For the 2020 season, Major League Baseball replaced the radar-and-optical setup behind its Statcast analytics platform with a camera-only system built by Hawk-Eye Innovations, a Sony company. Each of the 30 ballparks was fitted with 12 high-resolution, high-frame-rate cameras that track the ball and every player on the field with a stated precision of about a tenth of an inch.
The headline capability was pose tracking. Rather than treating a player as a single dot, the system follows roughly 30 points on each player’s body and analyzes them about 30 times per second, producing a moving skeletal model of pitchers, batters, and fielders. That lets analysts measure mechanics - a pitcher’s release point and arm slot, a fielder’s first step, a runner’s acceleration - that were previously invisible to broadcast statistics. The platform integrated with Google Cloud to process and serve the resulting data.
This was a clear case of computer vision and pose estimation graduating from research into a production sports pipeline running at every game, generating the spatial data that feeds metrics like sprint speed, arm strength, and the later automated ball-strike zone.