Here's an excerpt from a Baseball Prospectus article, that discusses significant enhancements on the way for the MLB gameday system.:
The new version of MLB.com's Gameday application, then called Enhanced Gameday, was first unveiled in time for the 2006 post season. That version was the first to weave into the display the PITCHf/x data used to show the speed, location, and trajectory of each pitch. Previously, the location data was displayed after it was entered manually by operators of the Gameday application in the press box. The PITCHf/x technology was developed by Sportvision, the company that began with tracking hockey pucks in 1996, and later gave us the "1st & Ten" yellow lines so familiar to football viewers. Gameday has been in use for Major League games since 2001. In short, the system relies on three cameras installed at the ballpark that triangulate on each pitch at 30 frames per second. Three computers in a truck outside the park then process the data and calculate the various data points the system tracks, including the position, velocity, and acceleration of the ball. The cameras and software know where to look for pitches (actually they look for objects traveling between 40 and 120 mph), since when the system is first installed a virtual grid is laid down at each park marking home plate and the pitcher's mound.
The moniker "Enhanced" has since been dropped, and now the 2007 version of Gameday is used for games both in parks that have PITCHf/x installed and those that don't. At the present time it appears the system is functioning in Texas, Atlanta, Anaheim, San Diego, Toronto, Oakland, Chicago (AL), Seattle, and Los Angeles (NL), and has at least been tested in Colorado, Detroit, St. Louis, and Washington. As of the games of May 21st, that means that 183 of the 657 games played (28%) have had at least some pitches tracked using the system–-or, if you prefer, a total of 44,102 of the 190,350 pitches thrown (23%) during the 2007 season. The goal is to get the system running in all 30 parks by the end of the summer.
When PITCHf/x is operational, the result is the kind of display seen below where each pitch is shown in a 3-D view, with the pitch data available in another pane of the application.
Users of the 2007 version will no doubt also be pleased to know that an update to Gameday was released on May 10th that is "significantly less resource-intensive" and is reportedly faster than last year's version. The early returns from this user certainly back up that claim.
