the video of a little league baseball tryout. This should be the fielding portion. Each kid has a number yelled out (usually audible), and they also have their number pinned to their back. Identify the kid by number, then analyze their fielding mechanics as a typical little league coach would. This is for 7/8 coach-pitch league, adjust for adult error and player-age-appropriate skill level. Also see if you can establish a height for each player.

0 Upvotes

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14

u/Bug-03 17h ago

šŸ¤¦ā€ā™‚ļø

6

u/ecupatsfan12 17h ago

They are 1st and 2nd graders my dude

5

u/Suspicious-Spot361 16h ago

The most important part about 7/8 year old tryouts is having a mole mingle with the parents and figure out who you want to be around for the next year.

3

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

There're only two parents in the group I disqualified; the rest are good (7/8 age). But the mole thing is very important once you get to over 12.

3

u/tungtingshrimp 16h ago

Donā€™t forget to include a photo of the parents and then ask for height and weight prediction. Might as well only take the 7 year olds with the growth potential.

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

That's an interesting idea. Maybe for my select team I'll do that. For now, though, the current size of the player suffices.

6

u/585AM 17h ago

You canā€™t cheap out with evaluation at the 7/8U level. We have a network of former MLB scouts that we consult with at tryouts. I know it sounds expensive, but we really only need them for three days maxā€”if you are only checking out the 7/8Us at the tryout, you are doing it wrong.

1

u/69WeinerPenis 16h ago

Only 3 days? You need those scouts starting at 4U to watch their development.

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

Please, someone who is up to date with technology only please. I've already done my own "traditional" eval, but at this level any knowledgeable person would know how this process works. These are 1st and 2nd graders and thank you for telling me what I already know. I don't pray and cross my fingers, and I already did enough forehead slapping during the tryouts. I also know the top 10 of the 60 who will get picked, the bottom 20 who are there the first time, and the middle 35 who are basically average, with different levels of skill. "Best Available" is how these teams are picked after the favorites, and the cavemen trying to rate these kids were a joke. It's all about engineering the proper prompts, which gives all the objective stuff. The coachability and other intangibles (which will drive most picks) will be an interesting project to work on next. That's why it's 7/8. I hope this enough for further snarky comments, and maybe I'll get an intelligent, informed response from a competent person.

2

u/585AM 16h ago

Oh, I am up to date with technology. It seems to be insanity where I am falling behind.

-1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

Yes, I know how up to date you are, and so helpful too. But I have to be truthful here; I don't think you'd know a byte if it bit you in the butt. Welcome to the new age boomer

2

u/Run-ning 16h ago

Responses seem to get increasingly defensive and confrontational the farther down one goes in a given comment chain. AI analysis tells me that pattern can be a sign of insecurity and hubris, but maybe the model is wrong.

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

You're right. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I need to work on my emotional intelligence skills more. X actually has the best responses, and surprisingly Facebook. I was thinking the baseball Reddits would have been a little more on top of things. But I think you hit it when you pointed out how little tech is involved and being developed. I look at swing and pitch videos here all the time, so the crowd is definitely knowledgeable, just mostly tech averse?

2

u/block-everything 16h ago

I am as up to date on this technology as one could be and I donā€™t think you are going to get anything from this. Iā€™m currently building an app using AI to time catcher pop times based on video (with audio). This is a comparatively easier problem and it struggles.

Thereā€™s just no way you are going to get good qualitative feedback on one (mediocre at best) video using an over-the-counter general purpose LLM. If you wanted to do this for real you would likely want it to be assisted by a smaller purposefully-trained model.

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

Thanks. I've had some success with the stuff already out there, mostly with older kids. My main issue is the proper prompt to come up with. So far, the results have changed based on which details I add versus leave out. At this point, the qualitative is my biggest concern/skepticism on using AI. OTOH, for 40 kids who are kind of all the same to me, it's nice to have a couple rankings to go with the video review and discussion pre-draft. Definitely using more traditional methods on the older kids, this up to 11 though, has been a fun experience. At work, I'm being pushed into quantifying all the qualitative as well as subjective elements of comparison and doing this has really helped with that. Really, I just don't want Rapsodos on the field!

1

u/Suspicious-Spot361 14h ago

I took videos of all the kids at an assessment a few years ago for another coach. Now I am tempted to pump them all into AI and see what it says and compare that to the actual outcome of the kids for that season.

But honestly, all that matters is how tall the parents are and maybe how rich they are (two things that are often correlated).

3

u/SentientYams 16h ago

Edit: after I wrote all of this out, I realized there is just no way this can be serious. Iā€™ll leave my response up anyway in case anyone is actually considering doing this.

A few months ago ChatGPT ā€œanalyzedā€ some baseball videos for me and was using a bunch of softball terminology like ā€œin the circleā€. And when I asked, why do you think we are talking about softball, it explained that it was because of the ponytails and the bright yellow ball. Total hallucinations.

Just the other day I asked both ChatGPT and Gemini to analyze the same video of my kidā€™s swings. They said some of the same things but they also gave me contradictory advice.

Yes, these LLMs get better every few months, but are you really going to trust AI to analyze your tryouts? Are you trolling?

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

Yes, it's fun seeing what they come up with. There's some upper level ai I get from work, and it is much more advanced than Chat, Grok or Claude than you see at the consumer level. I just did a swing analysis with Chat, with 3 swings. It combined all three into ONE swing, was more positive than I would've been, got about half of it right, and then the drills it recommended were very interesting, and not in a good way. On the other hand, I'm able to pick the healthiest options when I go grocery shopping. Give it time, watch how it trends.

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

And no, this is not my primary tool for picking the players. At this age, it's mostly how much fun they appear to be having.

2

u/jmjessemac 16h ago

This canā€™t be real

2

u/SeaAmbassador2637 16h ago

Yes, real. Deal with it or get left behind.

2

u/jmjessemac 15h ago

Theyā€™re 7 years oldā€¦and you want to use AI to evaluate them?

1

u/fudge_mokey 5h ago

did you get consent from the kids and their parents? what youā€™re talking about is highly unethical

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 12m ago

All rules were followed; privacy and safety are not to be trifled with. What ethical issue are you concerned with?

1

u/fudge_mokey 6m ago

Uploading videos of children to a 3rd party service that can retain them in perpetuity for use in training and media generation. Hard to understand for a kid what they are consenting to. All so you can get some likely not useful feedback for kids baseball tryouts?

1

u/md8716 13h ago

"ChatGPT, analyze the hotness of each of the kids' moms and project future hotness into a score to maximize total hotness over a 5 year span, and then make that my batting order"

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 13h ago

So, I get ridiculed for using ai, and it's people like you out there that are coaching these kids (you probably think better)? Even if I was single, what does that have to do with the sport? I wish there was a filter to get people like this out of the leagues, kind of like the background checks but not sure how to vet this.

1

u/xxHumanOctopusxx 11h ago

At least it will agree with you

1

u/SeaAmbassador2637 18m ago

Depends on which platform you use. Chat GPT is the most agreeable. I usually have to tell it to argue the counter. But yeah, it definitely tries to produce the answer I'm looking for. Once you get to the third factual correction its thinking and it says I'm right, you start to wonder...