Baseball for dummies
So, I never watch sports. At least not on purpose. But, being that I am in Baltimore and have time on my hands in a restaurant, I was watching the Angels Red Sox game and was stunned by the K Zone graphic they overlay to analyze whether a pitch is strike or not. Not only was it a neat-o trick (kinda like tracking the puck in hockey, or putting the first down in football) but it was actually really cool when they compared several of a pitcher’s throws together, stacking them all on the screen.
This is really a damn cool thing. Not only is it cool technology, it is actually useful and enhances watching the games. It makes me wonder if at some point umpires will actually just be sitting behind a laptop and calling balls and strikes without any fail, ever. Is that a good thing?
More info here and here on the development of the software which has apparently been around since 2001. How come there aren’t any good pictures of it online then?!
Imagine a GPS of every player’s shoe and the football in an NFL game. No more instant replays for out-of-bounds calls and the ball would absolutely have to cross the end-zone line to be counted as a TD.
Who needs umpires when we can put GPS sensors inside everything and have a rack of Dells manage every sport. Think of how a player will whine to a ref or ump on a tough call and put it in this scenario. I can almost see Terrell Owens typing “rm -rf, bitch” into a terminal while in a huff on the sideline when he is pissed about a call.
Purists might say that this would pervert the historical value of the game. Purists should then turn off their televisions and listen to games on the radio, or read about them in the newspaper instead.
Creepy. I was sitting in the booth behind you at the restaurant thinking “if half the folks here have lobes like that it should be an interesting conference.” Didn’t quite turn out that way though.
Strange that I should stumble on this entry while blog trawling…