Lots of folks think baseball is riveting, thrilling, stimulating and a challenge to watch and enjoy. Others find it too slow, too dull, too low-impact, too... zzzzzzz. Forgive me, I nodded off at how boring this debate has become.
But a new technology from Sharp will wade right into the middle of this debate and raises a host of philosophical questions as well:
Called "High Impact Sports" the new commercial technologies came from a Sharp researcher who developed technology to summarize video content.
"If you watch a baseball game it will last three hours and sometimes more," said Jon Clemens, the lead executive at the new Sharp venture. "If you run it through our system, it automatically takes out things that aren't baseball and it ends up lasting only 45 minutes."
Algorithms created by the labs and events defined by the licensee allow the system to recognize what is baseball and what is not.
"What it leaves in is baseball -- a stolen base, a pop up, a pitch," said Clemens. "It goes through and finds them all. What you see is the windup, pitch, strike, windup, pitch, strike.
"Some people can't watch a three hour game. They are working. They want to see every play, but they don't have three hours," he said.
In today's fast paced world, this technology brings speed to even a relaxing slow-paced game like baseball.
What's most interesting here is the Clemens remark that "What it leaves in is baseball." This prompts you to ask: "what is baseball?" (indulge me here peoiple; I studied philosophy so these are hugely important questions). Baseball critics dislike the spitting, scratching, foot shifting and just plain old standing around that players do. But baseball fans say, look deeper and you'll see a lot more going on away from the ball.
For example, will the Sharp technology capture what used to be called the "Williams shift" after Teddy Ballgame but what I call the "neocon shift" -- when the left side of the infield shifts significantly to the right to combat a lefty slugging threat (as teams do today against Jason Giambi, for example)? Baseball fans know that's as important a part of the game as anything else, even if it's not, as Clemens put it, a "stolen base, a pop up, a pitch... the windup, pitch, strike, windup, pitch, strike."
