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A Computer Umpires Its First Pro Baseball Game
An anonymous reader writes: Baseball has long been regarded as a "game of inches." Among the major professional sports it arguably requires the greatest amount of precision — a few extra RPMs can turn a decent curveball into an unhittable one, and a single degree's difference in the arc of a bat swing can change a lazy popup into a home run. As sensor technology has improved, it's been odd to see how pro baseball leagues have made great efforts to keep it away from the sport. Even if you aren't a fan of the game, you're probably familiar with the cultural meme of an umpire blowing a key call and altering the course of the game.
Thus, it's significant that for the first time ever, sensors and a computer have called balls and strikes for a professional game. In a minor league game between the San Rafael Pacifics and the Vallejo Admirals, a three-camera system tracked the baseball's exact position as it crossed home plate, and a computer judged whether it was in the strike zone or not. The game went without incident, and it provided valuable data in a real-life example. The pitch-tracking system still has bugs to work out, though. Dan Brooks, founder of a site that tracks ball/strike accuracy for real umpires, said that for the new system to be implemented permanently, fans must be "willing to accept a much smaller amount of inexplicable error in exchange for a larger amount of explicable error."
Thus, it's significant that for the first time ever, sensors and a computer have called balls and strikes for a professional game. In a minor league game between the San Rafael Pacifics and the Vallejo Admirals, a three-camera system tracked the baseball's exact position as it crossed home plate, and a computer judged whether it was in the strike zone or not. The game went without incident, and it provided valuable data in a real-life example. The pitch-tracking system still has bugs to work out, though. Dan Brooks, founder of a site that tracks ball/strike accuracy for real umpires, said that for the new system to be implemented permanently, fans must be "willing to accept a much smaller amount of inexplicable error in exchange for a larger amount of explicable error."
Ball tracking tech has been used by cricket umpires for years.
Although its still a human making the decision, the computer shows where the ball was, and would have gone.
The use of a computerized system to call balls and strikes is not new to professional baseball. Major league baseball has used a system called QuesTec to automatically determine whether a pitch is a ball or a strike. MLB used the data to evaluate the performance of umpires and try to standardize the strike zone so that all umpires call it according to what's in the rule book. In practice, this generally meant a narrower but a taller strike zone, including calling the low strike at the knees and the high strike at the letters. Another system called PITCHf/x is installed in all 30 MLB parks and automatically classifies the type of pitch and tracks its trajectory, recording both velocity and movement. This data can show which pitches were balls and strikes, the type of pitch thrown, the velocity, and the amount of horizontal and vertical break on the pitch. These data are readily available on sites like Fangraphs. Furthermore, the K Zone and FoxTrax have been regular parts of the ESPN and Fox MLB telecasts, respectively, for many years and show the trajectory of the ball as it's pitched and whether it's a ball or a strike. The technology isn't new at all to professional baseball. The only thing that's actually new is using the data in real time to umpire a game as opposed to evaluating umpires after games, collecting data sets for scouting and statistical analysis, or entertainment purposes in TV broadcasts and tracking games live online.