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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

How do they get continuous player and ball tracking data? Are their sensors? Seems like all major American sport franchises (NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA) would love to have this data. Though not sure how I feel about it. I am purest (big baseball fan) and a lot of these technology additions deteriorate the essence of the game.

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> Seems like all major American sport franchises (NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA) would love to have this data

The NFL and NBA already have it, as do college (American) football teams, AFAIK. I don't know about American baseball, but I do know that they track things like the rotational velocity of pitches and, very trendy now, the 'launch angle' of a batted ball (I suppose the movement of baseball players, other than the efficiency of fielders responding to a ball, is neither interesting nor unpredictable).

Here's an article about that data as applied to Lebron James, who apparently is very efficient with his movement like Messi.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17333058

I wonder why all sports don't put sensors in balls to eliminate judgment calls by referees, but perhaps either it's not worth the expense, it won't bring in more fans, or like self-driving cars, the computer errors will seem egregious to fans.

But the balls (baseball, footballs, etc) and players are not wearing sensors. This is done using cameras, not data directly sourced from the players and balls.

There are real-time sensors in the balls. Players are tracked with cameras and ,I think, also sensors in their shoes. We read about a systems developed by a German uni in an event processing class (they generated millions of events per minute) but I cannot recall the name right now.

I'm not sure if they're tracking it from the ball or the shoes. I don't think they have sensors in their shoes.

This could be from offline analysis of the video.

Players usually wear their own shoes, so I doubt they have sensors.

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