Major League Baseball Advanced Media has released details on a new player tracker system and it could be huge for the game, especially for us in the sabermetrics community. This new system will track everything, and I mean everything, that goes on when the players are on the field. It will track the players route to the ball, the ball, maybe even the peanut vendor in the crowd, it's that impressive. We will finally be able to analyze and use everything in the game to evaluate a player now, not just some numbers on a stat sheet. This combines the stats and the eye test into one tell all system, I like it.
The plan is to have this system in all 30 Major League parks by the 2015 season but we will only see it is three stadiums in 2014, CitiField, Miller Park (imagine that Bud Selig), and Target Field.
Mark Newman of MLB.com broke the story, here is a quote from his piece SEEN HERE:
The goal is to revolutionize the way people evaluate baseball, by presenting for the first time the tools that connect all actions that happen on a field to determine how they work together. This new datastream will enable the industry to understand the whole play on the field — batting, pitching, fielding and baserunning — and enable new metrics for evaluation by clubs, scouts, players and fans.
For instance, on a brilliant, game-saving diving catch by an outfielder, this new system will let us understand what created that outcome. Was it the quickness of his first step, his acceleration? Was it his initial positioning? What if the pitcher had thrown a different pitch? Everything will be connected for the first time, providing a tool for answers to questions like this and more.
We have been having issues embedding videos from certain places, MLB.com being one of them, so if the embed doesn't work please click the link and watch the video. Wow.. that's all I have left, wow.
