Baseball Viewing Is Getting Nerdier And Nerdier

Old school Baseball heads look immediately to Moneyball as the reason for Baseball becoming run by nerds, but the entire game is going through a nerdy over-haul. Well according to FOX Sports the movement isn't slowing down now....

Earlier this month in San Francisco, Sportvision Inc., the sports-entertainment technology company that helped develop the system, hosted a Pitch f/x "summit." By the end, the stats wonks, engineers and nine team representatives in attendance could barely contain themselves.

Nearly everyone at the conference believed such advancements in measuring fundamentals could finally bring a "why" to the "what" of box scores and stat sheets. The same technology will spread to hitting and fielding, they say, and could be applied to other sports.

"Instead of saying, 'There's a hard smash to third base' we could say, 'That ball was hit 106 mph and the third baseman had a third of a second to react.' " says Peter Jensen, a statistician and summit attendee who has written for the Hardball Times, a baseball analysis site. "That adds some context that's been lacking so far."

Not everyone is infatuated with this technology — a fact that became clear during Pitch f/x's debut on 2006 postseason telecasts on FOX. After its cameras clocked pitches from Detroit's Joel Zumaya at the unheard-of speed of 103 mph, some fans assumed it was broken. Sportvision says the system was measuring the ball's speed at the release point rather than in mid-flight, as radar guns do.

I think more information is a good thing just so long as that a**hole "Slider" "Scooter" isn't passing it on to us. However, there is a point where enough has to be enough. If you want to use it as a scout that's fine, but as a viewer I could care less about reaction times.

Baseball's nerd machine (FOX Sports)