Recent FieldFX article

[logan82]

Here is a recent article on FieldFX. I have not had time to read it all yet.

 

Honestly doesn't look to promising that there will be public access.

 

For now, however, the company is focused on its broadcast products

and its partnership with the league. The fate of the Fieldf/x data is

unclear. "I think we would make it public," says Bowman. "We live in an

age where, if you've captured it somewhere, somebody's going to find it,

so you're better off making it transparent." But that decision will

ultimately come from the commissioner and teams.

 

 

If Tippett has any say in the matter, clubs will keep the data to

themselves. "I want this to be adopted by Major League Baseball, made

available to all the clubs, but kept within the industry," he says.

Tippett admits that broad access to Pitchf/x data produced useful ideas

and that as a fan he values open access, but he knows who signs his

checks. "We don't get paid to advance the state of the art in analysis,"

he says, "We get paid to put a winning team on the field." If he could,

of course, Tippett would keep the information exclusive to the Red Sox,

but Fieldf/x only becomes truly useful as league-wide data set, so

teams will have to share.

 

 

[sbrylski]

I don't have time to read that whole article, but I don't understand the negative in releasing that data? What so bad about the possibility of innovations from the public tinkering with data?

[logan82]

sbrylski06[/b]]I don't have time to read that whole article, but I don't understand the negative in releasing that data? What so bad about the possibility of innovations from the public tinkering with data?

From the article I think they are worried about some clubs not paying for it and just using free sourced stats from the amateur sabermetric community.

 

I think they said there is something like 2 terabytes of data per game. It sometimes picks up seagulls, guys in the on deck circle and cotton candy vendors. So I would guess only some of that actually should be useful.

 

 

[cwolf2012]

"cotton candy vendors"

 

If Prince is playing first, the location of these guys would be pretty important.

[logan82]

Sportvision began cooking up broader applications. Hank Adams, who

replaced Squadron as CEO, recalls a 2009 meeting with the Chicago White

Sox. "We had shown them data capture on one play, a steal, and they kept

asking us questions," he says. "'Do you get the initial lead? Do you

get the secondary lead? Do you get the windup time, the pitch time, the

pop time, the time it takes to throw down to second base?'" The answer

in every case was yes. "You could see it on their faces," says Adams,

"'Oh my God, what are we going to do with all this data?' "

At BIS, compiling these numbers is a laborious task. The company employs

roughly 20 "video scouts" at its offices in Allentown, Pa. They watch

video of every game at least three times and tag every batted ball with a

direction (from 135 to 225 degrees), distance (0 to about 400 feet,

depending on the size of the park), pace (hard, medium, or soft), and

type (grounder, fly ball, line drive, or "fliner"). The results are

information that major league teams pay to see, though Dewan won't say

how much. The BIS data, however, is limited. It has nothing to say, for

example, about where a fielder was standing when the ball was hit. And

it is liable to human error, with a margin of 15 to 20 feet on some

plays. Dewan estimates he's now only 60 percent of the way to fully

measuring a fielder's ability.

This is where Sportvision enters. Fieldf/x essentially automates and

massively expands the work of Dewan's video scouts. Each game at

AT&T Park last season produced files of about 2.5 million results,

or 2 terabytes' worth of data. At that rate, eight baseball games would

fill the memory bank of IBM's (IBM)

Watson supercomputer. "It's almost overwhelming how much data we're

creating," says Ryan Zander, the company's general manager of baseball

products. Much of it is extraneous: 20 records per second of players

warming up between innings or milling around between pitches. Zander

says Fieldf/x is accurate to within a foot. At AT&T, it would

sometimes grab hold of seagulls and cotton candy vendors who came into

the frame and begin tracking their movements. The slice of data that

teams are most likely to want amounts to about one million results per

game.

Via major league's BAM, front offices are likely to get just that, and

without paying a cent. In 2000, every club agreed to kick in $1 million a

year for the first four years of running BAM, with the expectation that

the project would eventually cost $120 million. The idea was to manage a

league-wide website and figure out how to make money from baseball

online. BAM became a moneymaker ahead of schedule in 2003. MLB.com now

gets 50 million to 60 million unique visitors per month during the

season. Its mobile app, At Bat 2010, was the top grosser in Apple's

online store last year. BAM's annual revenue is now nearly $500 million,

and teams have already been paid dividends totaling three times their

initial investment. The data is gravy.

 

For the first installation in San Francisco last year, Sportvision,

whose labs are in nearby Mountain View, worked directly with the Giants,

under BAM's oversight, to get permission to test the technology. In

return, the Giants received exclusive access to the data. BAM arranged

this year's installations—already in place at Yankee Stadium and in San

Diego, and under way in Kansas City and Tampa. "Our plan is ultimately

to put it in every park," says CEO Bowman. But first, he wants the

commissioner and clubs to see how it works. (Bowman plans to install a

competing technology, called PlayItOver, in one park "to keep everybody

honest.") If teams like what they see, BAM will likely help shoulder the

installation cost—about "six figures per," according to Sportvision CEO

Hank Adams—and then try to figure out how to make revenue from the

technology. "We think it's a project that may deliver value to our fans

through the myriad of devices they use," says Bowman. Sportvision,

meanwhile, will go to work on broadcast products, such as overlaying the

field with concentric circles illustrating a player's range.

 

As a rule, baseball teams don't talk about their front-office spending,

but according to sources familiar with their budgets, they now range

from about $100,000 to half a million or more for analytics. The teams

at the top end of that range treat work done in public forums as

tryouts. At the bottom, they treat it as free labor. And where they get

their stats analyzed will influence each team's opinion about whether or

not they want the public to see the Fieldf/x data.

[logan82]

Fangraphs article on FieldFX. They don't think it will be publicly available either.