[Jim Porter]

Scientific American Frontiers starring Alan Alda had a half hour devoted to the QuesTec system. They were at Fenway Park interviewing the developer. There were some things that bothered me about it.

First, the developer said something to the effect of, "The idea is to help umpires to see strikes at the top of the strike zone that they may not have been calling before, and also to see strikes on pitches that catch the bottom of the strike zone, but were caught too low by the catcher and may not have been called a strike for that reason." So, QuesTec is an effort to get umpires to call strikes on pitches that pretty much no one but Bud Selig wants to see called.

Last night, during the Red Sox versus Blue Jays game, the home plate umpire rung up a strike that looked ridiculously low. The Blue Jays hitter grabbed his head with both hands in disbelief. The plate umpire was pointing emphatically at the front of the plate. Apparently, that was one of those pitches that probably caught the hollow beneath the knee cap at the front of the plate. It looked just silly to see that called a strike the way catcher Jason Varitek handled it. I don't know if that's so good for the game.

The next thing that troubled me was how the QuesTec system approximates the strike zone. There's an extra camera that is intended to do nothing but take a snapshot of the batter's stance. From those snapshots, the system figures out the strike zone of the batter. That doesn't seem to be a very consistent way to determine the zone, in my opinion. The zone could change by several inches depending on exactly when the snapshot is taken, and exactly what position the batter is in at the time.

Finally, the system quite often cannot see the pitched ball while it is in the strike zone. The batter is often in the way of the cameras' abilities to get a full look at the ball as it passes through the zone. So, basically, the system uses a ball flight model. It calculates the velocity and trajectory of a pitch and then guesses where it will be when it reaches the strike zone.

There are some good points to the system. When the umpire receives his CDROM containing a games' worth of pitches, he is able to see illustrations of where the pitch passed through the strike zone, both overhead and from the side. He is also able to click on any pitch and see it replayed as captured by the telecast cameras. Those are valuable training tools.