Sure, Major League Baseball has royally screwed over a large number of their fanbase (myself included) with the commitment to MLB Extra Innings on DirecTV. But they do have something in the works, something that could turn out to be very innovative and fun. Major League Baseball is implenting a technology in all of their stadiums called Pitch f/x. It’s similar to Questec but we imagine Curt Schilling won’t take a bat to these things.
What exactly does Pitch f/x do? It analyzes information on every single pitch throw in the 2007 season. By doing a rough estimate, that’s upwards of 500,000 pitches, which makes for a lot of data. It will be used as a way of grading umpires on their ball and strike calls but there’s also something in it for the normal fan.
There is the opportunity to transform video gaming. ?We could send live pitch data to an Xbox 360 or a simple gaming application on a phone where the user can try to hit live pitches.? That would mean that eventually every fan in America or in Japan could take the live pitches from either Daisuke Matsuzaka or Joel Zumaya and then try to hit them on their own gaming system. With the advent of the Wii gaming system, think of what the future could hold.
Sounds cool to me. If you see Pat Burrell wiff on another slider in the dirt, you’ll be able to finally prove that you can lay off those pitches. We’re not sure how soon this technology will be implemented but it sounds like it has a real future.
