Wearables are the new market inefficiency. At least for St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Aledmys Diaz, who's been training with strobe glasses in an attempt to improve his fielding.
Diaz has been wearing the glasses, which were introduced to him by first base coach Oliver Marmol, several times a week while doing pregame infield drills.
"I have to focus more on the ball, pay more attention to detail," the 26-year-old told Jenifer Langosch of MLB.com.
The strobe glasses - a wearable technology that have helped Washington Nationals superstar Bryce Harper as well - use blinking LCD lenses to block the wearer's vision for brief moments, forcing them to concentrate more astutely.
"If we train our athletes to be comfortable in that panic situation and navigate back to a normal state where they can make good decisions, then the practice that we do here transfers that much better to a game," Marmol explained.
By traditional metrics, Diaz isn't performing too poorly at shortstop this season, boasting a .978 fielding percentage with five errors.
However, by more advanced measures, Diaz's defense appears to have some holes, as he's posted minus-10 defensive runs saved and a 0.6 Ultimate Zone Rating. Throughout 2016, Diaz had a minus-11.4 UZR/150, which is a statistic that attempts to define how many runs a player saved per 150 innings played at the position.
"I think it's helped me a lot," Diaz said of the glasses. "It builds confidence that I'm working on the defense side, and then when I go into the game, I can just react."
