BIRD BRAINS

Some really smart humans are behind the Orioles’ data-friendly rebuilding project. Will they remake the Birds into a winner?

- COREY MCLAUGHLIN

“ Do you see anything? ” Orioles assistant general manager Sig Mejdal asks me, looking out a second-floor window in Camden Yards’ iconic brick warehouse. Mejdal scans the empty green seats behind home plate, some 450 feet away. He’s trying to point out what is essentially a medium flatscreen-TVsized black square known as “The TrackMan.” “It should be right near the press box,” Mejdal says. He’s talking about the now-ubiquitous professional baseball technology that records data on every pitch thrown in every game. “I think it’s there,” he says, squinting as mid-winter sunrays shine down from the upper deck.

If you know anything about this man’s eclectic professional background, you know the irony of this situation. In his first job out of college 30 years ago, Mejdal worked as an engineer for Lockheed Martin, tracking satellite-carrying rockets in orbit from a windowless, secure control room at a U.S. Air Force base. Many moons later, at 54, he is at his latest stop on a pioneering 15-year-long journey at the forefront of baseball’s continued data-friendly revolution. And now he can’t find his own tracking machine. “Anyway, imagine a big black box up there,” he continues with a chuckle before making his broader point about how the technology has influenced the national pastime. “It has revealed information about the pitch that the human being just couldn’t pick up with our senses.”