OE SCAROLA is not one of the big names with the New York Mets. His name is never in lights. There is no Joe Scarola fan club. Many reporters who cover the team have no idea he exists.

Day to day, however, Joe Scarola may do as much as anyone outside the dugout to try to reverse the Mets' losing ways. And players like Mike Piazza say the Joe Scarolas of the baseball world are changing the way major league players approach the game.

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Scarola, 29, is the Mets' video coordinator. From now until the season ends in the fall - with the exception of Saturdays and Sundays when the team is on the road, he said - his domain is a windowless linoleum-tiled cell in the bowels of Shea Stadium.

It is an odd hybrid of a television control room and a computer data center. There at the end of a dank hallway packed with crates of Technicolor sports drinks, Scarola and his assistants record almost every major league game - more than 2,000 a year - off the DirecTV satellite service onto Hi-8 videotape. Hundreds of those tapes are fed into a PC-based video editing system. Then comes the hard part: Scarola and his crew break down each game into separate video clips for each pitch. They annotate more than 40 variables for each play, including the type of pitch, its location, which bases were occupied, whether the batter was right- or left-handed, the result, and so on.

The product is a searchable database of video - a baseball fan's dream, perhaps, but increasingly a player's workaday tool.

Piazza, the Mets' slugging catcher, says technology has been at least partly responsible for baseball's offensive explosion over the last decade. "The fact that you can easily see how you've performed against a certain pitcher in a certain situation is a big help now," he said. "I've had pitchers like David Cone tell me that the hitters today are just better. They cover the plate better. They're smarter. It's not the whole story, but video is a big part of that."

Scarola's operation is merely a reflection of a broader influx of digital technology into the game. Major League Baseball is already dispatching scorers to record each game on laptop computers. And now the game's officials are encouraging teams to track each pitch on Palm hand-held computers, looking to add those details to the digital repository as well. Team executives following a prospect in a small rural town log into huge databases that track thousands of players. And Major League Baseball is making live Webcasts of hundreds of games available to fans by subscription on the Web.

Fans in the ballpark, too, can benefit from the technology. Scattered around Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco, for example, are stations where Palm users with infrared connections can beam themselves information about the day's lineups and statistics on a game in progress.

The world of computer-driven baseball statistics has become so serious, in fact, that Steve Hirdt, executive vice president of the Elias Sports Bureau, a private firm that is a font of sports information, will not discuss the technical systems his company uses. "For competitive reasons," he explained.

For the same reasons, some teams refuse to discuss in detail either their video systems or their statistical analyses. "If we have stuff that other teams don't, we don't want them knowing about it,'' said Matt Hodson, a spokesman for the San Francisco Giants.

Consulting and devising statistics to anticipate every potential situation has long been a particular obsession in baseball: how, say, Kevin Brown of the Los Angeles Dodgers pitches against right-handed batters with runners in scoring position. With the addition of video, the computer-generated answer to that question is not only a number but a veritable highlight reel.

Denny Walling, the Mets' hitting coach, and Roger Cedeño, an outfielder who has been struggling at the plate, were squeezing past cases of Gatorade one recent afternoon to reach Scarola's lair for a video consultation.

"There wasn't any of this stuff a few years ago, and it's really helped us work with the hitters to identify tendencies and help to work through an opponent's rotation," Walling said. "Up until a few years ago, we could just talk to a hitter. Now, they can see what we're talking about."

Perhaps an hour later, after a session in the batting cage, Cedeño said he had been trying to work on some of the issues that he and Walling had identified.

"Today when I'm hitting good I stand up a little more, and when I'm struggling I get down with my shoulder, see?" said Cedeño, demonstrating with a swinging motion. "You can see all that on the computer. They can show you side-by-side the pictures of when you are doing well and when you are struggling. It's a big help."

Digital technologies are a big help in the front office, too. Despite the reluctance of some teams to reveal their technological arsenals, Gary LaRocque, the Mets' assistant general manager and director of scouting operations, was happy to demonstrate a custom I.B.M. Lotus Notes application that helps him keep track of the information generated by the organization's 40 or so scouts.

With the professional baseball draft coming up in a few weeks, the Mets' system is tracking statistics for 10,000 to 12,000 amateur players, in addition to about 8,000 professional players, LaRocque said.

As his hands danced across the keyboard of his office PC (which has a quaint 15-inch screen), LaRocque demonstrated how the system tied together the data generated by Major League Baseball's centralized information system, reports entered each day by the club's scouts and minor league analyses generated using software from Inside Edge, an independent company based in Minnesota.

With a click, he pulled up information about one of the Mets' stars: career statistics, length of service, Social Security number and off-season address. With another click a screen showed that one of the team's minor league pitchers threw first-pitch fastballs 71 percent of the time against right-handed batters but only 60 percent of the time against lefties.

"I have access to whatever happened the previous day in the minor leagues, the major leagues, with all of the amateur scouting that's happening prior to the draft," LaRocque said.

The players rarely see all of the megabytes of statistics that interest the front-office staff. For them, the No. 1 new technology remains the digital video.

"We always had tapes, but you might have had to sit there for three hours, fast-forwarding, " said Steve Trachsel, a veteran pitcher for the Mets. "Now you can really focus on what you need, and you might only have to spend one hour doing it."

Many clubs are installing additional cameras in their stadiums so players and coaches can review angles that are never seen on television. The Mets, for instance, have installed at least three additional cameras along the first- and third-base lines and behind home plate. Other teams have even more. Dan Feinstein, video coordinator for the Oakland Athletics, said his team records up to seven angles for home games.

Piazza and other players say the ability to study video is a particular boon to hitters. Pitchers have always been better prepared than batters, some baseball experts say, because starters have several days' rest between starts, giving them the opportunity to study batters they are scheduled to face.

Now with computerized video systems, players can study pitchers more efficiently.

"Of course," Piazza said, "you still have to produce on the field."

For all of their added technology, the Mets have been having trouble with that part of the equation. As in so many other areas of life, technology is merely a tool, not a solution.

Tom Glavine, the pitcher who joined the Mets this season after years with the Atlanta Braves, said the Braves were far less aggressive than the Mets in using video technology. But that has not stopped the Braves from dominating the Mets in recent years.

In the end, technology is only as useful as people choose to make it. A laptop in the Mets' clubhouse is tied into Scarola's video cave. Some players use the laptop all the time; others do not.

A few hours before a recent night game, that laptop collected dust while one of the team's underachieving stars reclined on a couch watching "Beverly Hills Cop" on a flat-screen television.