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Baseball Archiving: Tagging and Watching 160,000 Hours of MLB Footage

by Caleb Johnson on October 14, 2010 at 09:00 AM

Atlanta Braves Baseball game
While technology isn't totally embraced on the baseball diamond, Major League Baseball is embracing it behind the scenes. According to The New York Times, about 50 employees now watch 2,430 regular season and up to 41 postseason baseball games as they occur, and digitally archive every play using hundreds of tags and descriptions to make searching this database as simple as a Google search.

Loggers, as these employees are called, work at 18 stations inside an MLB Productions studio. Monitor on their desks show the TV broadcast of a game, while the loggers click and enter data on another nearby monitor. One play could involve as many as five players and include 15 tags -- ranging from "Pine tar" to "on-deck circle" to "error." By tagging each and every play and storing it on servers, loggers can quickly access trends and plays that occurred throughout the season. For example, a logger could search for diving plays made by New York Yankees outfielders, or look at the types of pitches thrown by Cliff Lee when there are two outs.

Unfortunately, fans don't have access to this wealth of footage -- neither do players, scouts or managers. Major League Baseball uses its archives for in-house purposes, such as showing highlights on the MLB network, and keeps the footage for posterity. Surprisingly, MLB didn't archive complete broadcasts of games until 1998, and no World Series prior to 1965 exists on film.

Creating the digital archive, which now boasts 160,000 hours of baseball footage since its creation two years ago, is a nice way to lead-off. Now, MLB needs to round the bases and slide into home by opening its archives to the public -- or at least to its players and coaches.

Tags: archive, archives, baseball, digital, major league baseball, MajorLeagueBaseball, MLB, search, sports, top

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