Miller: Five things to know

TUCSON, Ariz. -- In prehistoric times, there was Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn.

He purchased his own video equipment, lugged it around the league himself, learned how to hook it up to hotel televisions and endlessly studied tapes of his swing.

Amazing part is that he was able to move it, undamaged, past all of those Tyrannosaurus Rexes and pterodactyls roaming the earth at the time.

Jamey Carroll says the Rockies scout pitchers by watching video of past at-bats via iPods before coming to the plate. (US Presswire)

"I should talk to Sony about a sponsorship," he mused this winter upon being voted into the Hall of Fame, nostalgic for all of his own personal money he forked over in his quest to be the best that he could be.

It was quite a path Gwynn set from then to now. Along the way, he made only two mistakes.

One, he placed his faith in Beta video instead of VHS -- something his wife teases him about to this day.

Two, if he hadn't been so far ahead of his time, he sure could have saved himself a whole lot of dough.

A game that in the past has viewed change as comfortably as Ozzie Guillen embraces silence has, like most other businesses, charged into the digital age with gusto.

Nothing this side of steroids has been so startling in the baseball industry as the technological advances that have swept the diamonds over the past decade. From e-mail trade proposals to video rooms built just behind dugouts so hitters can instantly review an at-bat, the days of clubs traveling by train -- or, heck, even flying non-chartered airlines -- has never seemed so quaint.

You're familiar with Netflix?

In Colorado last season, the Rockies pioneered NetRox.

Brian Jones, now the club's video coordinator, began experimenting last season by downloading hitting and pitching videos onto iPods. It was a concept that immediately took root in the Rockies clubhouse. Suddenly, iPods weren't just for listening to Green Day or Ol' Dirty Bastard anymore.

"We're just exploring everything out there," Jones says. "A lot of these guys are gadget guys. They come in with something, I want to know how to use it.

"Preston Wilson wanted every pitch he saw filmed, on 8-millimeter film. That took up four small shelves for the tapes. It was a pain in the ass to update all the time.

"That's how this evolved, from there. I saw a way the way the video iPod worked when it came out and said, 'If this thing works the same way it does with music ...'

"I'm curious to see whether it was just a hot thing we did last year, if it was just a new thing, or if these guys stick with it."

No question, the Rockies' foray into iHitting and iPitching was an attention getter last year. Jones took calls from the video coordinator of the NBA's Miami Heat asking about it -- coach Pat Riley had read about the Rockies -- as well as from video-philes from all over the country. Junior high school coaches. Nicholls State University basketball. Snow Community College football in Utah. University of Colorado football. Jones talked with the video coordinator of the NBA's Denver Nuggets.

Just a decade ago, the odds of an NBA team picking the brain of any baseball team when it comes to gadgetry would have been on par with Henry Ford quizzing a horse owner about which kind of buggy rolled best.

"I used it more to look at pitchers I was going to face," Rockies infielder Jamey Carroll says. "I get everything on there I can. If we're facing (Arizona's) Brandon Webb, I'd look at my history against him, at-bat by at-bat, to get an idea of how he pitched me."

Says third baseman Garrett Atkins: "I liked it. You had your highlights on there, so if you were feeling bad about your swing, you had a point of reference back to when you actually were a good player."

When Gwynn was schlepping his oversized equipment from city to city, he pretty much was responsible for everything. Shopping for it. Choosing the model. Purchasing it. Packing it. Learning how it worked.

Now, every one of the 30 clubs not only has its own video equipment and video rooms -- stocked with televisions, computer screens, digital video recorders, satellite dish receivers to record every televised game, DVDs containing thousands of at-bats and pitches -- but its own video coordinator, too.

In fact, there's now something called the Professional Baseball Video Coordinators Association, organized so the video guys can share ideas and new technology. It is entering its third full season -- and Jones and the Rockies won last year's Award of Excellence from the PBVCA.

"Tony Gwynn pretty much was the pioneer," Jones says, breaking from more time behind his four computer monitors in the video room at the Rockies' Hi-Corbett Field here.

In a game that was dreadfully slow to embrace change for, oh, 100 years or so, the digital age has been breathtaking.

"When I became a general manager (with Kansas City in 1981), I used to have to put my fingers in the telephone and dial the numbers," John Schuerholz says in mock wonderment. "Like any facet of our lives -- cars, homes, recreation -- it's changed by leaps and bounds.

"You've got to be on the fast track to keep up with the developments. If we're not, our players will be. These are modern-day players. They've grown up with X-Boxes, iPods, streaming video. That's what their life is.

"I grew up with tin foil and rabbit ears."

