MLB Gives Geeks a New Toy

In this already-halcyon period for the stats nerds of the sporting world, writes Slate's Nate DiMeo, Major League Baseball has quietly enabled a quantum advance with a new technology: Pitch f/x. It tracks the vital statistics of each pitch: initial and final velocity, initial and final location, and deviation from the straight line between those two points.

This allows devoted sabermetricians to quantify and compare pitchers to a degree heretofore unheard of. It has already enabled one determined blogger to write a letter that convinced Mariners ace Felix Hernandez to change his fastball-heavy approach—to DiMeo's thinking, "one of the greatest moments for nerddom since Ric Ocasek married Paulina Porizkova." (More MLB stories.)