Jennifer Ouellette interviewed Dr. Lloyd Smith in this April 2022 Ars Technica article.
So Smith and his co-author, Andrea Sciacchitano of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, set about finding a better method for measuring a baseball’s drag in free flight. They note that the first such measurements were made during the 1996 Olympics, using two 120 Hz cameras to track the balls. And in 2006, the MLB installed video-based baseball tracking systems in every MLB park. “The systems were primarily intended to track pitch speed, pitch movement, and the strike zone location, but drag could also be extracted from the publicly available fit parameters,” the authors wrote, adding that such measurements were subject to noise and effects of the ballpark environment.
Jennifer Ouellette, “Physicists devise precise laser-based method to measure a baseball’s drag”, April 2022, Ars Technica