Robots are watching baseball.

Listen...

I am a disgruntled Philly sports fan. My Phillies got knocked out by the Dodgers in what can only be described as painfully catastrophic. But something caught my attention this year: there is way more pitch tipping than ever this year.

We already use analytics in sports, so why wouldn’t teams start using AI to model pitches? You could train a system on massive amounts of data to detect subtle tells — things that would be nearly impossible for a human to catch.

Instead of a coach noticing how high a pitcher holds their glove or whether they lick their lips before a fastball, an AI could find hundreds of micro-patterns: posture shifts, timing cues, finger positioning... then turn them into probabilities. A machine could predict what pitch is coming next with startling accuracy.

That would certainly change the nature of the sport. It would make players more robotic — if they don’t act robotic, they’ll give away signals to robots that will tell the hitters what’s coming.

Fascinating! Especially in baseball, which is basically a one-on-one duel, pitcher versus batter, with just enough time between pitches for analysis. You already see it when a runner is on second base and teams have to change their signs to prevent pitch tipping.

I’m curious to see how this evolves.