Worldwide "Spy vs. Spy"
While the players are working up a sweat at practices, Liu Chih-sheng and Yang Ching-lung, two coaches on the Chinese Taipei baseball team's intelligence-gathering squad, as well as CTBA employees, circulate through a cramped laboratory at National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT). Here, Chang Chueh-wei, associate professor at NTUT's Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, is leading a team of information specialists to build an "intelligence database" one piece of data at a time.
In this secret war room, filled with videotapes, wide-screen LCD televisions, computer components, and photographic equipment, information gathered over the last few months on individual players and games is being entered into a media database. According to Chang, "Basically, this information includes players' offensive and defensive stats, the characteristics of their pitching and hitting, as well as visual materials."
For the Asian Championships last year, the National Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and the CTBA hired Chang to create an intelligence database that covered players from China, Japan, and South Korea. This allowed coaches and players to become thoroughly familiar with their opponents before they faced them on the field. Chinese Taipei team took second place, and the detailed information provided by the database can be said to have played a large role in that success.
Since the database scored such an important success on its first outing, the CTBA is preparing to use it again this year for the Olympics. Since the end of last year, every night the lights in the tiny lab have been on late as researchers work to bring baseball into a new era of information warfare.
"Bringing technology into sports is a natural trend. In addition to information technology, physics, sports psychology, and other sciences can help coaches to make better decisions and help athletes perform better," says Chang Chueh-wei, who is an expert in image processing.
Chang Chueh-wei points out that the application of high technology will bring rapid progress to the baseball world. "In the past," he says, "the Chinese Taipei team would gather intelligence, but when they used the old paper-and-pencil methods, they often made mistakes. There is no comparison to the ease and speed computers offer for searching, organizing, and comparing information."
In last year's Asian Championships, the team burned a couple thousand CDs that held information on past performance by Japanese and South Korean players, which made it possible for coaches to immediately grasp their opponents' situation before the games. "This was especially true for the South Korean teams, who were unknowns to us-it really helped set our minds at ease," says one coach. The same coach also admits, however, that now the players are no longer required to analyze the strategies themselves, and it is difficult to tell how frequently they use the database, making its real effect hard to estimate.
In order to help players with less-than-stellar computer skills, the intelligence team emphasized simplicity and clarity when they designed the system's interface. Upon entering the system, just by entering a pitcher's or batter's name you can get a list of detailed information about the player's performance against various opponents. For every pitch a pitcher throws, it will provide information on the type of pitch, pitch speed, and a grid map of the ball's path. In addition to static information such as text and images, the system can also play clips of the duel between pitcher and batter. "This design is especially helpful for players to study the way a pitcher combines his pitches," says Hsu Sheng-ming.
However, in contrast to the geographic proximity and similar baseball styles shared by Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea-the "three powerhouses" of baseball in Asia-opponents in the Olympics will come from every corner of the globe, a fact that presents clear difficulties for building a database as complete as the one used last year. "Factors such as language barriers, degrees of familiarity with these countries, and the number of channels for obtaining information will all influence how complete the final database will be," says intelligence team member Chen Hsin-liang.
According to information from the intelligence team, the team from the Dominican Republic has a pitcher who, while only 16 years old, can already throw at speeds of up to 163 km/h. There is very little relevant information on this type of unusual player, and thus no way to completely prepare to face him.
Because of this, the intelligence team is also working through the CTBA and the sports TV station ESPN in the hope of reviewing and copying images of players from other countries to fill out their database.
Athens often reaches temperatures of 38oC in August, but the sun there is not as dazzling as in Taiwan, though the air is quite humid. Because of this, when players and coaches wear hats they need to be particularly careful about cooling off. The intelligence team's reports also include such factors as weather, wind direction, and venue for the each game that it indexes.
In their on-stage work recruiting players and behind-the-scenes work at intelligence gathering, the Chinese Taipei team is thoroughly prepared. Now they are just waiting for the trumpet to sound.
"After 12 years, people in Taiwan have high expectations for the baseball competition in these Olympics," says Hsu Sheng-ming. At last year's Asian Championships, the Chinese Taipei team found strength in unity, defeating the South Korean team despite the low estimate many people had of them. The successful adjustments made by Hsu Sheng-ming have been a major factor.
This middle-aged coach, who puts great emphasis on discipline in everyday life, is skilled at observing player's situations, and gives them plenty of room to make use of their talents on the field. In Hsu, you can always see the tenacity that Taiwan baseball has always been proud of.
"If you have mental power, then you have absolute power," he says.
Roll on August!
Almost guaranteed a spot on the Olympic team, in recent years Pan Wei-lun have been major figures in the pro baseball world.
Almost guaranteed a spot on the Olympic team, in recent years Huang Chung-I have been major figures in the pro baseball world.
Almost guaranteed a spot on the Olympic team, in recent years Chang Tai-shan have been major figures in the pro baseball world.