Major League Baseball: Engaging the next generation of fans

About Major League Baseball (MLB)

Major League Baseball, which is North America’s oldest and most-attended professional sports league, consists of 30 member teams in the United States and Canada.

Industries: Media & Entertainment
Location: North America

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About Arctiq

Arctiq is a Google Cloud Premier Partner, providing expertise in hybrid, multicloud, Anthos, cloud infrastructure, microservices, and automation.

Major League Baseball migrates to Google Cloud to develop a unified data plane across its complex operations to drive fan engagement and increase operational efficiency.

Major League Baseball (MLB), America’s most historic professional sports league, is an enduring element of American culture with legendary players and coaches who, over the past 150 years, have shaped the sport into America’s National Pastime.

Complex queries run 50 percent faster on BigQuery

“Innovation is a huge challenge in baseball. The sport is steeped in tradition. We have to work very hard to make sure the younger generations appreciate the game the same way that I do and that my father did. What the current MLB fan expects is for us to be relevant in today’s environment.”

Robert D. Manfred Jr, Commissioner of Baseball, MLB

To continue to play a role in American culture over the next 100 years, the league is focused on growth. Noah Garden, the league’s Chief Revenue Officer, says, “Our goal is to have baseball content wherever people are consuming content ranging from a big screen, to the device in their pocket, to every established and emerging social media platform. We want to be everywhere.” And to be everywhere, the league is counting on innovation to engage more people, particularly younger generations.

“Innovation is a huge challenge in baseball,” says Commissioner of Baseball Robert D. Manfred Jr. “The sport is steeped in tradition. We have to work very hard to make sure the younger generations appreciate the game the same way that I do and that my father did. What the current MLB fan expects is for us to be relevant in today’s environment.”

As the league works to engage younger fans, Jason Gaedtke, the league’s former CTO, says, “Technology will play a role in every aspect of the fan experience.”

“The fundamental goal is fan engagement—to bring baseball to millions of fans and introduce new technology that allows for personalized recommendations and a social viewing experience, where when something happens on the field and you get excited about it, you can share it with other fans. These are the things that really motivate us and Google Cloud has been a great partner in building products that embody those values.”

Jason Gaedtke, CTO (former), MLB

Partnering with Google Cloud to innovate fan engagement

Like many businesses, MLB is enabling advanced data analytics, which will play a crucial role in business growth by delivering deeper levels of fan engagement. Maximizing the power of its data provides the basis for accelerated decision-making, enabling the agility required to quickly adapt to a constantly changing marketplace.

MLB partnered with Google Cloud to provide the missing pieces of innovation and expertise that will drive success in its technology modernization program. Built on a culture of openness, data-driven decisions, and cost predictability, Google Cloud technology and expertise provide MLB with the innovation it needs to drive deeper engagement with fans today and in the future.

Gaedtke says, “The fundamental goal is fan engagement—to bring baseball to millions of fans and introduce new technology that allows for personalized content recommendations and a shared viewing experience, where when something happens on the field and you get excited about it, you can share it with other fans. These are the things that really motivate us and Google Cloud has been a great partner in building products that embody those values.”

To deepen engagement with fans, Major League Baseball and Google Cloud are establishing a foundation for innovation by migrating key parts of its business to Google Cloud, where it will get:

  • Data democratization
  • Operational efficiency, scalability, and cost savings with lower overhead and less maintenance
  • ML innovation for greater levels of analytic insights and predictions

To build engagement with today’s fans, drive engagement with future generations, and lay the groundwork for future innovation, MLB consolidated its infrastructure and migrated to Google Cloud’s Anthos, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, and BigQuery services to gain innovation with Google’s industry-leading machine learning, analytics, databases, application management, and data and video storage capabilities, and to increase reliability and manage governance at scale.

Migrating to BigQuery for faster decisions and better insight

To get more actionable insights, and get them faster, MLB migrated its Wheelhouse Data and Analytics Platform to BigQuery, Google Cloud’s enterprise data warehouse, which integrates all the interactions that baseball fans have with MLB, including buying a ticket or a jersey, streaming a game online, visiting an MLB website, or using the mobile app. Gaedtke says, “All these touchpoints tell us a little bit about how individual fans engage with and enjoy the game. With BigQuery, we found that we have an extremely powerful data analytics solution for running complex queries. It also integrates very well into the rest of our workflow and tooling.”

By migrating Wheelhouse to BigQuery—completed in just seven months—the league now has a more comprehensive, frictionless approach to leveraging data to better serve fans. MLB is now able to share data across its teams and operations, with speed and reliability. Benefits to MLB include:

  • Data democratization and distribution to its 30 teams
  • Improved time to insight, with queries running up to 50 percent faster
  • Richer insights via integrations with Looker and Google Ads
  • Reduced operational overhead
  • Lower costs with flat-rate pricing

Migrating for operational efficiency with Anthos

The MLB computing environment is complex, encompassing its cloud services, an on-premises data center, and data centers located at each of the league’s 30 ballparks. To streamline operations and build a basis for application modernization, MLB is using Anthos. Gaedtke says, “Anthos allows us to provide a common control plane for all our compute workloads, whether we’re running those on-premises, at the baseball parks, or in the cloud. It makes us a lot more agile and it simplifies a lot of our DevOps procedures.”

