The heart of baseball is a love of stats. The heart of MLB's fan cave is a massive NASA-style stats-displaying mission control center.

For the third year in a row, a group of baseball fanatics have been chosen to spend the season camped in the Fan Cave at 4th and Broadway in NYC. It's a heavily sponsored two-story playroom complete with lounges, a pool table, shuffleboard, an arcade, a bar, art, and TVs. This year, however, they've added something new, a massive mission control center that looks like it was lifted from Houston. We're here to talk about mission control.

"The big idea was to try to take this real-world environment and find a way to connect it to every piece of baseball out there," says Michael Lipton, co-founder of Breakfast, the firm that designed the mammoth screen-and-button-laden interface. "We wanted Mission Control to act as an extension from the cave out to the rest of baseball, as well as a way for fans to connect into the Fan Cave itself."

Brooklyn-based Breakfast specializes in bridging digital and physical worlds using robotics and devices. In this case, that means arrays of switches and dials linked up to the cloud, giving Cave dwellers access to 21st century stats through a retro 1960s interface. Because switches are cool.

There are 31 screens. Thirty of them display constant live feeds of the thirty MLB stadiums (one for each team). Most of the time, they are fixed shots of the empty stadium, unless a game is on. On the dashboard there are rows and rows of switches, each one attached to some stat or other. Flick a switch and each team's screen will display the corresponding information, after a moment it fades back to the stadium's feed. One gets the teams' RBIs, another shows the temperature. Yet another shows the latest Instagram photo taken at the stadium.

The thirty-first screen is for a Google-Hangout-style chat streaming between the Cave's superfans and regular fans stuck in their regular homes.

"We also have three gauges, which will keep track of total number of games played, total number of hits and total number of home runs across all teams for all of MLB," says Lipton. "Lastly, we have status lights that will monitor activity (also across all of MLB). So anytime there's a base hit, anywhere in the sport, we'll know about it. Same can be said for stolen bases, home runs, RBIs, rain delays, double headers and a handful of others."

There is something deeply appealing about physical interfaces. Photo: Courtesy Breakfast

Behind the scenes, cobbling together this clean all-in-one glanceable dashboard was surprisingly complex. The team wrangled thirteen APIs ranging from Twitter and Foursquare to Weather Underground and of course MLB's own live stats. Getting all the hardware and software to play nice together meant coding in languages ranging from Ruby to C++ to Applescript; seven all told.

Lipton says that the physical design was much more straightforward. "While the overall design stayed quite close to our original vision, we iterated a lot in the details," he says. "In our prototype builds we also played with things like the wall angles in order to maximize how many screens would be easily viewable from the central standing position."

Standing?

Yes, says Lipton. Mission control isn't intended for long hours watching the games; the Fan Cave has lounge areas with widescreen TVs for that. Instead, it's a place to geek out on data. "The dwellers, and other visitors will use it to easily compare real-time stats between teams in ways that aren't readily available otherwise, and also to dig deeper into statistics that surround teams beyond how they behave on the field," he says.

As the season progresses, it'll be interesting to see if the cave dwellers make full use of the system's functionality or whether this interface is cooler in concept than in practice. If it does work they way Lipton wants it to, it'll be a perfect arsenal for bolstering your position in the heat of an argument with some fan who loves the wrong team. Which is, let's face it, half the fun of baseball.