Sports Graphics
We were lucky enough to grow up in the era of the virtual first down line, so we take it for granted. In debuted in 1998, and absolutely blew everyone’s mind. Let’s start this post with a little history of the most beloved live sports graphic in history.
In 1998, three dudes started a company called Sportvision. These guys were inspired to make a television sports graphics company after being inspired by watching hockey on Fox the previous year, where they managed to put a glowing blue ring around the puck on TV (apparently, this graphic wasn’t a huge hit). They had a lot of ideas but tackled the first down line first based on their perceived value of it. After a few months, they decided it was feasible and started pitching the idea to TV networks. Their first customer was ESPN, but they only pitched it to ESPN after being turned down by Fox, ABC, and CBS.
ESPN, being the fantastic company it is, immediately saw the value. Not only did they say yes without even asking price, they said they would only take the deal if they could be the exclusive user of the first down line for the entirety of the 1998–99 season, including the playoffs. With a few months to work before opening day and a lot of work to do, Sportvision got to work.
They worked nonstop throughout the offseason and practiced during the preseason. At this point, the entire thing was a secret. They wanted to surprise viewers with the first down line for the first game of the season. Imagine not having this luxury, and then unsuspectingly turning on ESPN and seeing this black magic. Unfortunately, the line was deemed too jittery to be deployed when the season arrived. It took Sportvision a couple additional weeks to get it just right. ESPN had a press release announcing the feature, which was actually met with a bit of skepticism. That is, until everyone saw it in action. People were blown away. It allowed people with limited knowledge to learn and understand the game much quicker and obviously just made for a better viewing experience.
Back in 1998, getting the first down line to show up was a process and a half. It’s actually extremely difficult to keep the line stable as the cameras move around, shadows change, and athletes in all different colors run past it. For each game, Sportvision started out charging $25,000 to incorporate the first down line (I believe this cost has decreased since then). This is because for each game, they had to drive a 48 foot long semi to the stadium and start prepping. They had to calibrate the ESPN cameras to each stadium. This includes building a 3D model of the stadium, surveying the topography (topology?) of the field with lasers, feeding samples of the grass in all different lighting at different times of day through the camera to the program, and running hundreds of yards of cords from all of the cameras in the stadium out to the truck in the parking lot where the magic happened. When the broadcast went live, ESPN had to delay the feed by about 2/3 of a second to give the program time to work. Once the game ended, the team would hit the road towards whichever stadium was hosting the game that would be televised by ESPN the next week. Since 1998, the process has improved considerably. The equipment can be shipped in a large crate and certainly does not take as long to setup.
What else has Sportvision made? I’m glad you asked.
Lefko and Mehul are probably the only ones that watch baseball, but we should all be able to appreciate K-Zone. This basically tracks the ball as it’s moving and shows the viewer if the pitch is a ball or strike. I always thought this was done post-filming by tracking the white pixels on the screen. It turns out, every single MLB stadium has special cameras dedicated to tracking the ball. The entire path of the pitch is mapped extremely accurately — within 1 mph and 1 inch. This means that K-Zone is incredibly accurate, so much so that it may not be far from putting home plate umpires out of business. But there are more implications of this technology. Based on the trajectory of the ball, Sportvision can automatically tell you what type of pitch was thrown. I had wondered about this — if there was someone whose job is to watch a pitch and quickly decide what it was and input that decision into a computer, which then shows up on the screen for viewers. Nope. Completely automated. Another result is that people can view the actual trajectory of pitches on apps.
Furthermore, this creates a ton of data to be visualized and analyzed.
Above is a visualization of Brad Ziegler’s pitches in 2016. SI is sinker, CH changeup, and CU curve. The image below shows the percentage of pitches thrown that are of each variety. FF is four-seam fastball, which he stopped throwing in 2011.
And here’s a gif comparing Ziegler’s sinker trajectory to Rick Porcello’s sinker trajectory:
Mehul, I know you want to see more of this, so check out this website that leverages Pitchf/x here.
These are the coolest tools, but there are a ton more. You can see how the same technology used to create Pitchf/x could be used to track a football pass, a golf shot, a soccer ball, etc. They even do motorsports and sailing. To me, the coolest thing is that these aren’t just visuals that look for certain pixels on the screen and try to stay close to them, these are products that are doing the tracking as the action is filmed that accurately map the trajectory of objects and create data off of it. Check out more of Sportvision’s products here.
Lastly, I want to show y’all a genius opportunistic advertisement.
According to Deadspin, Statefarm paid 10 Million dollars to have this Discount Double Check belt put on Steve Novak
Sidenote: Aaron Rodgers made this celebration famous — it started when he was a backup to Brett Favre. He was getting bored, so anytime he made a good play as the scout team quarterback in practice he would do this. It stuck, and the rest is history.
