Technology in baseball and the legacy of Steve Jobs

I should preface this post by saying I'm a pretty avid PC guy, but I'm also a Warriors fan, so that makes two inferior products I've had no problem supporting for the better part of the last two decades. That being said, the passing of technological visionary and Apple founder Steve Jobs has given people around the nation and around the world great pause. By the time the iPod hit the market back in 2001 it was clear that Steve Jobs' reach would extend far beyond Mac fanboys and their computers, and into a wide breadth of areas such as the realm of sports.

Baseball is one sport in particular that has embraced all that Apple has had to offer over the past few years. The advent of the iPad in early 2010 was every Sabermetrician's wet dream, allowing countless hours of viewing every player's  DIPS, VORP, and WAR till the cows come home (or ten hours of battery life, whichever happens first).

Jayson Stark of ESPN.com wrote a great piece at the end of August on how the information age is changing the way baseball is played, and of course Apple had a prominent role:

AN APPLE A DAY

In the beginning, there were tapes. Big, clunky VHS tapes that had to be loaded into bigger, clunkier VCRs. And that's how players watched video once upon a time.

Michael Zagaris/Getty Images 



Eventually, a few of the more advanced teams started editing those tapes to produce custom DVDs for a few technologically savvy players. And as the years rolled along, more and more players started lugging around laptops so they could crank up that video from airplane seats and hotel rooms.

Then came the iPod, an invention that made it possible for players to watch every episode of "Lost" and every pitch against the Blue Jays with just about the same ease. But the screens were smaller than Joe West's strike zone. And loading that video onto each iPod presented major, time-consuming technological challenges. So even the iPod had its limits.

So for years now, teams have been using video in some form or other. But it was just 16 months ago -- drum roll, please -- that life in the video room, as we used to know it, changed forever.

All because of the iPad.

So clearly the collapse of the 2011 Giants, and more specifically the anemic offense that couldn't hit their way out of a wet paper bag can be attributed to Steve Jobs and Apple. While opposing pitchers were watching video of every swing of every at-bat the Giants took, Aubrey Huff was playing Angry Birds.