The Oakland Ballers just made sports history by letting an AI system manage an entire baseball game, using ChatGPT trained on a century of baseball data to make real-time decisions from the dugout. But the experiment backfired spectacularly with fans, revealing a deeper tension about AI's role in America's pastime and whether tech innovation belongs on the diamond.
Baseball just got its first AI manager, and the results say more about fan culture than technology. The Oakland Ballers, the scrappy independent team that filled the void left by the departed Oakland A's, let artificial intelligence call all the shots during a recent game - and immediately discovered that some innovations hit foul territory with their community.
The experiment started simple enough. Distillery, an AI development company, trained OpenAI's ChatGPT on over a century of baseball statistics, including every Ballers game, to create a system that could manage in real-time. "Baseball is the perfect place to do an initial experiment like this, because it is so data-driven, and decisions are made very analytically," Ballers owner Paul Freedman told TechCrunch.
And technically, it worked flawlessly. The AI made every pitching change, lineup decision, and strategic call that human manager Aaron Miles would have made. The only override came when Miles had to substitute a sick catcher - hardly a failure of artificial intelligence, more like real-world chaos meeting algorithmic precision.
But perfection wasn't the point. The Ballers, founded by edtech entrepreneur Freedman as Oakland mourned losing the A's to Las Vegas, built their identity on creative experimentation. Minor league teams often test MLB innovations like instant replay and automated strike zones, but the Ballers add theatrical flair to their tech pilots.
Last season, they partnered with Fan Controlled Sports to let supporters make managerial decisions via app. Fans predictably chose chaos over strategy, at one point sending a pitcher to pinch hit. The team lost, but everyone laughed. This AI experiment hit differently.
"There goes the Ballers trying to appeal to Bay Area techies instead of baseball fans," one fan wrote online. "It's so over for Oakland." The backlash caught Freedman completely off-guard. Oakland fans, already burned by three professional franchises fleeing the city in five years, saw the AI stunt as corporate tech-bro posturing rather than playful innovation.
The timing made it worse. Just weeks after winning Oakland's first baseball championship since 1989, the team that positioned itself as the authentic alternative to corporate baseball was experimenting with the same AI automation that many fans blame for displacing human workers across industries.
