MLB Sweetness
Last night I saw the coolest thing on-line. mlb.com gameday. Now I love baseball, and I also love data visualization. I love baseball for a whole bunch of reasons, but primarily because it is a turn based strategy game, my favorite kind of game. I love data visualization because I’m a big fan of anything that helps lead to better deeper understanding of any problem. Basically I like to solve problems and I like stuff that helps me learn how to solve problems.
GameDay Screen Shot
Baseball is a form of problem solving. The new Gameday application is a crazy way to better understand how to solve baseball problems. In a nutshell what they have done is insane. They are capturing the pitch trajectory in real time with 3 video cameras, analyzing the data and then converting the film into trajectory / location points ans streaming it over the web. Yes a human (two actually) are still involved in the process (at least until they can integrate tracking markers into the player uniforms and bats – then they could get it down to one guy). Never the less, that they can do this at all is amazing.
That they are willing to stream it across the internet for free blows me away. This is seriously cool stuff.
So how does it show up in your world? Through a nifty browser plug-in IN 3D. They actually let you rotate the camera around the path of the ball to get a better feel for how it actually is traveling through space.
What’s more, now that the ball flight path is digitized they can apply real time analysis to tell what kind of pitch was thrown. They can tell if it’s a breaking ball, a fast ball, you name it. And they have invented two metrics to tell how much the pitch moves (PFX or pitch-f/x) and how much it breaks (BRK, or break). They have found a way to quantify the split finger fast ball and apply metrics to curve balls.
Crazy.
What’s even more impressive is that they are archiving this stuff and providing it in historical games. I’m having a ton of fun with it sitting down with my son and analyzing pitchers and their approach to certain batters. It’s hard to watch an MLB game without it now.
It is amazing the creativity the internet has spawned. That this is available for free, to any baseball fan with a computer and an internet connection is just incredible. Check it out. To find it head over to Mlb.com and look for the little baseball diamond icon in the 
next to the scores of active games. If you check out todays scoreboard, there is a hyperlink for Gameday above each box score.
