Sag Harbor Resident Cox Earns Emmy Award For Work With MLB Home Run Derby

For the past 30 years, Sag Harbor resident Steve Cox has been working remotely as a contractor, developing and programming video games long before working from home became more mainstream.

He recently earned a piece of hardware that will adorn the shelves of his home office, and, he says, will likely be a visual and tangible object of motivation for him as he continues on his career.

Cox recently found out that he won a Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Digital Innovation for work he did that was part of Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby broadcast.

Cox — who is married to Chris Tice, a real estate agent and longtime former Sag Harbor School Board member — has been a video game developer for almost 40 years for games that run on nearly every platform, he said, from video game consoles and PCs to mobile and virtual reality devices.

When he was a teenager growing up in Newark, Delaware, near the University of Delaware, he was able to have access to the mainframe computers there because his father worked for the university as an English professor. “That was the genesis of my interest in programming,” Cox said.

Over the years, he’s worked for many top-tier game companies, including Activision and Dreamworks, and over the last eight years he’s worked for Major League Baseball as their technical lead, and as lead programmer for MLB AR (Augmented Reality), which led to him winning the Emmy.

Cox left MLB roughly a year ago to work for Meta but found out in June that he was part of the team that won the Emmy, which he said was a thrill. “It was very exciting to have won for outstanding digital innovation, particularly because augmented reality applications are at their nascent stage, so it’s really the beginning of a whole new field,” he said.

The plaque on the award references Cox’s work on MLB XR (extended reality), which he explained is a mash-up of both augmented and virtual reality.

“Virtual reality usually involves a headset such as the Oculus Quest 2 that completely covers your eyes and replaces everything you see with computer generated images,” Cox explained. “With augmented reality, you see everything around you, with computer generated images rendered over specific things.

“For example, MLB AR allows you to scan your environment with your phone, locate a flat surface, such as a desk, place a 3D model of a baseball stadium on the desk, rendered on the phone, and then watch animated ball trails and see the statistics of home runs as they’re hit.”

Cox is credited as a producer, which he said is a bit of a misnomer. “The Emmys don’t yet have a category for technical lead or lead programmer on computer-related projects, since they’re geared toward television content creation,” he said.

The Emmy is the icing on the cake for Cox, who says he’s been lucky enough to enjoy going to work — at home — throughout his career.

“I love what I do and have been fortunate to work with great teams on some really interesting projects and cutting-edge technology,” he said. “Most recently, I’ve been very interested in the emergence of virtual and augmented reality, and the potential for a wide array of applications that will have a huge impact on how people work, learn, socialize, and play.”

Looking at the Emmy while he’s working will help him remember to keep pushing forward, Cox said.

“I expect seeing it regularly will inspire me to do my best work and continue to innovate,” he said.