NEW YORK – Major League Baseball has doubled the isolated camera angles available for video review from 12 to 24 and has arranged for high-speed streaming cameras to stream directly to the new playback operations center and stadium video rooms.
As part of the changes announced Monday, the time each manager has to decide whether to challenge a referee’s call has been reduced from 30 seconds to 20.
The move to a new repeat operations center twice as large as the previous one is part of the move from Major League Baseball and MLB Advanced Media to a combined office space in Manhattan, across the street from Radio City Music Hall.
The pandemic-delayed MLB season begins Thursday with the New York Yankees in World Series champion Washington Nationals.
Also debuting this week is a second-generation Statcast system that switches from TrackMan to Hawk-Eye. There are five tone tracking cameras behind the turntable and seven used to track players, each with a rate of 100 frames per second.
MLB said the margin of error, which had averaged mostly 1 to 2 inches in 2016, is expected to drop to 0.1 inch this season. The system is designed to eliminate previous blind spots in high pop-up windows and in the corners of gardens. Margins of error in fielder movements are expected to decrease from 3 feet to inches.
TrackMan took over the PITCHf / x pitch rate tracking in 2017.
“We would argue that it’s more accurate than you’ve seen in the past,” said MLB Executive Vice President of Strategy, Technology and Innovation Chris Marinak. He added that “it reflects historical data as closely as possible.”
Jason Gaedtke, MLB chief technology officer, said extensive testing was used to avoid changes in speeds that some claimed resulted from the 2017 change.
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