One of the reasons Schuerholz is so successful is because he hasn't remained in that tin-foil and rabbit-eared world. As in every other facet of the game, the job of even running a ballclub has changed drastically in the digital age.

"I got my first trade proposal via e-mail last year," Detroit GM Dave Dombrowski says. "Jim Bowden (Washington's GM) uses his Blackberry all the time, and it was the first time I got a trade proposal over the computer."

Dombrowski answered electronically, and said the two exchanged a few names during the back-and-forth, though the Tigers and Nationals never consummated the proposed trade.

Schuerholz, also, said he received e-mail trade proposals last season.

"Either from Jim or Theo (Epstein, Boston's GM) or Kevin Towers (San Diego)," Schuerholz says. "The Blackberry is like a computer. I don't think you can distinguish a Blackberry from a computer.

"(Trades) used to be a function between human beings. Now your Blackberry vibrates and it's somebody making an offer."

Computers, the Internet, cell phones, computer programs ... legendary GMs like Branch Rickey and Roland Hemond wouldn't recognize the way some of today's executives -- and players -- operate.

Odd thing in this instant communication age is, it isn't guaranteed to always make things easier.

"You would think the answer to that would be yes, but it's not necessarily so," Dombrowski says. "What ends up happening is, because guys do travel, as good as technology is, sometimes you still go into areas where cell phones don't work.

"Twenty years ago, you'd call the office and always get the GM. Now, he's not always there. He's moving about, and you adjust your life. Guys are moving because they feel they can go do things.

"Now, you get that return phone call back, but it might be later, not now."

Not only is nothing -- not even the digital age -- foolproof, but as Dombrowski adds, there is an inherent danger in being chained to a computer all day and not looking up every so often to see what's in front of you.

In that regard, Philadelphia's Pat Gillick, a GM since taking over Toronto in 1978, says that while he e-mails and voice mails, he doesn't think he would ever do a trade through e-mail. Largely for the same reason that poker players study their opponents' body language.

"If it's possible to eyeball somebody, eyeball-to-eyeball, you should do it," Gillick says. "Technology can do a lot for you, but anybody I've eyeballed, I've had pretty good information on them and I'm more or less confident in the information I've had."

Same goes for free-agency. Gillick says that there have been two or three occasions when he was meeting with free agents during the winter and, after "eyeballing" them, he declined to extend an offer.

"Just because of a feeling that they wouldn't fit in," Gillick says.

Schuerholz agrees.

"I want to hear somebody's voice on the other end of the telephone, see if I can detect some sort of emotion," he says. "Whether it's glee, relief, whatever."

The digital age, of course, affects so many different facets of the game.

"It's changed night and day from when I first started," Dombrowski says. "It's far-reaching. Everything is at your fingertips now. Before, when I lived in Chicago and worked for the White Sox, West Coast Friday night games, you wouldn't hear a score, it wouldn't be in the Saturday paper ... the first time you might see a score would be Sunday.

"Now, you take for granted that you'll get the scores seconds after the final out. And the thought of using video, that wasn't even in anybody's mindset. Now you download it onto iPods."

The latest example of how quickly technology moves is located, again, in Colorado's camp this spring. The rumor is that the iPod might already be passé. Jones, the Rockies' video coordinator, is experimenting with Archos portable multimedia products.

"We're not moving away from (the iPod) so much as exploring," Jones says. "The iPod is restricted as to what kind of files you can put on it. MPEG4 is the only thing it will play, and the screen is a little small.

"And the ability to slow it down (so a hitter can watch his swing in slo-mo, for example), you've got to press the pause button with your thumb. Guys who play video games are good at it, but the others ...

"With Archos, it's a bigger screen and you can slow it down to slow motion more easily. But sometimes the iPod is a little easier to navigate through."

Archos has a bigger hard drive, it plays Windows media and, according to Jones, "when you pump it out onto a TV, it's a lot better than the iPod. And it converts files to DVDs off of our system."

Which is key, too. How advanced has the science of hitting and pitching become? When they play at home, the Rockies record every pitch of every game not only from the television broadcast, but from three other separate angles. So hitting coach Alan Cockrell or pitching coach Bob Apodaca -- and the players -- can look at an at-bat or at a pitch from four different views.

Meanwhile, every pitch and situation is charted electronically, too. So if the Rockies want to check out, say, Todd Helton's at-bats with two strikes and runners in scoring position, or Atkins' at-bats in an 0-and-2 count with nobody on base, they're all stored in digital files and available at the click of a button.

What do you think Hall of Famer Ted Williams would think of conversations like these?

Or Gwynn, who, back in the day opted for the Beta format over VHS?

Schuerholz laughs.

"And I can remember getting 8-tracks," he says. "Archie Bell and the Drells."