Well today, we are spoiled. The hotel’s channels aren’t playing your home team’s game?, then flip open your inch-thin laptop and watch it live on MLB.tv. If you’re at home, then you’re lucky and can truly become part of the game with your 1080p HD 62” flat screen, your 12 speaker surround sound, and the neighborhood shaking subwoofer. The number of stats have grown tremendously with the addition of up-to-date statistics and advanced computerized data for each baseball game, too.
One company that has helped speed up this revolution is a California based company called Sportvision. Perhaps most-widely known for their Virtual Yellow 1st Down line shown on every play of every NFL game, Sportvision has made its mark in nearly every sport, ranging from football and NASCAR, to horse racing and the Olympics.
Baseball is a sport like no other: on the outside it may seem like “…six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.” ~Ray Fitzgerald, in Boston Glove, 1970, but to the die-hard, truly passionate baseball fan, it is 2 ½ hours of excitement and emotion. Every single play is filled with mind-numbing decisions and overwhelming athletic prowess, and for every single play there are innumerable stats that are processed. I think that for many fans, baseball is not only a game which showcases the finest athletes in all of sports, but a statistical analysis of each of these multifaceted plays and players.
Sportvision, largely affiliated with ESPN and MLB, understands this, and has created various technologies which have furthered the technical study of the world of stats.
ieeghn.org has this to say about Sportsvision, "The success of Sportvision has hinged on solving two technological problems. The first involves locating or tracking a target in real space and (crucially for live events) in real time. The second involves superimposing graphics onto that target — taking into account not only its movement, but that of the television cameras (whose lenses additionally introduce distortions). Moreover, the system has to work with several cameras simultaneously."
For example, the KZone on ESPN, developed by Sportvision, is able to show precisely where the ball entered the strike zone, accurate to 2/5 of an inch. This is done by using multiple camera sensors to create a virtual strike zone and a 3D model of the ball’s path to pinpoint the location of the pitch’s intersection with the zone. Not only can KZone show the location of a single pitch, but also has the extremely valuable ability (for which it won an Emmy Award) to show pitches in sequence in order to show how a pitcher “works” a batter.
Another one of Sportvision’s amazing technologies is PITCHf/x, a tool used on MLB Gameday. Using the camera sensors for KZone, points are plotted to create a virtual “tail” behind the ball to show what type of pitch was thrown and the exact path of the ball.
Other Sportvision innovations include personal Hit Charts, the Lead-off Line, and pregame Player Cards.
Coming Soon: FIELDf/x – FIELDf/x is a new technology which records the flight, location, trajectory and speed of the ball, and the position, route and speed of the fielder (as well as many other things) in order to determine the difficulty of the catch and compare the catch (or lack thereof) against other plays and players around the league. "The concept of being able to quantify that is appealing to teams, to the fans, and to stat heads." ~ September 19, 2009, Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle. It will provide an entirely new way to contrast various players at every position and evaluate who should really win the Gold Glove awards. It will be interesting to see if Sportsvision decides to incorporate UZR (Ultimate Zone Rating) virtual imaging in the next installation of the f/x series. This new technology has already been experimented with at AT&T Park (SF Giants), and FIELDf/x is expected to hit other ballparks for the 2010 season.
There has been an amazing transition in revolutionary technology for baseball over the past 15 years, and it only seems to be accelerating to better and more advanced ways of analyzing this multifaceted game. What’s next, an Albert Pujols pick in the dirt in 3D?
