Whats the current state of strike zone technology?
I would assume that there would have to be some sort of technology built in to the ball and/or player uniforms to get the correct reading, and it’s not worth the investment, considering how many balls are hit out of play each game. Putting aside umpire preference, the strike zone’s upper and lower regions change per batter based on their height, torso length, etc., so it’s not like Hawkeye in tennis, where a camera can scan the lines to see if a ball was in or out. A “uniform” strike zone wouldn’t be “uniform” at all, or it’d be unfair to the tallest and shortest players.
If you haven’t read this article about camera angles and the strike zone I’d recommend it. It doesn’t directly address your question but it goes to the same idea.
I’m recalling a party conversation from years ago with some guy who worked at a company that did tech like this for pro sports. My understanding is that, yes, the technology exists to have a computerized strike zone and it works just fine, but the traditionalists at MLB want it to never see the light of day. This technology could work even better if they could put a sensor inside the baseball but that is just too much meddling for MLB to bear.
One strike zone detection system would consist of two cameras. The first would detect when the incoming ball crossed a plane just in front of the batter; the second, pointing at this plane instead of across it, would measure the position of the ball as it crossed the plane. Together, the information from the two cameras identify the position of the ball in 3 dimensions as it crossed the plane of the strike zone. The first sensor might not be a camera at all, but a simpler kind of sensor that works as a photointerrupter (an infrared emitter on one end, and a row of receivers on the other end; if any loses its signal, then it’s because the ball “shadowed” it and thus crossed the line between the source and the sensor) I assume, but don’t know for sure, that feature recognition technology is quite good enough to reliably locate the ball in a digital photograph. If not, you could embellish things by using an infrared or ultraviolet camera, and put a special invisible (to humans) pigment on
