AI in Sports: Its Impact on Baseball
Written by Adam Krasilovsky
The basics of sports have been around for hundreds of years, but just like everything else in life, they evolve.
Some ways that sports have evolved have been through expansions of leagues and the implementation of new rules.
However, one of the most recent breakthroughs within the past ten years of sports has been the use of artificial intelligence.
Out of the four major sports, baseball has been changed the most from the implementation of AI in sports.
How has AI in changed the way sports are played?
Baseball, which is known to be America’s pastime, has been changing its traditions as it has been moving into the twenty-first century.
The first way that AI is changing baseball is through the use of IPads in dugouts (just like on sidelines in football) to watch game film or pull up a certain players’ stats at a moment’s notice.
However, not as obvious, artificial intelligence has the largest impact on the research and development departments of baseball franchises.
Using the millions of data points gathered throughout hundreds of years of playing, people in the R&D departments can create hundreds to thousands of models that can find the best place to position fielders.
The use of AI in sports seems endless.
Is AI in sports ethical?
One of the largest issues of using artificial intelligence though is that many might not find these techniques to be ethical.
Most notably, in the 2017 World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Houston Astros were caught relaying Dodgers pitchers’ signs to their batters from a center field camera and a trash can.
With the use of AI in sports, soon we will be able to predict what pitch a pitcher is going to throw, which is what the Astros were doing.
That is why with the addition of AI in sports, some boundaries need to be established.
In the future, one of the most pressing uses of artificial intelligence will be the creation of robot umpires in baseball, which seems to be about four to five years away.
With new robot umpires, the games will be less reliant on humans and their errors, leading to players showing their true talents against other players with very few confounding variables remaining.
What will AI in sports look like in the future?
We can also see artificial intelligence expand to basketball and hockey like how it has from baseball to football.
Beginning advancements have already been achieved in hockey through chipping the puck being able to collect loads of data from every single game.
However, basketball will probably take longer to be manipulated by artificial intelligence as players are only getting better and changing strategies about how the game is being played, leading the AI in need of catching up.
To conclude, artificial intelligence is currently re-identifying the sports that we all know and love, and it will continue to do so for a long time.
