Baseball-All Stars go high tech to fight piracy

BOSTON, July 15 (Reuters) - Major League Baseball plans to unveil a high-tech system on Tuesday for tracking baseballs that batters have slugged out of the field in a bid to crack down on piracy in sports memorabilia.

The system, to be launched at the All-Star game at New York's Yankee Stadium, uses electronic hologram identifiers stamped on baseballs, said IBM, which developed the system.

After a player hits a home run, a security guard will approach the fan who catches the ball with a handheld computer. The guard will scan the electronic tag and enter details of the game, the name of the player who hit the ball and the identity of the fan who caught it.

That information is entered into a database that can be used to authenticate the ball, IBM said.

"If you ever see on eBay that some ball by a particular player is on sale, you can now go on the database and see that this ball is actually not a fake," Larry Bowden, a vice president for IBM, said in a telephone interview.

The system has been in pilot testing in some ball parks, he added. The system is expected to be rolled out to other stadiums, Bowden said. (Reporting by Jim Finkle, editing by Pritha Sarkar)