Michael Ventre

For Torii Hunter, it isn’t video without a little audio.

Specifically, the star center fielder for the Los Angeles Angels does at least some of his film study with the help of the late rapper Tupac Shakur. The club’s senior video coordinator, Diego Lopez, puts together DVDs of Hunter’s performances — greatest hits, if you will — and adds Hunter’s favorite music to juice it up.

“Diego likes that positive feedback,” Hunter said. “He puts all my catches to a CD of Tupac and it gets me so pumped up. It’s a highlight show. It gets you motivated.”

Providing an infusion of confidence to a professional athlete is just one of the many facets of video study in professional sports in the 21st century. Most of the time, it’s all about surveillance — the legal type, of course.

Studying what the other side is doing has been a basic tenet of warfare for centuries. Studying the other side in the less deadly but still intensely competitive world of professional sports is a critical element of getting ahead. And studying in the era of computers and digitized video is state-of-the-art sleuthing in a high-tech quest to gain an edge.

And then there is the self scrutiny of the home team. What could be better for an athlete trying to improve than to get an immediate look at his mistakes? Hunter, like many of his teammates and indeed, many players around Major League Baseball, often goes to the batter’s box, commits an out, and then is up past the dugout into the video room to see what just happened.

“We can give immediate feedback from one at-bat to the next,” said Lopez, who began with the organization as an intern in 1991.

“That helps me tremendously,” said Hunter, who signed with the Angels as a free agent before the 2008 season after having been with the Minnesota Twins since 1997. “When I was in Minnesota, all those years we never had this footage. Now we can go upstairs, click a button, pull up your video right away while he’s recording the next batter. You can go down there and look on one of the flat screens, click on your swing where you just struck out five minutes ago, see what the pitcher did to you, what your hands did, where your feet were.”

But that’s only a small portion of what they can do.

The Angels, like most clubs, have a satellite feed running during all MLB games, and they record each of them. Then the information is fed into the database — the Angels use Dartfish software — and it is then available for perusal. The video is also tied into statistical information that is supplied to the computer through another service.

Lopez and the Angels coaching staff can then call up whatever they need — the last five starts of an Oakland Athletics pitcher they might be facing in an upcoming series, the defensive charts of an opponent, the last 10 or 15 at-bats of an opposing slugger, the last 10 or 15 at-bats of an Angels hitter against a particular hurler.

“Every year there are different pitchers,” Hunter said, “and the ones you already know about, they make some adjustments. If I faced, say, Roger Clemens or Pedro Martinez, those guys might have something, like when they throw their fastball their glove might open up a little wider, or they’re squeezing their glove to get a better grip on the their fastball.”

Center Joe Pavelski of the San Jose Sharks said that in hockey there isn’t a great deal of in-game study. “It’s a game of reaction,” he said. “You don’t get bogged down too much.”

However, there are points of interest that assist hockey players on video as well, especially when it comes to faceoffs and watching opponents.

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“We don’t study players as much as some of the coaches do, when they’re trying to figure out how to defend somebody," Pavelski said. "But we’re watching the games, too. And every player has his tendencies. We might see on a breakaway what kind of a move he might use. Certain players have certain one-on-one moves, they might go inside out.”

The possibilities are endless.

But in the NFL, there are definite boundaries. That’s because the rules are different. A quarterback can’t run over to a monitor after he throws an interception and see a replay to determine why it happened.

“The league regulates that,” said Pep Hamilton, quarterbacks coach for the Chicago Bears. “Think back to the whole Spygate issue.”

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello explained the league’s rule: “No use of video is permitted during games other than coaches viewing the network telecast in the upstairs coaches’ booth.”

Yet there is plenty of video study before and after to more than compensate for the absence of in-game video.

“Our Mondays and Tuesdays consist of, I would say, at least 30 hours of video,” Hamilton said. “Just the upcoming opponent. I would say that is somewhat standard. You would hope also that your quarterback would spend a solid 40 hours a week just watching film of the opponent.”

By league rule, each team has to send a tape of its most recent game to its next opponent.

“What ends up happening,” said Dave Hendrickson, the Bears’ video coordinator, “is that once we get the tape from, say, the Packers, there is objective data that goes along. We match it up. The actual formations, personnel groupings, stunts. We have quality control guys look at what the Packers are doing.

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“So you look at down. Distance. Yard line. Three wide receivers. It’s all categorized.”

Hendrickson estimates the Bears’ computers — the team uses the Pinnacle system — have 23 terabytes of storage.

That ability to log information and obtain it at the click of a mouse is what sets apart the present-day video gurus from their forefathers. There was a time when VHS ruled — and it took its time doing so.

“It was tricky because you had to have two different machines,” the Angels’ Lopez recalled. “One was recording constantly, and the other you would be switching tapes, rewinding and showing a player that clip. Then when the following player came up to bat you had to switch machines.”

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