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By: Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Friday, July 10, 2009 - 11:40 am |
By Ken Kerschbaumer and Carolyn Braff
Viewers watching ESPN’s coverage of Home Run Derby from Busch Stadium in St. Louis next Monday will have a better sense than ever of the distance and trajectory of some of the big flies (and big outs), thanks to TrackMan Doppler-based tracking technology used to compute the height, distance, and speed of balls as they leave the ballpark.
“I think it’s really going to help the telecast as it can show the distance of movement of monster home runs,” says Anthony Bailey, ESPN VP of emerging technology. “And there is the potential to hit the ball out of the ballpark in left field, so we’ll be able to tell how far it went in the street.”
Ball Track was designed specifically for the production of this year’s Home Run Derby, according to Jed Drake, SVP/executive producer of ESPN event production. “With this system,” he says, “we will not only be able to tell everybody the distance that the ball had traveled, but we’ll be able to show the arc as well. It’s a system that was truly made for this event, quite literally.”
The real-time system will be tied to a camera located on the press level and will track objects moving faster than 30 mph. “It tracks the ball until it comes to a complete stop, much like the system would track a missile,” says Bailey. “It then sends back coordinates like the speed and rotation. We wrote some [code] to predict where the ball will most likely go.”
The Ball Track system paints the path of the ball, or arch, as it travels through the air, using a changing color pattern that projects whether the hit will be a home run. The prediction changes continually as the ball travels through the air. An on-screen graphic will allow ESPN — for the first time — to display the real-time distance the ball is traveling, from the point of impact to its final resting point.
One difference in using TrackMan for baseball instead of golf is that the tracked object will not always have the same starting point, such as on a tee box. “The system will start looking for the ball when it gets to home plate and then track it from that point,” says Bailey. Testing has found it to be accurate within 1 to 3 ft., depending on variables like wind.
ESPN has tracked the distance of Home Run Derby blasts in the past, but the new system will be more accurate and timely. “We’ve used a system for the last eight years, but it takes 30 seconds to figure out how far the ball was hit,” says Bailey. “And the Derby has such a fast pace that often the announcers wouldn’t tell how far the home run was hit until after another one was hit.”
TrackMan is just one of a number of technologies in use at the Derby. In total, ESPN will utilize 20 cameras for the production of the Home Run Derby, including the Ultra Mo, which replays the action at up to 1,000 frames per second. The Ultra Mo, Drake says, worked so well last year that the network will put it to use in similar fashion this year.
As for the other 19 cameras used during the broadcast, Drake says the ESPN team has maxed out the number of unique positions available in a baseball stadium. Rather than go bigger, he explains, the network will offer a show that is cut a bit more on the conservative side: “We put ourselves through a pretty tough evaluation because we do have a lot of camera positions and the event by definition can get rather repetitive.”
The Home Run Derby steps up to the plate on Monday July 13 at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN HD.
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