ESPN will formally announce Friday that its Sunday night games, starting with St. Louis at Chicago Cubs Sunday (8 p.m. ET) will show viewers stats they've never seen, such as a fielder's speed in chasing down a ball as well as the speed of his release and the throw itself.

Such stats, delivered in the first replays by a system ESPN calls Diamond Track, are gathered pretty simply. One staffer in a production truck will risk repetitive stress syndrome by incessantly clicking a computer mouse that directs a single camera high above home plate that snaps still photos of everything on the field. Then, says Anthony Bailey, ESPN vice president for emerging technology, "the system does the math" — and could calculate pretty much the speed of anything, from balls in flight to bodies in motion.

Like so much data being delivered by information technology these days, we may no longer even ask ourselves why we need it — more is usually better these days. Tested last Sunday, the system showed a hit ball took 1.6 seconds to get to the shortstop, then 2.5 seconds to get from his mitt from first — beating a runner who needed 4.5 seconds to get down the line. Which would be helpful if you're scoring at home and need a way to translate a routine groundout into something involved in tenths of seconds.

Bailey says the idea for the new stats came up at ESPN's Innovation Lab in Orlando this spring because "we wanted to dive into defensive stats since it was something nobody was doing." Initially, says Bailey, ESPN considered some radar-based system — "but we wanted to make it as simple as we could" — and went on to test the current system on AAU games. Some coaches, he says, liked it: "They'd tell players the speeds in the video were showing what they'd been saying — that some players held the ball too long."

Since the system is hardly expensive — just a laptop and a camera, says Bailey, with automation soon replacing the need for clicking staffers — it wouldn't be complicated for it to expand across TV baseball. Then, he suggests, "you could dive in and say this or that guy has the strongest arm or greatest range." And, eventually, millions more human hours could be devoted to chewing over such new stats in fantasy leagues.

Bailey says ESPN is already looking at how the technology could create new basketball stats, like players' shooting percentages when they're being guarded by players a certain number of feet away compared to when they're guarded closely.

Or, how they shoot when they're being guarded by 3D holograms operated by coaches using joysticks.

Kidding about that. For now anyway.