Minutes before the Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics trot onto the field during an overcast May afternoon, A's bullpen coach Scott Emerson strides along the third-base line toward his seat along the left field wall. Emerson---everyone calls him Emo---is a former minor-league pitcher, and he still looks ready to take the mound in the eighth. The only sign that he's a coach, not an aging star riding out a contract, is the space gray iPad Pro in his right hand.
Major League Baseball recently signed a multi-year deal with Apple to provide the 12.9-inch tablets to every team. They're preloaded with MLB Dugout, an app that collects a team's stats, scouting reports, and other info in one easily accessible place. (Sorry folks, the app is for ball clubs only.) After decades of binders stuffed with paper, the league is going digital. It's the latest step in an ongoing effort to modernize the game---even if the players and teams don't quite know what to make of it.
Apple and the MLB started working together last season when the tech company handed over a bunch of iPad Airs running an early version of Dugout. "Our initial reaction," Athletics general manager David Forst says, "was, 'What do we need these for?'" At that point, Dugout offered PDF versions of all the data teams already produced, essentially digitizing the binders and nothing more. Helpful, but hardly revolutionary.
Of course, if you're looking for people with a proclivity for innovation and a ship-first-fix-later attitude, don't call a professional ball team. It's all about gut feelings and "the eye test" for those people. Stats and analysis abound, sure, but anyone in the business will tell you numbers don't tell the whole story. "It's not about X's and O's," goes the old (and unsourced) quote, "it's about the Jimmies and Joes." Or, as Forst put it, "We're dealing with human beings."
Still, teams know they must embrace new tech or get left behind. Forst knows this. The A's, after all, led the league's data-driven revolution. Former general manager Billy Beane's hyper-analytical "Moneyball" approach won the A's 20 games in a row and their division in 2002. Michael Lewis wrote a best-seller about it; Brad Pitt starred in the movie. Now every team operates this way. If Forst needs a reminder to keep looking for what's next, he need only look across the hall---Beane, who is now VP of baseball operations, has the office opposite his.
The league thinks Dugout is what's next. During the off-season, Apple and the league's Advanced Media division (which does everything from run the popular MLB At Bat app to serve the streaming infrastructure for HBO Now) kept refining it. Each of the league's 30 teams got a new version in February with a killer app: video.
Video offers something a binder full of paper can't: visual evidence. "I can say to a guy, 'You're hanging your curveball," Emerson says. "And he'll say, 'No I'm not!' Now I can just say, 'See for yourself.'"
For years, pitchers and batters would jog into the clubhouse, take a seat in the video room, and cue tape. They'd be alone in the bowels of the stadium, far from the action. Now, Emerson can sit alongside his pitchers as they watch themselves and the batters they'll face, sifting through data to tell them what the need to know. "A picture's worth a thousand words, right?" he says. "When you start moving the pictures, it's a lot of words."
Within the A's, everyone agrees Emerson is the iPad's biggest proponent. "I like to think I'm a little bit tech savvy," he says in the dugout before the game. He's data savvy, too, constantly evaluating possibilities: which pitcher to warm up, which hitter he might face, what pitch he should throw, even the size of the strike zone each umpire tends to call. The iPad helps, sort of. Beyond video, Emerson likes that it makes finding info so much easier---because pages flip faster on a screen. "Sometimes they get stuck together with paper," he says. "You know?"
To be fair, Emerson sees the tablet's potential. He has a million ideas about it. But he also sees its limitations.
Just before the Mariners game starts, Emerson is talking to coaches and players, his iPad propped on a plank under his seat. It stays there for most of the game. Beyond a few glances, Emerson relies upon a pen and some paper to keep score just as he always has. He finds the tablet more useful before the game, when he builds scouting reports and game plans. Come game time, though, he needs a place to keep track of what's happening now, a way to adapt and communicate. He can't do that on the iPad. Plus, he says, "I'm not taking this thing out to the mound with me."
He won't have to. Apple and Major League Baseball are moving slowly. The league doesn't even require teams or coaches to even use an iPad, unlike the NFL's in-your-face partnership with Microsoft that put Surface tablets on every sideline. But the real challenge for iPad integration isn't some Luddite in the front office or a coach bound by tradition. It's the intense secrecy and security teams bring to their data. "It's one thing if you lose a binder and somebody has your scouting report for one series," says Chris Marinak, a senior vice president at MLB and the leader of many tech initiatives. "It's another thing if you've loaded all of your proprietary information for your entire organization for the year, and then you lose it."
To minimize the risk of leaks, the iPads can't get live feeds of games or even access the Internet. Dugouts do not offer Wi-Fi or other connectivity; to update Dugout with the latest stats and info, someone must trot over to a league-sanctioned hotspot and download it. "You can't take pictures," Marinak says, "you can't get on Twitter, you can't, you know, go surf the net." Still, upgrades are coming. They're working on support for the Apple Pencil (so Emerson can keep score), developing the ability to keep different information on different iPads so everything isn't everywhere, and exploring things like animated charts and annotation for video.
The Moneyball era was all about collecting data and using it to make decisions. Now everyone's doing that, and then some. Teams generate and analyze astounding quantities of data during every game. "It just gets sent to you in these enormous files that most of us here have no idea what to do with," Forst says. That's the new trick: taking mountains of data and turning it into victories.
Right now, the iPad doesn't do much more than make that data easier to read. But you can imagine the possibilities. Even Joe Maddon, the Cubs manager who immediately opposed the system, sees that. "Those things are wonderful to access information," he said earlier this year. "But when you need it very quickly, I think you almost have to wait for artificial intelligence to take over where it actually moves at the speed of your thought." That's the idea. Like any good prospect, the iPad Pro is full of possibilities, with talent to spare. But you have to develop it.
