In 2012, at the International Broadcasters Conference in Amsterdam, the Swedish company Hego (now ChyronHego) introduced a technology it had patterned after the human visual system. “It could see the depth of the field inherently,” recalls Joe Inzerillo, M.L.B.’s chief technology officer. The new technology couldn’t pick up balls, which were too small and moving too fast. But Inzerillo believed it would have no trouble tracking players.

BAM had been trying to capture data on player movements ever since its start more than a decade before. At the Amsterdam conference, Inzerillo sensed that he and his team were close. He proposed the idea of trying to integrate the Hego system with another technology so they could follow the ball and the players simultaneously. It wouldn’t be PitchF/X, he knew; in a large space like the entire field, the prospect of the ball getting lost entirely amid the background clutter would increase drastically. But he wondered about the modified Doppler radar system, called TrackMan, that was starting to be used to measure the trajectory of thrown and batted balls. “Radar, on the other hand, does not really see the background,” Inzerillo says. “And one unit can cover the field pretty well. We literally sat down and sketched it out on a piece of paper and figured out how these two systems could talk to each other.”

Hego’s two camera pods have now been installed, 70 to 150 feet apart, along the third-base line in all but two major league ballparks. (In Boston and Milwaukee they’re along the first-base line because of architectural quirks.) The TrackMan system, adapted from one used for missile defense, traces the ball as it would any moving object. Statcast is programmed to layer the information generated by one atop the other, creating a representation of what’s happening on the field. Usually it works.

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t. Nearly three years since an initial trial run in the Arizona Fall League, Statcast is still committing rookie errors. Chopped grounders that bound high into the air elude the radar. So do high pop-ups. The system is accurate at the middle of the field, less so toward the foul lines. And even when the technologies are in sync, glitches can occur. Willman showed me an example: an out made by the Boston right fielder Mookie Betts earlier this season, a play categorized by the Statcast database as one that’s made successfully only 5 percent of the time. When Willman called up the archived video from the home telecast, I expected to see Betts diving across the outfield for a sinking liner or leaping against the wall to pull a home run from the stands. Instead, this was a fly hit directly at him. “Easy play for Mookie,” the announcer said. Willman shook his head. “That’s one that got lost in the radar,” he said.

Even if the vast majority of the Statcast data is accurate, its sheer volume — millions of lines of digital output from every day of the baseball season — remains difficult to process. Merely coming up with a program to unpack the pages of computer coding is beyond the wherewithal of most teams. “It’s nice to say that we have the technology, the means of capturing data,” says Jeff Bridich, the Colorado Rockies’ general manager, who played baseball at Harvard. “But now we’re plowing through it, trying to understand it. What does all of this mean?”

That’s not to say Statcast isn’t already having an influence. Not every franchise can risk $72.5 million on an untested outfielder, which is what Boston did with Rusney Castillo, a Cuban defector who played 99 games in the outfield for the Red Sox over the last three seasons before being sent back to the minors for good. Instead, some teams hire young analysts to crunch data. They take a chance on unproven technologies. And like Beane’s A’s a generation ago, they try to find an edge.