Welcome back to our special two-part series here on the Athletic Podcast Network.

I am Mike Smeltz.

In episode one, we looked at how the fan experience will change in the near future.

Now going to the games, watching the games and taking a piece of the games home are shifting

in the digital age, today we're looking at what is evolving from the player team at

league perspective.

Now baseball is a sport that straddles both the cutting edge of innovation and a dedication

to its roots, one element of the game that has spanned the decades is players and teams

dedication to cheating.

It's a big salvo in the war over the stealing signs.

Everyone's always trying to steal each other's signs, they still are.

That is, you know, Sarah's baseball writer at the Athletic who often writes about the

confluence of analytics and gameplay in the sport.

Sarah's is talking about a new piece of equipment in baseball called pitchcom that yes is

an advancement in the game but looks like something from 30 years ago.

So this year they've introduced pitchcom device and it just looks like an old school

I don't know almost like a pager or something with the big fat buttons on it.

It's got these big fat buttons on it, it's on the it's on the wrist of the catcher and

they can press a couple buttons and then it just basically I think it's Bluetooth technology

and it goes to the hat of the pitcher and it'll actually say slider and the funny thing

about it is you can record whoever whatever voice you want because they wanted to be able

to make it Spanish, you know, they wanted to be able to make it any language they wanted

...