from Amazon
Friday, October 06, 2006
Wanted: Billionaire who loves baseball
The amount of data that will be coming out of MLB will soon be staggering, as Dan Fox is showing us. Just wait for the video of where the fielders are, frame-by-frame. We’re going to come to the point where half the guys best suited to dive into the data, the Dan Foxes, Andy Dolphins of the world, will only scratch the surface, because they have real jobs that pays the bills., and the other half will be beholden to a team.
What we need is a billionaire who loves baseball, who wants the answers to all of (baseball) life’s mysteries to hand over a couple of million bucks, to ensure you have a dedicated group of researchers to spend their every waking moment looking at this. The baseball equivalent of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
Does this only happen in movies? (Contact, Jodie Foster)
That, or stathead pledge drives, bake sales, plasma-thons…
Outside of harvesting data for analysis, though, you think FOX or ESPN could afford, say, access to the frame-by-frame defensive positioning? We could perhaps be on the verge of maybe the most significant revolution in how games are broadcast. Watch a game, how many times are the fielders even mentioned (much less shown on-screen) before the play? Twice, maybe three times tops? Even then, it’s usually reserved for very unconventional circumstances (e.g., Ortiz shift, infield playing up with runner on third, etc.)