The Athletic Hockey Show - Future of Sports Pt. 2

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

In episode two of the Future of Sports series, The Athletic's Mike Smeltz looks at how the team experience may change in the future: increased use of technology in gameplay, robotic umpires and the unique initiatives of a startup sports league. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, we've got something a little different for you today. As part of Dell Business's Podference, the Athletic has put together a two-part series on the future of sports, how technology will change the fan and team experience going forward. Coming up now is part two. Focusing on the way sports are practiced and played will look different in the future. Enjoy. Welcome back to our special two-part series here on the Athletic Podcast Network. I am Mike Smeltz.

In episode one, we looked at how the fan experience. experience will change in the near future. How going to the games, watching the games, and taking a piece of the games home are shifting in the digital age. Today, we're looking at what is evolving from the player team and league perspective. Now, baseball is a sport that straddles both the cutting edge of innovation and a dedication to its roots. One element of the game that has spanned the decades is players and teams dedication to cheating. It's a big salvo in the war over the stealing signs. You know, everyone's always trying to steal each other signs.

They still are. That is, you know, Saris, baseball writer at The Athletic, who often writes about the confluence of analytics and gameplay in the sport. Saris is talking about a new piece of equipment in baseball called pitchcom. That, yes, is an advancement in the game, but looks like something from 30 years ago. So this year, they've introduced pitchcom device. And it just looks like an old school.

I don't know, almost like a pager or something with the big fat buttons on it. It's got these big fat buttons on it. It's on the wrist of the catcher. And they can press a couple buttons. And then it just basically, I think it's Bluetooth technology, and it goes to the hat of the pitcher,

and it'll actually say slider. And the funny thing about it is you can record whatever voice you want because they wanted to be able to make it Spanish. You know, they wanted to be able to make it any language that wanted to make it, the pitching coach or the manager or, you know, Morgan Freeman. You had the voice of God telling you a slider down it away. But sometimes even the voice of God isn't enough for flawless communication.

We've already seen pitchers. There was a pitcher in Washington who took the hat off and was putting it the hat on his ear as if it was like some sort of speakerphone. And he had to like get the thing closer to his ear to hear it. So you see people that are having trouble hearing. it. And now I think October and everybody, it's rocking and it's the eighth inning and your relievers just, I can't, I can't

hear you, dude. According to Saris, one flaw in relying on pitchcom is that if it doesn't work, it puts the early adopters at a disadvantage. And then they have to go back to signs they didn't practice or they don't do as, like, right now when you are doing signs, it's

like three or four pages. They've got pages that they look at on their thing and they're like, okay, we're on third page, four set of signs, you know? And then the pitcher has to look in his hat and they go, okay, third, okay, four set of signs, okay, that's what he means. So what if they're, if they're not practiced in doing that and they have to, there's still going to be some games that baseball teams are going to play with this, you know? Like, it's not going to be the last thing that ever happens in sign stealing. Pitchcom was introduced to thwart cheaters.

Sarah says if sports history shows us anything, there will be some clever bad actors that will figure out a way to manipulate pitchcom to their advantage. You know, now you've got this Bluetooth thing and, you know, could that not be hacked? They have a similar thing in football where you have kind of a Bluetooth thing and it goes from the head coach to the quarterback. And they can communicate with the quarterback on the field instead of doing the signs. The same idea. But there's this old story out here on the West Coast that Bill Walsh used to actually turf those, used to do something to throttle those so they wouldn't work. And Bill Walsh used to plan his first 20 plays along with his quarterback.

so then the quarterback would know what the 20 plays were. And once the things didn't work and you couldn't hear, then both teams had to stop using it. So it became a competitive advantage for Bill Walsh because they knew what their first 20 plays were going to be. And he could throttle it so that it wouldn't work for the other 20 plays. And the other team would have to either use these signs or would be basically on their heels.

So I wonder if the next sign stealing scandal in baseball is going to be someone hacking into the Bluetooth and hearing it, you know, or throttling it. So then the people have to go to sign stealing. are not used to using anymore. As slow to react as the MLB can be at times, that carefulness, to put it politely, is a good lesson for business.

Implementing major changes takes time. Relying on so-called robot umps instead of your Joe West types is the biggest of changes. I think the way that any technology goes in baseball, and we've seen this with robo-a-mps and with wearable technology that they use to become better players, or the data that they get, the Rhapsodos, the technology they pitch in front of, you know, all this technology, if you're comfortable, if you've seen it on your way up,

then you're comfortable with it. You know, and I think that's why if you look at the robo-umps that are going to, that are, I think, are coming to baseball, you see that they went to the Arizona Fall League, and then they went to Haya, and then they went to Lowe, then went to HAY, then went to double A. So they're basically coming up with these young prospects as they come up so that the younger players, when they get to the big leagues and there's a, there's a robo on, we'll be totally used to it. And the older players will complain about it. And I think that's the same process you've seen basically with his pitchcom is it's been around in the minor leagues. It's been around

in certain leagues. It's been around certain clubhouses for like, you know, I'd say three to four years. So some of the younger players are more used to it. Maybe the, ones that are going to be the first adopters. And some of the older players are just going to be like, we haven't done it this way. I'm not used to it and I don't want to do it. The technology behind robot umps isn't new. Sports like tennis have used tracker systems that can quickly spit out

whether a ball was in or out. But in baseball, there are different dynamics at play, where the strike zone is wildly different for players like 5 foot 6 inch Jose Altuve and the 6 foot 7 inch Aaron Judge. And so there's been almost philosophical questions about what the strike zone should be. Should the strike zone move as they move? If they crouched really low, should the strike zone go with them as they crouch really low? Would the hitter be able to manipulate the electronic strike zone by changing the way he's standing?

