Wow. That MLBAM stuff is just bananas. My inner nerd is salivating at all the data analysis opportunities. I have to think that data beyond just these clips will become available at some point, right? Why would they tease us with this if they weren't going to release at least some of it? I suppose they may only be releasing video on plays where all the data is captured perfectly, and like 90% of plays have some horrible coding errors. Still. Amazing.
I don't know how much this stuff costs to put in to a park, but I wonder if any teams have put their own proprietary, non-MLBAM systems in. The Red Sox might be using something like this to make personnel and coaching decisions at this very moment. This could be so useful in minor league settings for player evaluation and scouting, too.
Also, while I don't know if they can do all these fancy measurements in real time, I could see this kind of thing really changing umpiring. Close baserunning decisions could become like tennis line calls - instantly and definitively decided with no need to stop a game for 5 minutes to go into a tunnel to watch an inconclusive video 15 times.
