For a few years now those league-issued iPads in the dugout have been treated like glorified scouting binders — Statcast numbers, video angles, ABS strike zone data. Harmless stuff. Then some front offices got clever and started loading a third, custom tab with software that didn't just display information, it told the manager what to do with it. Pitch calls. Substitution suggestions. Actual in-game decisions being nudged along by generative AI, live, from the top step.
MLB is banning the custom tab on the dugout iPads due to as many as ten power-user teams pushing the envelope on what is considered live inputs. Apps were generating pitch and substitution suggestions. “Gotta stop the cheating before there’s cheating now," said one executive.
According to Sarris, as many as 10 power-user teams had been leaning on these apps, with people familiar with the tech telling him roughly a third of the league had used the dugout iPads for at least one of these AI-assisted purposes. The Miami Marlins are believed to have pioneered pitch-calling from the dugout this season, a trick that reportedly spread to as many as 6 other clubs before the league office stepped in. That's not a rogue operation — that's a third of MLB quietly building an edge nobody voted on.
The league's memo landed with front offices on June 11, and the restriction went fully into effect this past Wednesday as the second half of the season kicked off. The fix is blunt: that third custom tab is just gone. Dugout devices are now locked to the Statcast/video tab and the ABS tab — no more apps generating recommendations on who to bring in or what pitch to throw next.
Breaking story on MLB's crackdown on generative in-game iPad apps making pitch and strategy suggestions: t.co/yedAtRlWj7
The framing from the league side is pure paranoia-management. "Gotta stop the cheating before there's cheating now," one exec told Sarris — which is a very MLB way of saying they didn't want a repeat of the Astros-era trash-can scandal, this time with a chatbot instead of a camera. Notably, the league's review reportedly found no actual sign-stealing rule violations here. This wasn't Apple Watches buzzing in real time. It was teams asking, essentially, "what should we do right now," and getting an answer back instantly.
That's the actual tension. Analytics has been baked into dugout decision-making for a decade — the iPad itself was proof of that. What spooked the league wasn't data, it was autonomy: a system generating the call instead of a human interpreting the data and making it. Front-office innovation staffers are reportedly annoyed, and you can see why — teams spent real resources building this stuff, and now it's dead weight overnight. But MLB clearly decided it would rather kill the tech before some team wins a pennant on an algorithm's fourth-inning double-switch and the whole thing becomes impossible to unwind.
Watch for two things next: whether any team tries to route the same functionality through a personal device or the clubhouse instead of the dugout tablet, and whether the MLBPA or front offices push back on a rule that got written and enforced in about a month. Baseball has spent 20 years fighting over where the line is between smart and cheating. This is just the AI-era version of that same fight.