where the pitch really is

If you've watched some baseball playoffs on the TBS Network, you no doubt were interested in the little box they had in the lower right hand corner that displayed pitch locations.

Pitch Trax in the lower right corner

photo courtesy of TBS

How accurate is this?  The creators of this graphic say the actual pitch location is accurate to within 1/2 inch.  This is completely amazing.  The system uses two cameras mounted in the stadium to track the flight of the ball toward home plate.  To test the system, the engineers placed a piece of foam at the front of home plate.  With this, they were able to gauge where the ball hit the foam, and where the PitchTrax system placed the ball.

Baseball has not had many technological innovations that help television viewers through the years, other than the ubiquitous score in the upper left hand corner of the screen.  I would expect this PitchTrax system will be a mainstay for TV broadcasts in 2012.