It looks like Major League Baseball coaches will soon have a spanking new toy to play with – the 12.9” iPad Pro (yes, this is larger than even the recently released 9.7” iPad Pro), and this is made possible thanks to Apple with the Cupertino company having arrived at a multi-year partnership with Major League Baseball to furnish each coach in the league with the tablet.
It does seem as though MLB coaches are expected to use make good use of the iPad Pros not to play games when their team are winning by so many runs, or when they are being trashed out there with no idea at all on turning the tide, but rather, to go through performance stats from different seasons, or perhaps to calculate the probability of how well a hitter will perform against a certain pitcher. Heck, it is also possible to check out “spray charts” of where the hit ball is most likely to go, or to refer to footage from older games.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred shared, “I started in this game 25 years ago, and the single biggest change has been the emergence and predominance of analytics. It affects the way we judge players, make decisions on the field, and the way fans consume the game.”
This is the first time that teams in the MLB will be able to gain instant access to data over a mobile tablet, and the Apple deal certainly comes into play alongside the MLB lifting the ban on notebooks, tablets, and smartphones in dugouts.