Every baseball game tells a story.
MLB Gameday has helped tell those stories with in-game highlights, live stats and real-time pitch-by-pitch data and analytics from Statcast. But starting this season, MLB Gameday aims to make every fan more informed and bring them closer to the sport they love with MLB Scout Insights powered by Google Cloud AI.
Think about how the best baseball broadcasters always know when to drop in a piece of information that can provide greater context about a matchup or a better knowledge of a player. That's what you will see with MLB Scout Insights in Gameday.
"Scout Insights is the idea that when there are great matchups or great storytelling or just kind of learning who people are, we could inject the right insight at the right time to help fans be a bit smarter," said Josh Frost, MLB senior vice president of product management.
Now when you are following a game via Gameday on your phone, computer or tablet, you will see an insight flash upon the screen that's relevant to the moment in the game. If, say, Dansby Swanson is facing Paul Skenes in a Cubs-Pirates game, you might see an insight during that at-bat about how they were each No. 1 overall Draft picks. You might see an insight about Swanson's performance versus right-handed pitchers, how Skenes mixes his pitches or how the two have fared against one another in the past, just to name a few of the many, many possibilities that you could see with MLB Scout Insights.
"We're happy with being able to complement [Gameday] and not disrupt that experience if we can add to the storytelling and have our fans say, 'Well, that's interesting,'" senior product manager Marco Louvado said. "Insights are very subjective, but I think we've got a good mix that could appeal to a large breadth of users.”
Built with Google's Gemini models, MLB Scout Insights has access to baseball's entire history of traditional and Stacast data and then presents relevant, illuminating information based on the game's situation. Having that information show up quickly, just like everything else in Gameday, is the "golden rule," according to Frost.
"Getting an experience that keeps pace and is still delightful and fun while injecting [insights] is really good," he said. "... There are going to be a lot of insights, and a lot of -- like when you think about a broadcast -- game notes that are generated. But it's serving the right one at the right time."
Gameday users need not worry about being bombarded with insights; you will likely see one insight per inning or per half-inning during Opening Week. The frequency will increase once the season gets rolling, but like how any good play-by-play announcer or color commentator lets a game breathe, Frost and Louvado understand that they don't want Gameday to suddenly become too noisy.
"We just want it to be a good experience," Frost said.
To see MLB Scout Insights, all you need to do is log in to your free MLB.com account before following your game of choice in Gameday.