The Wall Street Journal ($) has a fascinating piece on how baseball does not have a reliable way of measuring how far home runs travel.

Of course, tracking homers isn't a simple process, and it usually involves calculating how far a ball would have gone if it had hit flat ground instead of bouncing off a light pole or hitting the picture window of a restaurant in the stadium's upper deck. And the numbers aren't the least bit relevant to the outcome of a game. Still, the true distance of an epic homer is precisely the sort of barstool topic that fans are intensely curious about.

But at a time when sports such as tennis and golf are using lasers, microchips and computer models to determine the trajectories of shots, baseball is running out of excuses. Not only does the technology exist, but the necessary equipment has already been installed at nearly a dozen ballparks.

Ed Plumacher, president of QuesTec, a company that has fitted cameras in 11 major league stadiums to monitor the performance of umpires, says that with an investment of about $15,000 per stadium in new software, this system could measure home-run distances to within one meter. The only trouble, he says: "I haven't found anybody who wants to pay for it."