Big Brother will soon be watching you, major leaguers, and it's a really, really good thing:

As baseball's statistical revolution marches on, the last refuge for the baseball aesthete has been the sport's less quantifiable skills: outfielders' arm strength, base-running efficiency and other you-won't-find-that-in-the-box-score esoterica. But debates over the quickest center fielder or the rangiest shortstop are about to graduate from argument to algorithm.

A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitized of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, almost certainly affect their compensation and perhaps alter how the game itself is played.

This is going to be a huge in that it will (a) take most of the guesswork out of player analysis by allowing us to quantify defense and base running and things like that; and (b) it will radically alter the scouting landscape, likely replacing the subjective analysis of a traveling baseball man with the objective analysis of guys in cubes back at the home office. Make as many derisive spreadsheet-and-laptop jokes about that as you'd like, but it will make teams smarter and better.

One potential application not mentioned in the article: enhancing broadcasts of games. If you capture everything, would it not be possible one day to allow viewers at home to watch the game from any number of angles rather than rely on the centerfield shot and whatever else a director in a truck wants us to see? If that happens, one of the best things about seeing a game in person -- being able to watch what, say, the third baseman does as the pitcher goes into the windup or what the base runner on third is doing to distract him -- can be enjoyed from the comforts of home.