The Cop Car That Invented Baseball's Radar Gun

In the fall of 1974, Michigan State baseball coach Danny Litwhiler opened the campus newspaper and read a short item about the university police buying a radar gun to catch speeders. He couldn't stop thinking about it. If it could clock a car, could it clock a fastball?

A Coach With a Question Nobody Could Answer

Litwhiler had spent nineteen seasons at Michigan State and decades before that as a big-league outfielder. He had scouted pitchers his whole life by ear and by guess. Nobody could tell him, with a real number, how fast any pitcher actually threw.

The State News article, written by student reporter Steve Orr, was about traffic enforcement. Litwhiler saw a baseball tool.

The Cruiser on the Field

He called the MSU police department and asked if an officer would bring the radar gun out to practice. They agreed. An officer drove the cruiser onto the field, parking it between the mound and home plate.

There was a catch. The gun had no battery of its own. It was built to plug into a patrol car's cigarette lighter, so the car itself had to stay put on the infield grass while a pitcher threw.

"We didn't have an external battery to power the radar gun, so I drove the police car onto the baseball field," retired MSU officer George Groll later said.

A pitcher wound up. The gun read a number. Litwhiler had his answer.

Building One That Didn't Need a Cop Car

A radar gun that only worked with a police cruiser parked on the field wasn't going to help many teams. Litwhiler wrote to MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn about what he had found, then went looking for someone who could build a version made for baseball.

He found John Paulson, the inventor behind the JUGS pitching machine. Paulson fitted the radar unit with its own battery, so it no longer needed a car to run.

The result was a shoebox-sized handheld unit called the JUGS Speed Gun. Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver used one of the early units at spring training in 1975, and word spread fast through pro and college baseball.

What's Still Pointed at the Mound

Litwhiler donated his original prototype to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1990, and it remains part of the museum's collection in Cooperstown.

Major League Baseball has since moved its official pitch tracking to camera-based systems. But the radar gun Litwhiler and Paulson built never left the rest of the sport.

It is still the tool a college recruiter carries at a high school game. It is still what a scout raises behind the backstop at a showcase. It is still what a dad clicks on from a lawn chair at every Little League game his kid pitches.

The American Baseball Coaches Association announced a new partnership with radar gun maker Stalker Sport in January 2026, more than fifty years after a campus police cruiser first rolled onto Litwhiler's practice field.