The Oakland Ballers let an AI manage the team. What could go wrong?

The Oakland Ballers, an independent Pioneer League baseball team formed in response to the departure of the Oakland A’s, recently experimented with letting an AI manage their team during a game. Drawing on over a century of baseball data and analytics, including Ballers-specific information, the AI—developed by the company Distillery and based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT—was trained to emulate the strategic decisions of the team’s human manager, Aaron Miles. This experiment leveraged baseball’s inherently data-driven nature and the slower pace of play, which allows for analytical decision-making after each pitch. The AI’s management closely mirrored the choices that Miles would have made, including pitching changes, lineup construction, and pinch hitters, with only one override needed due to a player’s illness. This demonstrated that while AI can optimize decisions by recognizing patterns in data, human ingenuity and judgment remain essential. The Ballers’ willingness to pilot such technology reflects their unique position as a minor league team with major league aspirations and creative flexibility, often