Any video of Ichiro Suzuki's famous throw to third will inevitably be coupled with a complaint about the camerawork. It's one of those things only noticed when it's done poorly. Take this Nippon Professional Baseball highlight of a laser from right field to home plate. Between the ball hitting the outfield grass and Chusei Mannami's beautiful throw to beat the runner, an MLB production would have cut at least two times, maybe three. Don't you wish our camerawork had that kind of visual scope?
The intent behind MLB Gameday 3D, a new feature released by the league last year, is to allow fans to view the game from any angle. To be clear, this is not AI, or at least not generative AI in the sense that "AI" is commonly shorthand for these days. Gameday 3D translates Hawk-Eye and Statcast data into a live, three-dimensional replication of the game. After it ends, a fan can pull up 3D mirrors for any play that has a video in Gameday, and follow any person on the field through the play. MLB's feature makes no pretense toward detailed graphics or any lifelike replicas of Erick Fedde. The player model has equipment and wears the correct uniforms, City Connects included, but is otherwise featureless: a slightly refined version of the Greendale Human Being. Gameday 3D is fun to play with, a great way to induce motion sickness, and occasionally useful to visualize the sheer scope of a play.
Gameday 3D is also a tech showcase for the sake of a tech showcase, in the way that sports leagues enjoy flexing their muscles with data developments. There's intrigue in that, even if tempered by the dual purpose of advertising (in the case of Gameday 3D, it's a credit card). If MLB can replicate an entire baseball game live, with the high-speed cameras and motion-tracking data at its disposal, then why not show it off? Gameday 3D's engine is surprisingly robust: It can render crotch grabs and batter rituals, bat flips and home run celebrations, and even close plays at the plate without players phasing into each other. Mostly, anyway. For instance, here's Cody Bellinger scoring the walk-off run against the Pirates on May 18:
The player movements avoid uncanniness ... until the Cubs celebrate at about the 18-second mark. Christopher Morel's avatar does a little high-speed jig—weird, but baseball players should be permitted their walk-off joys. He settles down. Then Bellinger's avatar moves in a way that would suggest a being of horrific divinity has possessed him. He rises several feet into the air, limbs flailing, and then begins to sink gently, like an early modern saint. By the time the clip ends, Bellinger is still peaceably walking on air.
This phenomenon was brought to my attention by Twitter user @AtlantaBrewer, who clipped a video of the Colorado Rockies walking off the Milwaukee Brewers in Gameday 3D and described it as such: "Walkoff celebration looks like an exorcism." Here's a slightly higher-quality video of that moment, from July 1:
Gameday 3D can handle when Jake Cave chest-bumps his teammate. But when the entire team starts running onto the field, the demons take root. Cave does something resembling a front walkover before his torso twists back and around, until his avatar is all pretzeled up. His body strikes a pose mid-air and then vanishes. The automatic camera that was tracing Cave slowly fades backward, but the video lasts just long enough to catch the demons hopping into the body of one of his teammates before they all vanish from the scene.
This seems to be the way to break Gameday 3D: either in the interstitial moments when action on the field is irrelevant, like in the transitional periods between innings, or when it's pushed beyond its standard inputs, such as the entire team rushing the field after a walk-off play. Because Gameday 3D is not there to track high-fives or happiness, the player models are permitted their weird little uncanny dances. What is a walk-off celebration if not an exorcism of all the world's ugly desires? Instead of treating the breaking points of Gameday 3D as an error, perhaps it's more compelling to view those breaking points as expressing the emotional valence of the sport. Nick Castellanos, everyone's favorite horseman of the apocalypse, provides another example from June:
The 3D reconstruction captures the arc of the ball as it lands just fair in right field, good for an automatic double. The Padres right fielder slides for the ball but misses in such a drastic manner that he freezes in place before he is eradicated from this planet entirely. Castellanos slows and joins his brethren at second base. They begin a beautiful, coordinated three-person experimental ballet. The jittery camerawork should not be attributed to Gameday 3D but to user error. If the technology had its say, surely the camera would pull away from the horror of that scene at second base. I, however, refuse to let it look away, and also I still don't quite have the hang of the viewer-controlled camera.
Gameday 3D's endless angles allow for more scrutiny of the understated moments in a walk-off win. After a player fails to make a game-saving play, a Major League broadcast would tend to focus on the joy of the winning team rather than the misery of the losers. For this April game between the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox, we are permitted full access to Dansby Swanson's distress:
Does Swanson actually remain alone, mournfully wriggling on one knee for the full 15 seconds shown in Gameday 3D? The ESPN broadcast showed Swanson forlorn on the ground, but cut immediately to the Red Sox, both in the dugout and on the field. When it cut back to Swanson eight seconds later, he was still on one knee. By the second cut, 12 seconds after that, Swanson was up and walking back across the field. Perhaps the question doesn't matter; the Gameday 3D shot of Swanson, alone, captures the spirit of the moment.
In that clip, the weather looks stormy above poor Dansby. This is a more understated part of the Gameday 3D visualization: It does its best to reflect the environs of every play, from time of day to weather. The stark shadows of a daytime game at the Miami Marlins' ballpark, in the Gameday 3D treatment, are an oppressive monochromic filter. This world is flattened into these broad swatches of color: Dark blue overwhelms the infield, and the player models, not adjusted for the shading, stand out against it. The bright little dots representing the outfield audience pop in this setting, evoking a kind of amateur Pointillism while generously overrepresenting the number of fans at a Marlins game.
This daytime game creates a secondary visual world. The sunlit parts are visible past the shadows; take the camera to the outfield, and everything looks like the average Gameday 3D replay. But home plate, where the celebration takes place, remains in that flat blue realm. The Marlins players dance on in their bright uniforms. In this world, even the umpire can join in.
It's not wrong to consider Gameday 3D a redundancy. Its marketed purpose doesn't come into play all that often. The same thing that makes the feature's reproductions palatable—the lack of pretense when it comes to realism—means that it'll never fully satisfy the replay gap. But while the broadcast version of a walk-off win will capture the emotion and stakes of a game, the Gameday 3D version provides an alternate viewing in which the chaos of baseball is rendered appropriately chaotic. There's something fascinating and plainly funny about a player's joy being quantified in contortions, or an invasion from the dugout expressed by seizing control of an umpire's body.
MLB's latest technology can imitate Jurickson Profar's joy as he hits a walk-off single in June, but its best work emerges when it is operating outside of its intended purpose. Profar runs cross-field to begin a herky-jerky gambol with a teammate, then four. They move together down the third-base line as a collective. Seconds later, a dejected Washington National drifts through the air, limbs askew, ready to ascend to heaven before he is pulled into the Danse Macabre below him. The actors can go home, but the stage is always there.
