Around The Horn

2007 in baseball is going to be known as the year of X. First off is the new Pitch f/x that is taking over where Questec left off. Every park in baseball will have new Pitch f/x operators, that feed information on every pitch thrown in MLB in 2007.

For starters all umpires could be graded on their ball and strike calls, and the information will be accurate, and will be available for all parks, not just the chosen ones that had Questec. Pitch f/x is a term created by Fox, but there is another X factor thrown in. According to Mike Jacob the head of Sportvision that created the Pitch f/x technology. There is the opportunity to transform video gaming. “We could send live pitch data to an Xbox 360 or a simple gaming application on a phone where the user can try to hit live pitches.” That would mean that eventually every fan in America or in Japan could take the live pitches from either Daisuke Matsuzaka or Joel Zumaya and then try to hit them on their own gaming system. With the advent of the Wii gaming system, think of what the future could hold. Eventually the wii joystick will look just like a 34 inch 31 ounce baseball bat. As you stand in your living room and watch a live MLB game, you will be able to take each pitch from the real game, and then try to hit them yourself in your own living room.

Baseball is the one sport where you can put the pitcher on your video monitor, and then watch the wind up and pitch, and then try in real time to see if you can make contact with the gyroball or just swing and miss. Everyone likes to see a 100 mile an hour fastball, but do you think if you stood in living room with a bat in hand, that you really could hit that pitch? MLB is betting that everyone will want to be part of the MLB Game day experience. F/X stands for Fox and Xbox, and if you try hard enough you might be able to hit a pitch just like old “Double X” himself, Jimmie Foxx.

I am:

The Fan’s Commish
Rick Swanson

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 6:52 am and is filed under The Good of the Game. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.