baller allowed one hit and zero runs over three innings, striking out two and walking one.” Passan isn’t fearing a robot takeover of his career anytime soon, in part because he reads GameChanger’s AI recaps. “As a person who writes about baseball for a living, every time I look at the game story, I am appalled,” Passan says. “It’s a terrible misrepresentation of what has happened during the game.” Lori Shontz is a veteran journalist who now teaches at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. She’s covered sports all over the world and now teaches sportswriting along with other reporting fundamentals. At OB’s request, Shontz evaluated the recap of the Tualatin game and said she couldn’t determine if the game even mattered, since the article didn’t include either team’s season record of wins and losses. There are no interviews with coaches and players, of course, and no stakes or tension. “The people who do this work really well are the ones who truly put it into a story with a beginning, middle and end with turning points and with some level of analysis,” Shontz says. “And that’s very difficult to do, and sports happen on deadline.” Shontz lives in the Eugene-Springfield area and has observed the diminishment of The Register-Guard’s sports coverage. (The once-robust newsroom is now down to seven employees after a 2018 acquisition by Gannett Co., Inc.) “It has been gutted,” she says. “So I completely get that there’s a need for this.” GameChanger recaps don’t run in mainstream news outlets, though Ahuja has seen reporters reference them on Twitter (rebranded as X at the end of July). GameChanger partnered with Narrative Science (now part of Salesforce) on the “natural language generation” technology in the early 2010s but has built a good bit of it themselves. “It hasn’t taken something that humans were doing and replaced it,” Ahuja says. “It just wasn’t being done at all.” Settled into a low-slung camping chair on the grassy sidelines of the Tualatin game, Portland mom Jessica Young watches her eighth-grade son play ball in real time and then the statistics load on GameChanger moments later on her phone. “It’s super helpful, because it is so rare that they ever have a scoreboard,” Young says. “If you don’t use this, you’re constantly asking people the score or trying to keep track in your head.” As a mother of four, her children play baseball, soccer, track and football. Young’s phone is cluttered with seven apps to keep track of all those teams: one for soccer, one for club soccer, one for tournaments, one that she just uses for which jersey color her son should wear and so on. “It’s obnoxious,” she says. If Ahuja’s plans come to fruition, she could be down to just one app in the next few years. Transitioning the GameChanger technology to other sports is the biggest challenge currently facing the company, Ahuja says. Baseball fans are notoriously obsessed with statistics, which is not the case in, say, soccer. Tailoring its product to dozens of new sports, each with their own cultures, is tricky. “We have to make sure we’re delivering what each sport wants,” Ahyuja says. “We’re spending a lot of time making sure we’re smart on that front.” Size of the field or court, pace of play and reliance on statistics (or not) all factor into how new sports will use GameChanger. Basketball and volleyball are easy to film in gymnasiums, whereas soccer and football are on huge fields that are tough to capture with amateur equipment. (Passan thinks that hockey would be “almost impossible” for amateurs to track statistics because of the relentless pace.) One commonality? “The emotion at the parent/grandparent level is the same no matter which sport it is,” Ahuja says. “People are people and they want to be connected to their kids.” Cleveland-player mom Jessica Young uses the app to keep relatives updated about the game. 40
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