I went to a ball game yesterday! Oracle Park, Giants vs Nats. (My first live sporting event since the 2019 Redbox Bowl.) It prompted a bunch of questions about baseball these days, mostly along the lines of: “how do they know that?”, and “when did they start doing that?”
On each pitch, the scoreboard not only shows velocity (which they’ve been doing forever), but pitch type: ie, “85 mph slider”. How can they instantly identify a 4-seam fastball vs a 2-seam fastball?
New pitcher comes in the game, and a stat on the scoreboard says his First Pitch Strike % is 60.5%. Who keeps track of that?
How do they calculate bat exit velocity and launch angle?
At the height of the foreign substance controversy a few weeks ago, everyone was talking about changes in pitcher’s spin rate. How do they tell a pitch is rotating at 2800 rpm?
Every MLB Park has 12 cameras dedicated to tracking every player as well as the ball. It’s called Statcast. It’s been going on league wide since 2015 but some clubs have focused on training their fan base earlier in the process. From what I’ve seen it depends on how staty the manager and GM are and how much they want to fans to understand why they may be doing something weird.
I think the Trackman system cameras is what’s mostly used now, but that may be only at a team level and not MLB official. And there are other systems like Driveline and Rapsodo.
Something like first pitch strike percentage is going to be simple database information from Baseball-Reference or such. Though the data sets don’t allow for the same detail and depth of information for all the years of professional baseball. (Pitch by pitch data for example)