World Series Looks to 2010 Baseball Season updates.

With the World Series behind us the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies can finally join the rest of the league in gearing up for the 2010 season but they won’t be alone. Jay Levy, ESPN Senior Coordinating Producer, and the rest of the ESPN team that covers baseball will be hard at work in the offseason gearing up for better coverage and new technologies. The goal? Continue to meet the growing expectations of baseball fans for solid, in-depth coverage.

“We keep looking for new ways to take the data and information and take the fan to a place they can’t get themselves,” says Levy. “It’s easy for fans in the ballpark to be able to see how fast pitches are as radar gun data is on the big screen but for us it’s segments like ‘That’s Nasty’ that features the nastiest pitch of the night. And next year we want to take that data and combine it with virtual technology.”

The Virtual Pitch Technology made its debut late this season on “Baseball Tonight” but Levy promises that ESPN has not even scratched the surface of how that technology will transform the viewer experience. “We will use virtual technology to take the fan and put them in the batter’s box so they can see how a pitch looks as it crosses home plate,” he says.

A near-term goal is to continue to work on turning data around more quickly so that, for example, something can be turned around for viewers in a couple of hours for baseball tonight instead of having to wait until the next night’s broadcast. And with technology development taking place in house it’s easier than ever to overcome those challenges.

“When I first came to ESPN we would farm out those projects and we could enhance them but we weren’t designing them,” he says. “It’s incredible what the emerging technology group at ESPN has figured out, especially in the realm of virtual graphics.”

Of course all that virtual technology will still have to enhance solid commentary and analysis. For ESPN that means having editorial boots on the ground at the biggest events like the World Series along with technical facilities to ensure content returns to ESPN in top-notch form. For example, at this year’s World Series ESPN, for the first time ever, delivered HD coverage from the ballparks back to ESPN headquarters. And some of the limitations, like the lack of parking at Yankee Stadium, led to some creative solutions.