Chase Rowe has spent the majority of his life around baseball.

As he rose through the player ranks to various coaching positions both collegiately and professionally, he developed a critique of how the game was being taught to up-and-coming players.

“Baseball, probably like most other sports, there’s a huge level of hand-me-down coaching is what we call it,” Rowe said. “What we got taught, whether it be in Little League, high school or college or pro ball, what made us good, you pass it down to the next generation.

“ … We can’t follow just what our biases are that might have helped us or helped a few players along the way or what we believe to be aesthetically pleasing with our eyes.”

Technology — artificial intelligence in particular — has proven to be the solution for Rowe in helping to bridge the gap between what coaches are able to identify with their eyes and what data-driven analytics can offer.

At his 20,000 square-foot facility in Callery, Butler County — the crown jewel of Battleground Baseball Group — Rowe has put this combination of the human touch and cutting-edge technology to use.

A Knoch graduate and former Slippery Rock standout, Rowe won 370 games in 13 seasons as head coach at La Roche in addition to serving as a minor-league hitting coach for the Detroit Tigers.

Along with a supporting cast of experienced coaches, Rowe offers a plethora of instructional and training options that cover all elements of the game.

Pre-teens, high schoolers and college athletes, as well as professional players, have flocked to his facility and staff.

The Pittsburgh Pirates’ Andrew McCutchen and David Bednar are notable pros who have gotten to know Rowe over the years.

Powering much of the technological side of Rowe’s operation is the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm Uplift Labs, which, using AI-driven biomechanics data, offers motion capture, 3D visualizations and video synchronization to demonstrate to players precisely how their body is moving.

At Battleground, players have motion capture analysis at their fingertips, using only iPhones or iPads paired with the Uplift app.

“We’re providing the data so coaches, such as Chase and others can then intervene, come up with new strength and conditioning regimens or what have you — recovery regimens — to optimize performance,” said Uplift CEO and co-founder Masa Kabayama. “That’s what’s really super exciting.”

Troy LaNeve, who recently earned a degree from Vanderbilt and is now preparing for his final baseball season with the Commodores, is an alumnus of Rowe’s programs.

A Pine-Richland graduate, LaNeve was a four-time All-WPIAL selection and started working with Rowe the summer before his sophomore year of high school.

The technology and devices LaNeve got exposed to at a young age with Rowe helped prepare him for the landscape of high-level college baseball.

“Now that I’ve had the opportunity to go to a school that’s known for being ahead of the game and training with guys like Andrew McCutchen in the offseason with Chase, I can sit back and see how it, in some ways, was ridiculous that I was a 13-14-year-old kid and I was able to get hooked up to a machine that the best of the best are getting hooked up to.”

The MLB career of McCutchen coincided with the rise of the kind of technology that Rowe, collegiate and professional teams alike now regularly utilize.

Seeing what is readily available for youth players is a testament to how much things have changed since McCutchen and former Pirates teammate Neil Walker were coming out of high school in the early 2000s.

“The crazy thing about the game now is that the kids are doing the same thing that big-leaguers are doing,” McCutchen said. “It makes things — I don’t know if you’d say the word ‘easier’ — but if we all are doing the same things, that gives kids that feeling that they can be what the guys in the major leagues are.”

However, Walker remains impressed with how Rowe, while fully embracing the new ways to gather data and analyze players, hasn’t parted with the human side of coaching.

“Chase himself has professional coaching experience, but more than that, he understands the baseball world,” Walker said. “He understands how it works, where it’s heading and what’s important to college coaches and professional scouts and teams.

“He’s not necessarily a guy that looks at just data and analytics of a baseball swing and all that goes into it. He also understands hitting philosophies as far as approach and all the things that in today’s day and age, get a little thrown behind.”

For Rowe, continuing to incorporate tech into coaching holds benefits for baseball players of all ages.

“No matter what level you’re at, you have a window to improve and you have a window to make adjustments,” Rowe said. “If that player isn’t doing it, he’s going to be out of a career. Utilizing this technology, for us, has cut down steps in the trial-and-error process and led us to some answers that happen a little bit faster.”

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)