Video tracking pitches in the World Series

Fox Sports and Major League Baseball are doing some interesting things with video as discussed in the MLB press release “Latest technology enhances playoffs”.

If you’ve watched any of the playoffs or World Series coverage, you’ve seen the “red box” illustrating where in or out of the strike zone a given pitch is. Now you can read just how they did it. As the press release points out:

It’s not about radar guns. It’s about video at 30 frames per second, triangulation involving three ballpark cameras, and software on three computers in the corner of a TV truck outside the stadium’s loading docks.

And they do this on every pitch, to every batter, fast enough to display the pitch tracking information during the live broadcast after any pitch they want to analyze. Very cool.

PS Go Cardinals!