American sports have always been quicker in embracing technology across the board. And it is sports like the NFL and MLB that continue to pave the way for widespread implementation of new tech.

Impressing the sporting world with its innovative techniques, the MLB is using its tracking technology Statcast in all 30 stadiums for the first time ever. Catching plays at 40,000 frames per second, the system converts the action into digital code and relays it to LCD screens for coaches and team management to analyse.

The system measures every action on the field down to the microsecond which includes everything from how far a player extends on his pitch to the spin of the ball as it is released from the pitcher’s grasp. Giving coaches access to every mechanical movement on the field, it is expected to revolutionise the way baseball is taught, analysed and even watched.

In order to prevent the electronics in the system from overheating, Statcast is kept in a temperature controlled environment in a truck at the back of the stadium.

Courtesy of our friends at Vice Sports who provided the real-time example taken from a game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red – Statcast turns this

Into this

The people in MLB’s Advanced Media department can pull up any play from any team in any match on a laptop and have it translated to an animation like the one you see above. Obviously since the action has been converted to an animation, they can also see all the full coding of the play.

The Statcast technology is understandably very complex but here is the long of the short of it.

Statcast is made of two different components; Trackman and Hego with the former tracking the ball and the latter tracking the players. Trackman is based on missile defense technology and it pares 40,000 frames per second to 100 frames per second which are used to calculate the ball’s three dimensional coordinates.

The Hego system uses cameras to track the players and there are six cameras per park, three for each side. Each set creates a live panorama of the field and, using triangulation, can determine the position of any given player on the field at 30 frames per second, the same frame-rate as television broadcasts. What’s even more impressive about this system is that the cameras essentially calibrate players’ position by using ballpark landmarks, such as large advertising signs.

The Trackman data then gets merged with the Hego system to create one complete picture of everything happening on the field.

Senior Director of Sports Data at MLB Advanced Media Greg Cain said that while it is a great tool, plans to integrate it with live coverage have been put on hold until they know how to analyse and interpret the data because it takes 30-40 seconds to interpret live on air and explain what viewers are looking at.

(It’s about) knowing how to look at the data, calculate all those elements, building a system to ingest our document, and then process this—and at scale, too, because we’re talking about 2,500 games a year, around 400 plays a game, we’re talking 200,000 plays a year.

With such technology being used widespread in the MLB, it will be before long until it is used throughout a number of sports to collect data in order to coach and analyse.