Trending
By Walt Frank
wfrank@altoonamirror.com
Technology has changed the way the game of baseball is played and more changes are coming in the future said Marc Roche, Pittsburgh Pirates Technology/Video Coordinator for the minor leagues.
"The automated strike zone is coming to Major League Baseball," Roche said Thursday while talking to members of the Blair County Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Club at The Casino at Lakemont Park.
"For the most part, umpires do a good job," Roche said, and he doesn't believe the new technology will get rid of umpires completely.
But, the automated strike zone was tried in Single A last year and it went well, he said.
"It gave the players a chance to challenge. That is what we will have, a challenge automated strike zone," he said.
Altoona Curve General Manager Nate Bowen said Roche has helped gather "tons of information" to help the organization.
"In the early days of baseball, we didn't have much but the ball, bat and glove. Without technology we just played ball the way it had been played," said Roche, who has been with the Pirates organization since 2018.
The first technology used was the radar gun.
"We became hungrier for more pieces of technology. As the world has grown, there have been new ways to track what we can do on the baseball field," Roche said.
The TrackMan system is used by all professional leagues in the United States and Japan and by most of the teams in Korea, Taiwan and Latin America. TrackMan provides the largest and most influential digital baseball scouting platform in the world, according to its website.
"TrackMan is like a big radar plate that tracks velocity, horizontal and vertical movement and speed of the ball. How hard you hit the ball and the angle, that can tell us a lot of good and bad about the players. We can measure if a player is getting better than just looking at his batting average, he may be hitting the ball hard but having some bad luck," Roche said.
Rapsodo camera and radar technology provides accurate, pro-level data.
"It uses very high speed cameras to figure out how the ball is coming out of the pitcher's hand," Roche said.
Hawk-Eye Innovations was introduced in 2015 and involves a series of cameras to take video feeds of all of the players.
"A lot of this has happened within the last 10 years, there has also been a lot of technology we have thrown out. We are still learning, there will always be something new to try," Roche said. "We try to make it simple so players are not overwhelmed; the goal is to help make players better."
Mirror Staff Writer Walt Frank is at 814-946-7467.