As Major League Baseball embarks on its most unique season ever, the league is working with Big Tech companies for assistance. Apple, Google and Sony will all play an important role in the shortened 2020 MLB season.

Baseball will look a lot different during the coronavirus pandemic. Fans won’t be in attendance, possibly for the entire year. Stadiums that are often filled with nearly 50,000 paying customers for games are set to be virtually empty.

Teams will use artificial crowd noise, provided by Sony. A choice of 75 different noises and reactions from Sony’s video game, MLB The Show, will be at the disposal of each stadium sound engineer.

The fake noise has been used in stadiums during exhibition games in the week before Opening Day.

“It sounded kind of like we’re trying to tune in our AM radio and trying to find the station and we couldn’t find it,” New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone told reporters after the team first experimented with artificial crowd noise. “I felt a little better with it during the game. It did feel a little bit more natural. So, you know, hopefully there’s some tweaking of it or whatever, but as long as it wore on, and during the game, I was okay with it.”

Empty stadiums are just one new aspect of the season that will force players to adjust. Because of social distancing measures that have been instituted, traditional video stations have been banned from clubhouses. Players will instead view replays on individual iPads.

Using its partnership with Apple, MLB will distribute 15 iPads to each team for players and coaches to watch at-bats, view scouting reports and use other tools to improve performances.

Every team will use Google Cloud for digital infrastructure and tools such as Statcast.

"When we sat down to take on this infrastructure and product refresh mission, we had to ask ourselves - what is our end goal here? And pretty quickly became obvious to us that our number one goal is fan engagement," MLB CTO Jason Gaedtke said at Google Cloud's annual user event. "It's bringing the game of baseball, which is a beautiful game, to our millions of fans. Being able to come in and introduce new technology that allows for things like personalization, personalized recommendations, a social viewing experience, where something happens in the field and you get excited about that and get to share it with other fans."

Virtual ads are set to be introduced in the regular season. The advertisements are usually reserved for the playoffs and other marquee games, but they’ll be used during regional broadcasts this year.

MLB has estimated that 40% of its revenue typically comes from ticket sales, concessions and other purchases by paying customers at the stadium.

Rob Manfred
In this picture, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred speaks at Clark Sports Center during the Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony on July 29, 2018, in Cooperstown, New York. Jim McIsaac/Getty Images
RELATED STORIES
Coronavirus Apple inc. Artificial intelligence Major league baseball