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Strike two! by randomduck

Techno-sport: A whole new ballgame

With the advent of affordable computing and, more recently, the Internet, baseball has taken on a different life than it had back in the analog days, both for teams and fans. An article on FOX Sports covers some of these changes, “Techno-sport: A whole new ballgame”, including one of the most important areas for any team:

On an organizational level, technology is leading to sweeping changes in the venerable and essential practice of scouting ballplayers. Some organizations are trimming down their scouting staffs because they’re now relying on satellite feeds for the advance scouting of opponents.

While scouts won’t be replaced with robots any time soon, technology has made teams’ existing resources much more efficient.

First and foremost, the scouting software used by the organization allows the Padres’ scouting staff to organize roughly 15,000 college, high school and international playing schedules each year. In the pen-and-paper days, it was far more onerous to coordinate such far-flung scouting efforts.

“We can schedule so much more easily than we did in the past,” says [Padres Director of Scouting Bill] Gayton. “We can also pull up scouting information very easily if we’re on the run or traveling.”

As for the fan, you only have to look as far as the FOX Trax or ESPN’s K-Zone for the value technology has added to the game. Putting aside the balls-and-strikes calling, I just appreciate being able to see which pitches are which and what kinds of movement they have.

Custom software tracks the ball, high-speed photography images the pitch, and the center-field camera is used to tailor the strike zone to the batter’s height. It’s a complicated process, but it’s highly accurate and impossibly fast in execution. In fact, the technology is so precise that users can determine the break on pitches down to the inch. Is Barry Zito’s curve sharper in the first inning or the fifth? Now, any fan can find that out.

I wonder how many years it’ll be before fans at the park are outfitted with holographic HUDs. :)