Major League Baseball's outdated, misleading offset camera angle | Hacker News Reader

Major League Baseball's outdated, misleading offset camera angle

slate.com

28 pointsrobg17 comments

Hackers here would probably be interested to know that the MLB releases the pitch tracking data nightly (http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/). It's fascinating and while I'm sure the clubs themselves have programmers working away at crunching the data, there are some interesting uses of the data publicly available:

http://labs.dataspora.com/gameday/

http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfx/index.php

I've been trying to think of something awesome to do with this data (since it seems amazing to me that it's available for free).

The feeds link to this copyright statement:

The accounts, descriptions, data and presentation in the referring page (the "Materials") are proprietary content of MLB Advanced Media, L.P ("MLBAM"). Only individual, non-commercial, non-bulk use of the Materials is permitted and any other use of the Materials is prohibited without prior written authorization from MLBAM. Authorized users of the Materials are prohibited from using the Materials in any commercial manner other than as expressly authorized by MLBAM.

http://gdx.mlb.com/components/copyright.txt

I didn't say something awesome meant a business. Think of all the generations of baseball fans before us. Games were only seen live, then heard on the radio, then on TV, then on the internet, then on TV in HD and now finally every pitch of every game is tracked and available in an XML feed. This is the future that baseballs geeks of all times have wished for.

Actually, I found the words "individual" and "non-bulk" more interesting than "non-commercial", but, then again, I never know what these legalese words are supposed to actually mean; each of the sites you link, for example, seem to make bulk, non-individual use of the data.

It's vague, but that's par for the course with pro sports. Note that when you watch a sporting event these days they warn you that even describing the game without expressed written consent can violate copyright.

I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding the statement read at the start of the game; it's saying that the accounts and descriptions performed by their hired talent are copyrighted, not that you can't describe it yourself.

Stat crunching and visualization of baseball data is immensely rewarding if you are a software developer and baseball fan. I'm learning more about statistics than I will ever learn as a web developer. The existing knowledge base is huge (sabermetrics) and growing every day as people develop more interesting measures of performance.

As soon as I find time, I hope to start reading about monte carlo simulations and implement one using existing MLB data.

If you anyone is interested in this stuff, google sabermetrics, baseball databank and retrosheet. Cool stuff and the community looks like it could use a solid dose of high quality OSS software. It seems a lot of experts in the field still use MS Access and Excel to model their information.

Being anywhere but right behind or right above the plate is going to make it difficult to tell if the pitch was a ball or a strike. Regardless of a dead center or offset camera angle, they are both from the outfield, which makes visually inferring when the ball crosses the plate a hard problem for our eyes to handle. Since pitches, even fastballs, have incredible amounts of movement, watching from a television means guess work at best. Thankfully, all baseball broadcasters have all kinds of camera angles and pitch tracking to show exactly where the ball crossed, and those features are used frequently so the viewer is rarely left in the dark on questionable calls.

Neither is optimal and I personally thought the offset camera did a far better job indicating the pitch was outside for the fastball pitch the article focused on (though the slider movement was indeed exaggerated). Then again, I have watched baseball from the offset angle all my life and it's probably just a arbitrary preference at this point.

What we really need is the ability to choose camera angles. Not really critical for baseball, as baseball is really about the pitcher vs. batter duel--though being able to watch a stellar base-runner lead-off and time the pitcher for a steal would be awesome. Basketball, hockey, football, soccer would all benefit from different angles. The side field view is no where near as compelling as an up and down (video game style) or a "blimp" view for understanding the complexity and beauty that is professional sports at the highest level.

Unfortunately the problem with implementing this in other sports is the same problem with implementing a centered camera view in baseball - infrastructure.

In order to get the awesome Madden-esque camera views that you describe (at least for outdoor sports), stadiums would need either overhead camera supports or massively zoomed in angles from the ends of the stadiums, and it would be nearly impossible to guarantee a consistent angle between venues.

Until we have lightweight drone type cameras that can be placed at any point of a 3d mapped field...

Imagine the fun of that, you could control the cameras in almost a 3d software setting.

Or maybe one day computer vision will be so good that it can infer any angle/point on a field from multiple inputs.

You can see this sort of thing starting to creep into NFL coverage, I think mostly FOX Sports. They have a number of robotic cameras strung across the field on wires, and they use them to put together some fairly impressive replay scenes, though they can't follow the ball very well with them so you don't see them cut to during live action that often. I'm not sure how you start introducing this to sports like baseball with its non-uniform stadiums and fields, although things like the NBA and NHL seem like great candidates and I am sure you will continue to see this spread. I think ESPN's Axis uses something like it in baseball and basketball already, but that may just be fancy editing/extrapolation with existing angles.

You used to be able to choose among a group of 4 or more camera angles on a couple of the DirecTV sports packages as well, and you likely still can do that. I know NASCAR is deep into that sort of thing, but I am not a fan so I don't know much about it.

Axis does use fancy extrapolation. But yes, with Skycam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skycam) awesome angles are possible. Baseball fields are too large for Skycam and the Skycam would probably interfere with play. For the NBA and NHL, Skycam is really impressive.

This is slightly off topic, but I feel like soccer in America is being poorly represented by American media companies due to their shitty camera angles. When you watch the English Premier League coverage they offer nice, high angles that make the field seem huge and the plays more impressive. It's kind of a minor detail, but I really think it's a subtle change that could change the way people feel about watching the game.

Well, the thing is we can easily figure out balls/strikes with a combination of the overhead cam and the side cam. The issue is that you can't really air those in the run of play and the networks generally only show those angles when they prove that the ump was right (either by MLB edict or a gentlemans' agreement not to show the umps up).

Article ends with "After all, isn't it time the sport embraced reality?"

Yes, I agree. Its time we all embraced reality and started using our brains rather than rationalizing outdated "traditions".

Another aspect of reality we should embrace: very significant percentages of "news" articles are actually deceptive propaganda pieces.

Probably about 80 or 90% of status quo in every domain has been proven incorrect numerous times and yet is defended and reproduced over and over by masses of unthinking talking apes.

Reality is, if you go to a game, you aren't going to be sitting at the optimum viewing angle.

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