Thursday, October 8, 2009

Our Skewed View



Here is a great breakdown by Slate of how and why our perceptions of pitching are skewed by the positioning of the cameras which capture most of the action (h/t Tommy Bennett).

TBS only operates with the off-center views that are responsible for the deceiving angles, but Fox says they will have some dead center cameras for later rounds. The one question I have after is watching this is whether the dead center angle is deceptive in regards to pitch height. And my first inclination would be "yes", but it's probably still far better than not being able to define the sides of the plate from your couch.
Posted by Jay at 3:30 PM
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous10/8/09, 5:07 PM

    Interesting piece; I've always wanted to know how much parallax error we're subjected to.

    As for the vertical offset, 30ft isn't nearly as bad as you'd think. If the claim of some cameras being offset by 15 degrees is true, at 400ft we're talking about 80 to 100 ft of horizontal error. 30ft hurts, but not too badly.

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  2. Jay10/8/09, 7:05 PM

    Thanks for the additional perspective, Anon. I'm guessing some stadiums are worse than others and the ones they did the side-by-side for are among the most glaring. Given that Yankee Stadium is brand new, you'd assume that they would be one of the better ones.

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