2017 Technical Emmy Awarded Project

This project was an extremely interesting, collaborative development project between our player tracking technology team in Sweden, a radar-based ball tracking company (TrackMan) from Denmark, MLB Advanced Media engineering and our US team.
 
Our goal was to create a live data stream which renders accurate statistics on the ball and the position of every player, 30 times a second, with NO sensors on the players......for all 2500 games per year!
 
I became involved as the Technical Project Manager during the proof of concept state when the project was literally three games away from failure.  With the help of the dedicated engineering teams and, believe it or not' DropBox (a long, but funny story), we kept the project on the tracks and in 2015 successfully deployed equipment, trained operators, and began delivering data on opening day! During the final acceptance meeting with MLB, someone from the MLB team made the comment...
 
"You realize that we are about the change the game of baseball forever!"
 
How often in your career do you hear that?!
 
I worked with all teams to coordinate testing, R+D efforts, client side relationships and roll-out.  In addition, I managed the continuing development of the technologies including extensive research and preseason testing during Fall League and Spring Training.   I have spent countless hours in ballparks and sports production trucks to ensure the success of this new technology.
 
In addition to the data acquisition side of this project, there was also a real time broadcast visualization component.  This was an OpenGL based graphics real time and replay based system that was used to turn the raw data streams into viewer consumable graphics keyed over live camera feeds.  I directed the specification and development of this system.  In all, we installed roughly 5 - 6 collaborating computer systems in every US ballpark in order to achieve these goals.
 
Here is a great video presentation from MLB on how this technology works and how it, in fact, revolutionized baseball forever.