Short clip: Technology gives SF Giants players competitive edge

Dan Farber: Now, you talk about using IT as a competitive advantage and certainly on the field that's an important issue. So, how are you using technology on the field for the players, coaches? Bill Schlough: On the field really there's two areas that you can divide. You have player development, improving the performance of the athletes we have today, and you have scouting which is evaluating, you know, potential additions to the team. So, if you look at the player development side, and really we have systems that support both sides. On the player development side, going into the 2000 season, and again, this is rewinding quite a ways, but going into 2000, pretty much every team in baseball on the video side used VHS recorders to tape their players. They would fast forward and rewind, and freeze frame, and slow-mo to take a look at their specific wind-up or their pitching motion or batting motion. Going into 2000, we were one of the first teams to take the step of going all-digital with that. So 2000, seven years ago, we put in a 4-terabyte DVD jukebox system, which is huge investment back then. But technology has moved on a long way since then. So, in year one, we had a system here at our home park to be able to evaluate our players and improve their performance. Fast forward to 2007, that system now, the DVD jukebox was sold on Craigslist, it's now in someone's living room with DVDs of their own on it, but for us it's all hard disk storage now. Dan Farber: You didn't go along with all that data Bill Schlough: No, we didn't let them have the data, but they took the jukebox, empty jukebox. And so now, you know, we have a storage area network that handles all that data. We're closer to 20 terabytes, from 5 terabytes now, and compression technology has improved so much that the video quality is significantly enhanced. That system is here for our home park. We use that system to manage information from our minor league teams as well. We take a version of that system on the road with us, as do many teams as well at this stage. So, it's evolved quite a bit, but for us staying one step ahead of the competition is the secret and so each year we try to evolve that system further on the video side. So that's one side, that's really the player development aspect. On the scouting side, we've developed an in-house system which we feel, it gives us a competitive advantage in terms of assessing talent at the amateur level, at the minor league level, scouting, you know. Dan Farber: What's that system made up of? Is it basically a database and putting in the data? Bill Schlough: Yeah. It's a local database with information that is populated by our scouts who are on the road or minor league coaches and all that feeds into a database central here. And our baseball operations staff is able to tap into that and report on it as they see fit and made decisions in terms of the amateur draft that comes up, as well as when it comes close to trade deadline, evaluating acquisitions, and that type of thing. So, what we do here is no different from any other team. Every team does these types of things.

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