The styles that different directors employ are extremely consistent within a sport and make up a "language of film" which the machine can take advantage of in order to represent the events taking place in the video.
even though it is not easy to automatically identify a player hitting a ball in video, it is easy to detect features that correlate with hitting, e.g., when a scene focusing on the pitching mound immediately jumps to one zooming in on the field (see Figure 1).