Could he just, could he theoretically get his shoulders really close to his knees and create a tiny strike zone? You know, like how responsive do we want it to be? Do we want to set it to their general height or their specific height in the box? And then how responsive would we want to be to changes in their stance when they're moving as the ball is coming in. And the ball is also moving in a 3D space. We want it to continue to be a 3D strike zone. We've been calling it more as a 2D strike zone. But once we start doing the robots, are we going to make it 3D? And so then there's going to be pitches that become strikes later in the strike zone. And so there's a lot of sort of questions. And that's why I really

like the way they're doing it, because they're doing it many, many years. And you might even begin to see second and third order effects where we start to see pitchers try to take advantage of the electronic zone, start to do little trick pitches and try to do the Sergio Romo slider where they just catch a little bit of it, or the Rich Hill curveball, where they catch a little bit of the strike zone and hit the plate. And so if you can see the second and third order, you know, things that'll happen out of what you do, then you can sort of adjust on the way and hopefully come to the big leagues with the best situation. And beyond those philosophical issues, as Sarah says, there is an issue with the technology itself. One would think that robot bumps should get the call right every time. I mean,

they are robots. But as Saras points out, already the information spit out by the machines right now changes multiple times over a 24-hour period. There's another part of the technological problem, which is the real-time problem, which is, and you see this sometimes, the accuracy of the zone, as you see it on TV, is not amazing. And, you know, I work with pitch data a lot as part of my job at the athletic. And there's what, there's data that you get from the game itself. like as the game's happening.

Then there's the data you get at about 6 a.m. the next day. So there's a washing. We call it a wash, but it's like a cleaning up. Oh, that's not actually a, that pitch didn't go 30 feet up in the air or whatever. You know, that actually happens. So you kind of clean up the data. And then there's another release at 8 a.m. That's been corrected again.

So at 8 a.m. the next day, you know a lot better if the ball is a strike or not. However, for Robooms, that doesn't help. You know, a lot of call strikes tomorrow. Yeah. Let's wait a couple hours to clean this data up. So that's been part of it, too, is perfecting that real-time technology. Innovation in one sector can ignite innovation in another. The use of motion capture technology and developing video games led over into baseball.

Baseball took note when they started making baseball games, video games. They had to put these balls on themselves, and they had to do the motion capture. And then the baseball said, whoa, we should do that, except use it to try to make the baseball players better. So what you do is I got down to my underwear up in Kent, Washington, and had to throw a baseball in my underwear in front of major league players and coaches. And it was very embarrassing. It was also embarrassing because I only threw 59 miles an hour, I guess.

When the pros do it, they're doing a better job. But what it allowed them to tell me about myself, and I had a lot of flaws, not being a pro, baseball player myself, but it allowed them to tell me how my different aspects of my body were moving. Now, access to biomechanical technology is extremely limited. It is expensive. Only select places have the tech. But some of the data learned through the testing in these isolated labs can proliferate out to all parts of the world. What they can also do is now they can test all the drills that coaches have been doing for years. And, you know, in the past, you do a drill. And for some guys, it works, some guys it doesn't. It's kind of haphazard. Now you can say, okay, we did an assessment

and then we did this one drill. And then after we did another assessment and it changed your hip shoulder separation. So that drill is a good one. We did an assessment. We did these other drills. They didn't work. Let's stop doing those drills. So you can actually test all the different drills that you do with players. And that makes you, that makes coaches more efficient and better at their at their job. Coming up, we'll learn what it means to be a startup in sports and how that impacts the league's priorities. Paul Rable is an impressive dude.

He is both, one of the greatest players in lacrosse history, and is the sports greatest entrepreneur. All of it is UGC. It's his user-generated content that's created by us on the platform. And the engagement is higher than all of meta, or Facebook and Instagram combined. The size of an individual, linebacker, but the mind of an Ivy League business school grad,

Braybill, along with his brother Mike, started the PLL, the Premier Lacrosse League. We are on pace and want to become the next billion dollar sports league. We think we can do what it's taken a lot of the sports leagues 20 years to do in 5 to 10. The instant success of the PLL has almost no comparable in professional sports history. The league started playing games just three years ago, and it already swallowed the previous top level pro league, the MLL. And there were some challenges with MLL at the time. Their Achilles heel was that they would sign players to one-year deals to protect

potential, you know, call closure. And that opened up the window for us to start the PLL from scratch the next day, which we did. And two years later, we were ending up acquiring MLL. So in a short period of time, the PLL went from the little fish taking on the big fish that was the MLL, and quickly the PLL ate the entire MLL. Rable says he to his group identified a key factor in acquiring the MLL. As part of that, acquisition was also, you know,

IT and history and sports are so much about history and the way that we colorize them and talk about them. And I think it's worth calling that out because we'll probably spend the bulk of our time talking about the future of pro sports, but you can't engage an audience. without context. And you get context through historicals. And so that's really exciting about the PLL.

