Major League Baseball has installed the Hawk-Eye camera tracking system at Buffalo’s Sahlen Field ahead of the Toronto Blue Jays’ first home game at the ballpark on Tuesday, a league source told SportTechie. The system was installed and calibrated over the weekend.
The 2020 season is the first in which MLB is using Hawk-Eye Innovations technology to power ball and player tracking for its league-wide Statcast system. The Canadian government declined to allow the Blue Jays to use their usual home venue, Rogers Centre, because of the risk of spreading COVID-19 from U.S.-based teams. Sahlen Field is the park for the Jays’ Triple A affiliate, but it needed multiple upgrades to be big league-ready, including improved lighting and better clubhouse and training facilities.
While Sahlen Field already had a TrackMan radar installed for minor league games—TrackMan powered the ball-tracking component of the previous iteration of Statcast—the field did not have Hawk-Eye, which provides additional capabilities such as direct spin measurement and biomechanical data from the players. Without Hawk-Eye, the Jays and their opponents would not have had access to the same consistent, advanced data set as the rest of MLB.
