Aaron Judge just dropped the cleanest reaction in baseball, and it still feels like half the league is pretending they didn’t hear it.
“I read the article and I was like, I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Teams are making decisions off of AI? Man, that’s just crazy.”
That’s the Yankees captain speaking for every person who still thinks a catcher should call a game and a manager should live with the consequences. MLB finally shut down the custom tabs on dugout iPads starting the second half because teams were running AI recommendations on substitutions, pitch selection, and live strategy. The original purpose was video and Statcast data. Some clubs turned it into a cheat code. I know what the front-office crowd is typing already. “Progress.” “Edge.” “Moneyball evolved.” Spare me.
Adam Ottavino put names on it. On his Baseball & Coffee stream he said the Mets were the main team that got cracked down on. They had an expensive AI program helping pick pitches, they bragged about it early, and Steve Cohen reportedly invested a significant sum in the software. Coaches around the league were talking. MLB got wind and killed the custom tab. The Mets declined comment, which is its own form of confession. Sources told the Post they were among the clubs exploiting the loophole in the first half. As many as a third of the league was using the tablets for at least one restricted purpose. Up to six teams were making pitch suggestions from the dugout in real time.
Morgan Sword’s memo from June 11 was polite corporate speak for “we caught you.” He wrote that the custom tab had expanded “beyond their originally intended purpose to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches.” They gave clubs a month of lead time so nobody could cry foul. No punishments. Just a hard stop. That is MLB saying the quiet part: we are not letting algorithms run the ninth inning.
I am all for it. Pitch calling is the last real chess match left in the sport. When a pitcher and catcher are locked in, reading swings, remembering history, feeling the moment, that is baseball. When a coach is glancing at an iPad that just spat out “a high-probability pitch recommendation” the human element is already nerfed. Jack Lambert from Driveline laid out exactly how it works: live-score the game, chart pitch type and location, update the plan dynamically for the second and third times through the order, then feed it straight into live pitch-calling. That is not scouting. That is a video game with payrolls.
John Schneider called it a little weird to watch decisions get swayed in real time by tech. Torey Lovullo said the opposite: AI is entering everyone’s arena and you better get on it or get rolled. Lovullo is wrong in the only way that matters. If your competitive advantage is an expensive black box telling your staff when to double-switch or what pitch to throw, you do not have a better process. You have a crutch. And the second half just took the crutch away.
I watched enough of the first half. Some of these “analytics-driven” bullpen moves already looked like a computer that never saw a baseball. Now the computer is banned from the dugout for the decisions that used to require guts. Good. The Astros scandal taught everyone what happens when technology outruns the rules. This was the next version, dressed up as innovation instead of trash cans. An anonymous executive told The Athletic the quiet part: “Gotta stop the cheating before there’s cheating now.” Exactly.
The iPads still have video, Statcast, ABS data. Static info can still be uploaded. Nobody banned preparation. They banned real-time AI coaching from the bench. That is the line. Cross it and you are not smarter than the other 29 teams. You are just louder about your budget. Cohen’s Mets got to play with the shiny toy for a couple months and now they get to prove they can win without the expensive ghost in the machine.
Baseball is already drowning in launch angles and spin rates. The second the algorithm starts choosing the pitch, the sport stops being a contest of people and becomes a contest of who bought the better software. I am not interested. Judge is not interested. Anyone who still wants a human in the middle of the chaos is not interested. The rest of you can keep glazing the bots. I will be watching the managers who still have to think.
You really want AI calling your bullpen phone in October? Go ahead and @ me. I dare you.
