During Apple’s iPhone launch two weeks ago, I spotted a 10-second augmented reality demo that could potentially change the way we watch baseball.

“What the (expletive) is that?” I said, as Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller teased how fans at a game could see special stats, including how hard a ball was hit, or how far it was thrown, or how fast a player runs in real time simply by pointing their iPhone toward the action on the field using a new AR feature in Major League Baseball’s popular At Bat mobile app. 

Also watching, my colleague Claudia Cruz yelled my name from across the office to make sure we both saw the same thing. I emailed MLB spokesman Matthew Gould. “Let me get back to you,” he replied.

A week later, Claudia and I found ourselves jockeying with other reporters in a crowded suite at AT&T Park in San Francisco — about a 45-minute drive north of Apple’s spaceship campus in Silicon Valley. We were promised a sneak peek of the new AR capabilities during an actual game between the San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies. It’s an internal prototype for the remainder of this season, with the goal to debut the updated app in 2018. 

It’s no secret Apple wants its augmented reality developer kit, announced this spring, to be used to create apps for the iPhone and iPad to live long past last year’s Pokemon Go phenomenon. Now the tech giant is experimenting with At Bat, the most popular sports league app, to give diehard baseball fans like Claudia and me more data than we probably can consume. The AR feature may also give MLB teams looking to cheat, er um take advantage of getting to use their iPads  during games.

“We want this to be fun for fans in the stands, to tell them something new about the game they can’t see on the scoreboard or having to search hard for,” said Chad Evans, a mobile product executive with MLB Advanced Media, baseball’s interactive arm. “Everything is in play.”

For non-sports fans, Claudia and I compare this AR feature to those Omnioculars used to watch Quidditch matches in the Harry Potter movies. “They will provide the user with a play-by-play breakdown if desired, showing the names of the manoeuveres performed by players,” according to the Harry Potter Wiki page.

And that’s sort of what the MLB At Bat app AR feature does. On Wednesday, Evans and Greg Cain, MLBAM’s senior data director, pulled out iPad Pros and showed us how, by clicking on a player’s augmented image, you can get their data from Statcast, which uses HD cameras, a Doppler radar and machine learning to track every move on the field.

Statcast gives teams, broadcasters and fans random metrics and trivia, including why New York Yankees’ rookie Aaron Judge’s 495-foot home run is the longest this season. Or how his teammate Aroldis Chapman has thrown the season’s fastest pitch at 105 miles-per-hour with the ball spinning a dizzying 2,600 times after it left his hand. 

During the Giants-Rockies game, we grilled Evans and Cain on what stats are available. Could they tell us how hard Rockies star and National League MVP candidate Charlie Blackmon hits a baseball? It’s around 86 mph (his exit velocity) compared with Judge, who hits it around 117 mph? We also learned that Rockies’ catcher Jonathan Lucroy has a 28 “sprint speed,” which means he’s too slow to steal a base.

Too inside baseball? That’s what the developers are trying to figure out — how to make the data not too intimidating for the casual fan, but not too underwhelming for stat freaks.

“We’re going to try to create the right information at the right time, we just need to figure out how to do it,” Evans said. “There’s all of these data stories we are going to try to tell.”

The demo left us wanting more. Claudia wants to see instant replays in AR, as well as the weight, height and strength comparisons of players on the field. She also wants the app to anticipate when a record could be broken.

I’d like the feature to show me what a hitter’s batting average is when he has two strikes and the bases are loaded and the probability of him hitting either a triple or a double in that same situation.

We could be asking too much, but they tell us that being able to marry data with the world is the promise of AR.

“This is not a static product,” Cain said. “We will continue to grow and build it out over time.”

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