Back in March, MLB Advanced Media announced a new project aimed to create the tracking data of our dreams. Instead of just measuring the velocity of a pitch or the exit speed of the ball on contact, this new system — eventually named Statcast — would track the full flight of the ball, the distance covered by fielders, the acceleration and top speed of the baserunners, and just about everything else we could want to know.

And then, for months, there was basically no news. MLB had originally said they were going to treat 2014 as a beta-testing year, giving the 30 teams access to the information to help iron out the wrinkles before the system was fully rolled out in 2015. Only the teams weren’t given any data to beta test. The system was teased in things like this video of Jason Heyward’s catch, but beyond proof-of-concept highlights, Statcast wasn’t that much more real than the mythical FIELDF/x system that had been talked about for years.

Well, that appears to be changing. Last week, MLB opened a @StatCast Twitter account, and after installing the system in all four parks hosting LCS games, they’ve been flooding the market with new examples of the system’s capabilities. We got five videos from just last night’s Orioles-Royals game, for instance, from measuring Lorenzo Cain‘s range in the outfield to Jarrod Dyson’s speed on the bases. They added four more videos from the Giants-Cardinals game, giving us examples of Statcast data from just yesterday.

Additionally, I’ve been told that teams have now received a small sample of the regular season data, and so while MLB might not have been able to beta-test nightly feeds during the season, the system does appear to be closer than ever to going live. And for those who prefer spreadsheets to videos, Daniel Brim has even collected the data from the videos released by MLB, and is updating a Google Doc with the information, which you can find here.

Likely due to the licensing agreements in place with Sportvision and the fact that MLB teams have paid for the rights to access HITF/x data, we haven’t seen the full capability of what Statcast could do on any one play, as MLB has focused mostly on just running and fielding. We don’t know how the league is going to go forward with the F/x data systems, or what is going to be made public and what is not. But given the amount of information that MLB has made available over the last week, it seems more likely than ever that Statcast could be a legitimate public utility, and it’s potential might be realized in the not too distant future.