We're entering our fourth season with 24 years of history at the professional level. The PLL is unique as a pro sports league in a number of ways. One, the players in the league earn equity over time. And two, instead of having teams based in different cities, the entire league goes from city to city each weekend. Barnstorming, a callback from sports past that was both a product of circumstance and recognizing what consumers are familiar with. You think about every year, traditionally,

the biggest event is the Final Four, which would take the top four teams, as we all know, in college. We descend upon a major market city. I did this for four years at John Hopkins, and we were able to get anywhere from 50 to 60,000 fans at Gillette Stadium for the semis and championship. And that idea that, oh, if you create some supply demand around best in class,

Let's create a final four each weekend, but the thread it all throughout the season where game week one, this season's going to be in Albany, and then you go down game week two, three, four, and we're to say, hey, I think the final four has done this. They still want to yield. So that was the idea. If the NFL was a league that exploded because of television, how that game looked on TV and how it was broadcasted on TV, then the PLL is attempting to use modern social media, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, as its catalyst for exploding interest. Of course, that isn't revolutionary to say a startup business, one involved in entertainment, is going to use social media. But hearing Rabel talk, it is much more than just a bullet point on a PowerPoint. This year, the PLL signed a landmark deal with ESPN. Their games will reach a potentially massive audience on ABC, ESPN's networks, and ESPN Plus.

But for Rabel, he is looking beyond television and streaming. To him, one of the best aspects of partnering with ESPN is having the companies hugely followed social media. social media platforms pushing out PLL content 24-7. I think ESPN's social, and it's backed by the size of the audience, they've figured out social better than any of their network competitors. They have 25 million plus followers across ESPN and SportsCenter accounts across all the different social platforms. And that is an invaluable promotional tool when you talk about unlimited inventory,

unlimited inventory compared to broadcast, right? You have 24 hours in a day in those slots, which are anywhere from an hour to two hour blocks are booked 24 to 36 months in advance and you run out of inventory. In social, with an access to 25 million fans per platform per handle, and you can talk about the PLL after a tweet where you talk about the NFL, the NHL playoffs, the NBA playoffs, that is really powerful. So social media, best marketing tool. The PLL's dedication to flooding social media goes deeper than most leagues are willing to go.

Other pro sports leagues like the NFL and the MLB actively discourage their athletes and fans from sharing game footage online. The PLL has a content farm that distributes the best bits to its league members, including its players. Instead of us turning one of the cheats, we just said,

hey, let's just create a highlights, distribute them to our players to live organically through their social, distribute them to our sponsors and our partners, distribute them to other media companies that would otherwise maybe be on the fence because they don't want to pay a licensing fee. Let's just get it out there legally as often and natively as possible. We create, I know that we create our content. I speak about natively for platforms that distribute it in a certain way. TikTok's 9 by 16. It's vertical. It's bite size. It's more BTS.

Twitter, you can go 16 by 9. It's horizontal. And it's more conversational. and it's more conversational on second screen and understanding Instagram and Facebook. We'll create custom content for our players. We won't upload it. They'll upload it. In some case, we'll upload it for them. And then you learn from it. Through our business intelligence team, we pull all of those metrics and impressions and engagements,

and we're constantly surveying a very quickly evolving algorithmic environment and social so we can be at the forefront of it. Because of how young the PLL is, both in the age of the league and the age of the people running the league, there's a clear dedication to making the PLL more than just a bundle of games that show up on a streamer. You know, there's a lot of conversation and it's a beautiful series every year and Drive to Survive on Netflix. They've done a fantastic job of driving value to the U.S. consumer base of an international competition like F1. But before Drive to Survive, there was Hard Knocks. Before Hard Knocks, there was the Ultimate Fighter. Before the Ultimate Fighter,

there were things like Mighty Ducks and Rudy. So this is all scripted, film, unscripted, which is reality or documentary series or documentary films that drive humanization and conversation around the people in sport. And that's what ultimately leads to more tune in on the live broadcast, which is tied to these leagues revenue. So we are, we're diving deeply into scripted unscripted and telling more stories around across away from a lot of games. The lessons from the PLL are clear.

Games aren't enough anymore. There is so much competition for audience. The PLL finds consistent and proven ways to interact with its customers through that steady drip of social media that go far beyond the allotted time of a lacrosse game. So for sports fans, the future of sports means they'll get more of it, just not necessarily those games. We're talking about behind-the-scenes videos.

documentaries, podcasts, social media, NFTs, alternative broadcasts. As in episode one, all of this comes down to choice. And leagues are doing everything they can to guarantee fans choose their sport to invest their time into. I am Mike Smeltz from The Athletic. Thank you for listening.