Customer Overview
It’s a whole new ballgame with Google Cloud AI
Baseball has always been a numbers game. In fact, in
baseball, stats are everything. To bring the stats and their
meaning to their fans, MLB leverages Google Cloud AI to
contextualize more than 15 million data points each and
every game, delivering real-time insights. This provides
fans with a new way to experience smarter stats, faster
analysis, and sweeter science, powered by Google Cloud AI.
From the spin rate on a ball to how many hot dogs are sold
in a stadium, MLB is capturing it all, and with the help of
Google Cloud AI, they’re able to generate real-time insights
to help make informed decisions across their business.
Tell us your challenge. We can help you get solving.
The Solution
Creating a smarter way for fans to jump into the action
Advanced data analytics are crucial to an organization’s ability to respond to change and thrive. Yet many businesses aren’t getting actionable insights from their data. That's where Google Cloud comes in. Built on a culture of openness, data-driven decisions, and cost predictability, Google Cloud offers MLB innovation to drive growth with fans, now and in the future.
Migrating toward innovation and a new fan experience
These innovations support the development and evolution of
tools like Statcast. Statcast is a state-of-the-art tracking
technology that allows for the collection and analysis of a
massive amount of baseball data in real time across all 30
ballparks. By upgrading Statcast with Google Cloud’s data
capabilities, Statcast has shown significant accuracy
improvements in pitch, hit, player tracking, and
pose-tracking capabilities open up exciting new ways for
fans to more deeply understand what’s happening in real time
with AI-powered insights. In 2023, MLB introduced another
upgrade to the Statcast platform, replacing 5 of the 12
Hawk-Eye cameras with high frame rate cameras, opening the
door for new insights to be gleaned via bat and biomechanics
tracking output, and we’ll continue to work together to
identify new stats and ways to deliver this information to
the fans. Real-time personalized fan experiences have been at the
forefront of this partnership for MLB, including leveraging
Google Cloud’s AI offerings and expertise, and exploring
further ways to integrate technology into improving the fan
experience at home, or in the ballpark. With migration to Google Cloud, MLB enhanced performance of
their inhouse video search and content creation
applications, enabling MLB to launch
Film Room.
Film Room is MLB’s highlight clip platform on MLB.com,
giving fans access to search over 3.5 million clips by
player, team, or play dating back to 1929. Fans and media
are able to search and view highlights personalized to their
queries in real-time, powered by Google Cloud AI and Search.
Keeping up the momentum created by data-driven rule changes.
Data played a huge role in baseball’s resurgence last year,
helping inform MLB to make rule changes that made the game
faster, more exciting, and more engaging for fans. With the
assistance of cloud computing, advanced video, and wireless
sensors, there is more data, and more types of data,
available than ever before, all of which were critical to
the introduction of the new rules—a pitch clock, bigger
bases, and a ban on defensive shifts. How much did the game change? Let’s take a look at stats in
particular that stood out: - Games were 24 minutes shorter - Stolen base attempts rose 50% per game, from 1.2 to 1.8,
with a 4% increase in success rate - Batting averages increased from .243 to .249 on average
- Runs averaged 9.2 per game, compared to 8.6 the previous
season - Attendance was even up, reaching more than 70 million
fans across the league, a first since 2017 As we head into the second season with the new rules,
there’s never been more excitement on the field, or in the
stands. Excitement that’s enhanced at every level by data
and AI on the cloud.
Tell us your challenge. We can help you get solving.
Technical overview
Make better use of your data with AI
Explore Google Cloud
Looker
Bring the power to connect, analyze, and visualize data across multicloud environments.
Vertex AI
Build, deploy, and scale ML models faster, with pre-trained and custom tooling within a unified AI platform.
More stories
Solving other customer challenges
See how Google Cloud technology empowers organizations across the globe.
