Real baseball players' moves are captured in video games

SAN DIEGO — Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia strides to the plate and begins his ritual.

Tap the bat twice on the ground. Circle it overhead. Adjust the gloves. Stand straight, bat upright, awaiting the pitch.

A voice interrupts: "And cut!"

Pedroia is in a Sony Corp. studio in San Diego, suited up in a spandex bodysuit studded with 55 white sensors. Cameras capture his every move and send the data to powerful computers so engineers can bring him to life in MLB 2009 the Show, for the company's PlayStation video game consoles.

"Whatever you do during a game, our players are going to want to see that," Chris Clements, the game's lead animator, tells Pedroia.

Sports-related video games now generate around $3 billion in annual sales, and enthusiasts have come to expect near-perfect fidelity. That means replicating a professional athlete's every tic and nuance.

The genre has benefited tremendously from computing advances that enable developers to render games that feel like the real deal: the angle of the sun shining into the stadium, the reaction of the crowds, the athletes' movements and facial expressions.

"We tried to make our titles look as if you were watching live television," said Demian Gordon, who helped set up a motion-capture studio for Electronic Arts Inc. to supply data for all the game publisher's sports titles. He is now a supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Culver City, using the same skills for movies such as "Watchmen," "Hancock" and "Beowulf."

"Our motto was 'If it's in the game, it's in the game,' " he said.

For titles based on football, baseball, basketball, golf and even skateboarding, that means suiting up pro athletes and putting them through the intricate movements they have spent their lives honing.

With baseball, however, there's a twist. Major league players have unique signature moves. Many go through elaborate rituals, often fueled by superstition, just before taking a swing or throwing a pitch.

"People who play our game really notice when the angle of the bat is 5 degrees off," Clements said.

On OperationSports.com, a fan-created website dedicated to athletic video games, readers dissect the minutiae. They point out when a player's jersey isn't quite the right color, or when an athlete's hat is positioned incorrectly.

But they also notice when developers get it right. They praise the realism of Matt Holliday's signature leg kick, Albert Pujols' gait or Jim Edmonds' toe lift.