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Apple closes deal with MLB and Baseball League teams will switch to iPad Pro

From the next season of games from American Baseball League (Major League Baseball, or MLB), all 30 teams will have help from one great ally: o iPad Pro.

iPad on the MLB

According to the The Wall Street Journal, Apple and MLB signed an agreement for league coaches to use the 12.9 ″ iPad Pro during games. IPads will be coated with a resistant cover with the logo of each team and will have an application called “MLB Dugout”. The software created by MLB in partnership with Apple developers will contain statistics and videos from previous games, as well as being able to simulate plays between hitters and catchers.

The partnership is somewhat unusual, since MLB, for some time, had banned the use of electronic devices such as notebooks, tablets and smartphones. But, unlike the fiasco agreement that Microsoft made with the Football League (National Football League, or NFL) that made it mandatory to use Surface in games, iPads will be optional and will not necessarily need to be shown on TV broadcasts. Although optional, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred believes that technology helps teams a lot and even Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Apple, gave his opinion saying “we’re not just exchanging binders for tablets; we are really helping them to do things that were not possible before ”.

Considering that Apple representatives have already said that even NFL coaches use their iPads “behind the scenes” instead of Surfaces, I believe that adapting the iPads by MLB will not be a very difficult task.

Bearing in mind the incident of American football commentators calling Surfaces “iPad”, now at least baseball commentators will be able to speak openly “iPads” when referring to the tablets used by coaches.

(via TechCrunch)