2022 SABR Analytics: Watch highlights from MLB FieldVision Demo and Deep Dive panel
At the SABR Virtual Analytics Conference on Saturday, March 19, 2022, representatives from Major League Baseball gave a demonstration and deep-dive discussion on the MLB FieldVision system.
Panelists included: Joel Feinberg, Senior Product Manager; Clay Nunnally, Baseball Scientist; Sid Sethupathi, Software Engineer; and moderator Ben Jedlovec, Senior Director, Baseball Data Platform Product at MLB.
Here are some highlights:
On fan access to the FieldVision system
- Feinberg: Come Opening Day, you’re going to be able to log into MLB.com and watch the game live in FieldVision and zoom around the field from any camera angle. We specifically are looking at FieldVision as a consumer entertainment tool, not necessarily as something that can be used for research. That primarily has to do with frame rate of the data we are dealing with.”
On the precision of the FieldVision system
- Nunnally: “It’s really easy to record video for baseball and try to make calculations out of it, but it’s really hard to map the accuracy and precision that you get in the image plane of all these cameras to the real world. So, I think that is one thing with Hawk-Eye that is really clever and is done really well.”
On making the FieldVision images more real to life
- Sethupathi: “Internally, many of us fell in love with the stick figures, but through a lot of user testing and fan feedback we figured out that people didn’t want to look at stick figures, they wanted something that was a little more realistic. So, a widespread development effort last year was trying to figure out how do go from the stick figures into a moved rig.”
For more coverage of the 2022 SABR Virtual Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.
Transcription assistance from Alisha Wetzel.
Originally published: April 3, 2022. Last Updated: April 4, 2022.