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it's one of the most difficult jobs in sports deciding whether a baseball
pitch is a ball
or a strike hundreds of times a game did the ball
often moving at nearly 100 miles an hour travel over the 17 inch wide plate
and did it stay between the batter's shoulders and his knees
it's a task that tests the limits of the human eye
and the human brain and not surprisingly umps sometimes make mistakes to the
frustration of hitters,
pitchers, managers and fans. Now two University of Maryland researchers
and a local inventor
have developed an automated system they say will all but eliminate these
mistakes
the idea was hatched with Hagerstown's Jerry Spessard.
he's been around baseball more than forty years. As a kid he played on to
Little League World Series teams
and he later coached his own son who became a star in College Park
I played a lot of baseball myself my son played here at the University of Maryland
and so I've attended many many baseball games and the two factors that offend me
are the umpire doing incorrect calls and taking
a game away from the batter or the pitcher and number two when I go to a
baseball game I get to enjoy it and I hate the verbal abuse at the umpire
has to take
Spessard isn't scientist and he needed help to make his home plate idea a reality
so he came to the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute or Mtech
which connects entrepreneurs to university researchers
who bring ideas from concept to market. There Spessard met Maryland computer
engineering professor Chris Davis
he had no interest in baseball but was still intrigued
I thought it was a really neat opportunity
to use optics to solve yet another interesting problem and
my lack of interest in baseball didn't deter me from being interested in this as a
scientific problem to be solved
after several months of work Davis and his research associate John Rzasa
came up with a model. The key features of this prototype
are two slots front and back from which a vertical curtain of
infrared light comes up and two photodetectors
and the photodetectors will pick up the light that illuminates the baseball
and scatters it down and that tells you a baseball has crossed the plate
software translates the sensors data into balls or strikes
it also collects data on the speed location and angle
of pitches. I feel that the electronic home plate
is going to be a training device in the first couple years
where it's going to be used in the bullpen it's gonna be used for
practice games and inter-squad games and they're going to get so used to it that
it eventually will
end up in games
Spessard isn't the first to invent an automated model that determines balls
and strikes
every major league ballpark has a sophisticated multi-camera system but
the TV networks use it more to give fans a better view of the action and less
to come to the aid
the umps. Each of those systems costs millions.
The electronic home plate though will be much more affordable
What we're trying to do is get the system where you can get the same type of information
basically anywhere there's a baseball field. Even though he grew up playing cricket
across the pond Chris Davis has become more
interested in baseball since starting the project. I'm exactly the same name
has Crush Davis from the Baltimore Orioles who's having a fantastic season
so there is an instant connection in a way. Davis and Rzasa are now in the process
of ironing out kinks in the device
and they hope to have a finished version early next year then Spessard will begin
manufacturing
and he plans to take the electronic home plate to market by next summer