PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD If all goes to plan, tonight’s baseball All Star game, like the current season, will be the last played in the easy midsummer before new monitoring technology electronically captures the movements of every player on the field for minute statistical and video analysis.
Sportvision, the company that brought the glowing puck to hockey, Yellow Line virtual first down to football, RACEf/x GPS monitoring to auto racing, BackBoard Slideout to basketball, and PITCHf/x to the diamond is working with Major League Baseball to introduce what one commentator called “the largest single advance in baseball science since the development of the box score” in 30 stadiums by next season. As described in The New York Times piece that broke the story:
A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitized of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, almost certainly affect their compensation and perhaps alter how the game itself is played.
It works like this:
In San Francisco, four high-resolution cameras sit on light towers 162 feet up, capturing everything that happens on the field in three dimensions and wiring it to a control room below. Software tools determine which movements are the ball, which are fielders and runners, and which are passing seagulls. More than two million meaningful location points are recorded per game.
As envisioned, the $5 million initiative will provide uncontestable data on every dimension of fielding action: fastest base runners, infielders quickest to reach a groundball, hardest and most accurate outfield thrower, etc. etc. The prototype looks like this:
Source: Sportvision
Homer or Groaner?
This latest development is glad or sad news, depending on your view of hyper-stat sports.
For quant crazies, it’s sure to excite. Finally, detailed data on a key dimension of the game heretofore only primitively measured in errors and fielding percentages. And for the true sports fan/geek, Sportvision’s CEO says the company may make the petabytes of raw data available to statistically minded fans and academics to create exciting new stats.
For traditionalists and classic baseball romantics, enamored of the game’s graceful poetry and magic, the new field eye will become another inevitable “advance” to be (mostly) ignored or decried.
It probably won’t do much for the job security of baseball scouts, either.
Who’ll win in the end? Top players and their agents. (Scott Boras, are you funding all this?) The new fielding system provides incredible new ammo for contract talks and jacking up top players’ already ridiculous salaries. And you know what that means, dear fans. You thought seats were expensive now? Just wait. There’s a reason it’s called Moneyball.
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