If you think baseball is a game of statistics, you haven’t seen anything yet. Sportvision, the folks who brought us the yellow first down line in football, and the pitch locator (the one with the crosshairs) in baseball, are busy in the off season installing their FieldFX camera system in major league ballparks. Up to four cameras will be located on the light standards along the first and third base lines. On every play, the cameras will report the position, movement, direction and speed of every player on the field. It will also track the flight of the ball. In fact, not just the flight, but the position, angle, speed and who knows what all at every instant. All of these will feed into a computer which will output things like “only 27% of the players in major league baseball could have made that play,” or “Joe seemed a little slow on that play; he was running at 15 miles per hour, but he gene...
My alarm clock goes off every morning at eight, except for the few times when I have a breakfast date. Usually I wake up about an hour before that, or at least I partly wake up. It is important that I remain in a “not quite awake but not quite asleep” state, because I consider that time as the germination period for whatever seeds happen to have blown into my head.