Visit the link if for nothing else than the quick video preview of the system.
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Skip Sauer is skeptical of the system's revolutionary potential. For one, he questions how much of this information could not be discerned with the naked eye, but his other claim is more damning: he says it is not just that historical fielding statistics are bad, it is that fielding, when compared to hitting and pitching, simply does not much matter -- fielding ability, he says, can at best capture 16.7% of the variation in wins and losses.
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I am not sure if this system will provide the data to do it, but we should soon be able to do some positively gnarly things with baseball statistics -- far more than just tracking fielding ability. The technology is already in its infancy in tennis, and is just waiting to be applied to baseball. Eventually, we should be able to say if a ball is hit in this location with this arc and velocity, what percentage of the time will the result be an out; or if a ball is pitched in this location with this velocity and movement to this-handed batter, what percentage of the time will the result be a hit -- then, with these data, pitchers and fielders will be able to practice more effectively with the system's instantaneous feedback. The result, we would expect, would be better defensive baseball and consequently lower-scoring games. Or, it could be that with the hundreds of thousands of reps players go through in their lifetimes, the system may be giving information that the players subconsciously already know -- in which case we would expect to see no improvement in defensive performance.
Either way, as a fan, I know I would be giddy with joy if statistics like these were dropped in my lap.
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