MLB Inks Multi-Year Deal With Google Cloud as Official Cloud Partner

The league's Statcast tracking system will now run on Google Cloud

Google and Major League Baseball have inked a multi-year deal in which Google Cloud will become MLB’s Official Cloud and Cloud Data and Analytics partner, with MLB’s business operations, including Statcast, now running on Google Cloud. Additionally, for a third season in a row, MLB will use Google Ad Manager and its Dynamic Ad Insertion feature to power its ads business. Previously, MLB had a deal with Amazon Web Services to provide machine learning services for Statcast, as well as to serve as the league’s official provider for machine learning, AI, and deep learning workloads.

“Every season we work to apply emerging technology to engage and support our fans, clubs, and broadcasters in new and exciting ways,” says Jason Gaedtke, MLB’s Chief Technology Officer. “MLB has enjoyed a strong partnership with Google based on Google Ad Manager’s live ad delivery with MLB.tv as well as YouTube’s strong fan engagement during exclusive live games. We are excited to strengthen this partnership by consolidating MLB infrastructure on Google Cloud and incorporating Google’s world-class machine learning technology to provide personalized and immersive fan experiences. We couldn’t have picked a better technology partner across ad delivery, streaming, cloud computing, and machine learning.”

MLB will migrate its cloud and on-premise systems to Google Cloud and leverage Google’s machine learning, analytics, application management, and data/video storage capabilities to increase reliability and manage governance at scale. Google will also become the underlying data analytics technology of Statcast, MLB’s tracking technology for players, coaches, umpires, broadcasters and fans alike. Google will collaborate closely with MLB to bring the next evolution of Statcast, as well as a number of new technological innovations, to life.

“MLB, which has led the sporting world in the use of data since the early 1990s, has shown the sports industry and sporting fans globally what’s possible when you combine data with human performance,” says Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “We’re looking forward to working with MLB to usher in a new era of innovation in sport, and together we can have a substantial impact on the game, giving the next generation of fans a different way to experience America’s favorite pastime.”

MLB’s migration to Google Cloud has already resulted in an exponential improvement in analytics and decision making, enabling MLB to provide teams with a unified data plane to enable accelerated decision making. MLB and the teams will utilize Google Cloud’s capabilities in machine learning, network, and analytics for the development of the fan experience.

The Google Ad Manager platform also continues to help MLB grow its media business by delivering ads seamlessly across screens wherever viewers are watching, whether that’s on mobile, desktop, or connected TV devices; Ad Manager’s integration with Google Cloud BigQuery enables the organization to better analyze its advertising data.