baseball

As if a night filled with 480-foot home runs wasn’t exciting enough, ESPN introduced its much-hyped Ball Tracker technology during Monday's Home Run Derby, giving balls a digital comet trail that indicated whether or not it could clear the fences.

While superimposing graphics in post-processing has been around longer than steroids, the system unveiled last night has some truly cool tech powering it, relying on Doppler radar to instantly track and predict the ball's path in real time, just 400 milliseconds after it leaves the bat.

How much was ending decades of futility worth to the Red Sox nation? At least a 9.3-percent increase in ticket prices, apparently. After winning the 2004 World Championships, the Sox increased their average ticket price to a league high of $44.56. The cost of victory trickling down to Joe the Fan isn't novel or surprising, but a study last month in the Atlantic Economic Journal showed that teams who win it all jack up ticket costs disproportionately.

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Entertainment & Gaming, The Score, Brett Zarda, baseball, economics, sports

Sports have been known to start riots. But no sports can cause utter pandemonium. For Red Sox Nation and the 20 Rays fans watching game six of the ALCS, the hypothetical nearly became reality. At 8:08 PM as the first pitch was being thrown, every bar in America was showing – The Steve Harvey Show?

A power failure in Atlanta eliminated the ability to transmit live footage while immediately placing every bartender in Boston in a very clear and present danger.

Can’t say we didn’t try. When we saw the proposed instant replay plan for Major League Baseball in June we pleaded with Bud Selig to reconsider. Heck, we even gave him a blueprint for how to get it right. Apparently, Bud wasn’t listening. As of this Thursday, MLB will implement its weak excuse for instant replay.

They call him the Freak. Standing on the mound at 5'10" and weighing in at just 172 pounds, Tim Lincecum's nickname isn't describing an imposing physical presence, but referring to his lack thereof. Ninety-eight mile-per-hour fastballs aren't supposed to come from frames like that.

The slingshot move of a pro pitcher’s shoulder is the fastest recorded action in sports. A pitch’s power, however, is generated by his entire body. For a right-handed pitcher, the chain of kinetic energy starts as soon as he lifts his left leg and faces third base. The energy of that foot landing transfers into the rotation of the trunk and then finally unleashes in the arm whipping around at the elbow.