We have many camera angles of a thrown pitch. But, I would like to see the batter’s view.
I am sure the technology exists. Why hasn’t a helmet cam been employed? Or has it?
Do you want the catcher, or the batter? Your subject says one, and the body the other.
I suspect that umpires would be opposed to this, as it would make it even clearer just how bad their calls are.
They already have the strike zone camera technology, a helmet cam wouldn’t make anything worse.
Here’s some video from various catcher or umpire helmet cams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcQe-FBLaCo
Unless the person wearing the cam stays still and keeps their head in one location, I’m not sure how helpful it would be.
Hell, I would like to see a bat cam. Right on the sweet spot. It could be done by sinking the lens into the wood. You would need a slo mo recorder.
Dennis
Isn’t that corking a bat?
Actually, umpire calls are highly accurate. People have been trying to devise electronic methods to call balls and strikes, and the umps calls are more accurate.
What a bizarre thing to say; it is completely false. What’re you talking about?
The automatic systems to track pitches are EXTREMELY accurate and would almost never confuse a ball for a strike or vice versa. The current system, Trackman, accurately places the ball’s location to far less than the width of a baseball, and can figure out its speed, flight, and the rotation. Its predecessor, PitchF/X, was scarecely less accurate. The systems have been used to try to improive umpire performance because they are so much more accurate.
No umpire has ever been remotely as accurate as Trackman or PitchF/X and never will be. Umps blow about 12% of all ball/strike calls, which sounds okay, but that figure includes really obvious calls, like wild pitches and strikes right down the middle. They probably blow about 25-30 percent of all calls that are not very obvious.
There is also very considerable variance between umpires, with some umpires blowing over 25% of all ball/strike calls.
According to who?
Not sure where you got info from, but absolutely not true,
This is counterintuitive to me. How would one measure the fact that umpires are more accurate than the most advanced electronic measurement system?
I would like to see, in real time, what the batter sees. They have about .3 seconds to determine where the ball will be when it crosses the plate. To me, it is a miracle that they even make contact. That is why I suggested the helmet cam.
I wish we had one.
Fake News!!!
Umpire calls are highly accurate by definition. 100% of the time, what the umpire calls exactly matches what the pitch is officially considered to have been.
Their results are less impressive when you compare them to what the rules say the pitch should have been.
What is possible?
The first solid contact would disable it.
Of course it’s possible. It works phenomenally well in tennis, and some of those guys serve at 130 MPH.
And that would be an improvement.
A bat-cam? A camera that gives a view of some random direction 80% of the time (sky, ground, batter’s back), and the rest of the time a blur and maybe a flash of off-white horsehide if the batter makes contact at the sweet spot. (Only a nauseatingly wide-field camera would have contact in view anywhere else up or down the barrel.)
As to a catcher mask-cam, don’t forget that framing to catch the pitch means that a lot of time the ball disappears behind the mitt well before the catch. It’s not as if you’ll see the full path of the ball from pitcher’s hand to catcher’s mitt.
A fastball pitch struck by a bat has 116% the kinetic energy of a fast serve returned by a tennis stroke.
And there’s no way to mount a camera in a baseball bat that wouldn’t affect either its striking ability by affecting the barrel shape, or weakening the structural strength (by embedding the camera), whereas there’s a lot of places to attach a camera to a racquet that can’t affect ball play.
“Works in A, must work in B” is a fallacy.