To support the MLB Anthos deployment, Arctiq, a Google Cloud Premier Service Partner, customized a project plan to pilot Anthos and demonstrate to MLB what’s possible with a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Following a successful pilot, Arctiq worked closely with MLB teams to deploy Anthos across each ballpark, providing expertise with deployment support, app performance testing, and additional application automation. With Anthos, MLB now benefits from centralized management and integration with other Google Cloud services.

By centrally managing its infrastructure across multiple locations, applications, and servers with Anthos, the league has improved operational efficiency, is better positioned to modernize and deliver applications faster, and can scale its architecture to handle vast amounts of data streaming from Statcast cameras at each ballpark.

Anthos gives IT professionals a single platform and a consistent experience to manage applications across environments, saving time on management and speeding up modernization. Kris Amy, Vice President of Infrastructure at MLB, says, “Working with Arctiq to enable hybrid cloud and refresh our ballpark’s Kubernetes infrastructure was a great experience. The communication between our teams was excellent, the deployments went smoothly, and Arctiq enabled our team to manage and operate the Anthos platform moving forward. Arctiq’s Anthos expertise is unmatched.”

Embracing data analytics for the next generation of baseball stats

Since the 1890s, MLB has led the sports world in the use of data, showing what’s possible when you quantify human performance as data. Statcast, the MLB state-of-the-art, on-field tracking system, is indispensable for fans, players, coaches, umpires, and broadcasters.

Manfred says that Statcast “helps fans answer the why, which we think is really important to fan engagement.” This includes the positions and movements of players, coaches, and umpires. Twelve cameras in each of the league’s 30 ballparks capture on-field movements at 100 frames per second, generating a huge amount of data.

MLB migrated Statcast to BigQuery to take advantage of Google Cloud’s innovative tools, which have cut processing time, simplified data engineering, and lowered costs. To drive deeper engagement with fans beyond live games, MLB will develop an innovative fan experience using personalization powered by Google Cloud AI.

Statcast on Google Cloud is the next step in the fidelity, accuracy, and management of data for MLB, and will be the foundation for future tracking enhancements. Running Statcast on Google Cloud has enabled MLB to capture more data than ever before, tracking nine players, one batter, four umpires, and two base coaches across 18 skeletal points each second, often across 15 simultaneous games. Learn more here about how MLB is using Google Cloud smart analytics to scale insights in the World Series.

On deck for MLB is to start maximizing the value of Google Cloud capabilities in machine learning, networking, and analytics to continue to innovate the fan experience and help the league leverage its data at a deeper level to drive engagement with current and new generations of fans beyond live games.

Engaging the next generation with Film Room

To engage younger fans, MLB has enhanced its Film Room video archive platform with rich metadata, making it easy for fans to use natural language queries to find nearly anything. Film Room draws from an archive of more than 3.5 million clips, which currently includes every at-bat in MLB since 2017, as well as historical clips dating back to 1929.

Film Room’s video clips, which were edited manually in the past, are now generated automatically. Triggered by the pitcher’s release of the ball to within 60 seconds of each play’s completion, Film Room captures each play of the season, accelerating film clip production and improving accuracy and consistency compared to manual editing.

MLB moved its digital video framework from on-premises running on virtual machines to Google Cloud running Google Kubernetes Engine for automated scaling and serverless computing. MLB is using Google Kubernetes Engine to power all of the platform’s virtualized databases, giving the league the flexibility, control, rapid scale, and reliability necessary to respond to the unknowns of a shortened baseball season and expanded Postseason

“We’re excited to consolidate MLB infrastructure on Google Cloud and incorporate Google’s world-class machine learning technology to provide personalized and immersive fan experiences. We couldn’t have picked a better technology partner across ad delivery, streaming, cloud computing, and machine learning.”

Jason Gaedtke, CTO (former), MLB

MLB and Google Cloud: Partners in innovation

The secret to success isn’t just industry-leading technology and tools, but a partnership of success and innovation that will drive future growth. The league already has a strong relationship with Google. It relies on Google Ad Manager for live ad delivery and uses YouTube to nurture fan engagement during exclusive live games.

Gaedtke says, “Every season, we work to apply emerging technology to engage and support our fans, clubs, and broadcasters in new and exciting ways. We’re excited to consolidate MLB infrastructure on Google Cloud and incorporate Google’s world-class machine learning technology to provide personalized and immersive fan experiences. We couldn’t have picked a better technology partner across ad delivery, streaming, cloud computing, and machine learning.”

Manfred adds, “The partnership with Google Cloud provides us with technology that will drive us to be better. As big as we are, we know we need someone bigger to help us, and we think Google Cloud is the best partner for us.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Major League Baseball (MLB)

Major League Baseball, which is North America’s oldest and most-attended professional sports league, consists of 30 member teams in the United States and Canada.

Industries: Media & Entertainment
Location: North America

About Arctiq

Arctiq is a Google Cloud Premier Partner, providing expertise in hybrid, multicloud, Anthos, cloud infrastructure, microservices, and automation.