That whole “baseball is dying” narrative is an annoying, lazy and (not surprisingly) false story line about America’s past time. Yet you still see it, read it and hear it everywhere, usually around this time of year. Just last week, ESPN ran a poll that claimed that Major League Soccer was more popular among kids than Major League Baseball. Deadspin quickly debunked that story.
Baseball has a rich history and will always have its place in our country. As Terrance Mann famously says in Field of Dreams, “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
It’s true, but that doesn’t mean the game couldn’t use some improving. Adapt or die, that’s what I say. This season, fans will finally enjoy the long awaited expanded instant replay, but it is MLB Advanced Media’s latest creation that has me most excited about the future of broadcasts.
MLBAM’s CEO Bob Bowman announced a revolutionary new player tracking tool that will be built into the infrastructure of all 30 ballparks by 2015 Opening Day. With the help of some fancy new equipment, the league will now be able to measure field f/x-type data such as batted ball velocity, speed of a baserunner or fielder, and route efficiency. Imagine watching Adam Jones race back to the warning track and leap to make a catch at the wall on a deep fly ball in center field. Now picture the replay showing an overhead view of the trajectory of the ball, Jones’ speed while tracking it down and how effectively he ran to make the catch.
The goal is to revolutionize the way people evaluate baseball, by presenting for the first time the tools that connect all actions that happen on a field to determine how they work together. This new datastream will enable the industry to understand the whole play on the field — batting, pitching, fielding and baserunning — and enable new metrics for evaluation by clubs, scouts, players and fans.
That sounds much more exciting than the AT&T Trivia Fact.
(By the way, what is a trivia fact? I’ve never understood that. Trivia usually implies a question. A fact is just a fact. Pick one, MASN.)
I’ll be most curious to see how the Orioles television network embraces this technology a year from now. Currently, Miller Park, Target Field and Citi Field are the only parks equipped with this new player tracker. By the time it rolls around next season, will MASN be prepared to use it in their broadcasts?
Over the years we have seen some good additions to the Orioles broadcasts. Their slow motion camera, X-MO, provides a unique low look along the first base line at the action. They have also embraced, in some form, pitch F/X in their production trucks. It’s worth noting that these pitches are tracked manually by two operators who essentially trace the route of the ball frame by frame. If you compare what’s being shown on television to actual pitch f/x data from MLBAM, it becomes evident that what we’re watching isn’t entirely accurate. Part of that is human error; the other is the angle at which the centerfield camera points at home plate. If you watch any baseball broadcast you’ll notice a slight difference between how the main tight-centerfield camera looks in each ballpark. No two are exactly the same.
It’s my hope that MASN will be out in front of this technology and will work with Bowman and MLBAM to get fans the player tracking tool (they still don’t have a name for it) on Opening Day 2015. I’m not trying to say that Gary Thorne and Jim Palmer could use the help, but I do think that adding features like this into broadcasts will grow the game among the younger generation.
2 Responses
I think they got rid of the trivia question because Palmer use to immediately blurt out the correct answer.
Still Palmer is a lot better than ex Nats analyst Rob Dibble who when they had a pop up ad for Viagra said “Oh Boy!” And put down Steven Strasburg’s injury telling him to “suck it up and play” which got him canned