Year 2 for the Oakland Ballers franchise had a Hollywood ending, with the team breaking the Pioneer League’s regular-season win record and then overcoming an 0-2 deficit in the best-of-five league championship series to deliver the city’s first professional baseball title since 1989. Now fans will be able to experience the essence of Ballers baseball in a new immersive virtual reality (VR) movie that will debut on the Ballers’ website on Monday at 1pm Pacific.
The film, which runs roughly 15 minutes, takes viewers through a “day in the life” of an Oakland Ballers game at historic Raimondi Park in West Oakland. It’s a collaboration between the Ballers and Google XR and is part of a new VR product release, a Samsung VR headset that runs on the Google Android XR operating system.
From being in the stands next to the famous Oakland 68s drummers to walking alongside beer vendors hawking their brews to literally being on the field during game action, viewers are given the full game-day experience in the short film, says Ballers co-founder Bryan Carmel.
“Anybody who has been to Raimondi Park, especially this year, knows there’s something magical about what happens that is kind of hard to articulate and describe. Our thought was: What if we could put a viewer immersively in the middle of that experience?” Carmel said.
The Ballers’ leadership team includes some Google alumni, so Jonathan Zepp, managing partner director, entertainment content and platforms at Google, and his team were familiar with the team’s origin story and the impact the Ballers have had on the community in the wake of the Oakland A’s departure. So when Google went looking for a compelling narrative for this film project, the Ballers were a good fit. But more than that, Zepp was drawn to the Ballers’ history of innovation.
“They are really showcasing innovation in professional baseball and sports, and that’s very much the language that we’re speaking, which is we’d like to see technology used for good and make projects, products, entertainment and sports more enjoyable,” Zepp said. “We’re seeing their use of technology advance the game and we think that’s a good thing to want to highlight and showcase.”
In only two years, the Ballers have not only revived Raimondi Park and the surrounding West Oakland neighborhood, which welcomed the new Prescott Market this year, but the team also had the first woman pitcher start a game in Pioneer League history, played a game where the fans voted on the in-game moves, had one of their games managed by artificial intelligence and opened up their ownership to fan investors, who also have a representative on the team’s board of directors.
“One of the differentiators between the Oakland Ballers and other levels of baseball, probably including MLB, is that we very much, by design, are trying to break down the walls between fans and teams,” Carmel said.
“We think that the game of baseball is beautiful. We love it. We built a team because we love it,” Carmel added. “But we are also always thinking about what are the ways we can make incremental improvements and innovation around the game play and around the game experience … including how we tell stories about the team.”
Viewers can find the video on the Oakland Ballers website and on the Google XR content stream on YouTube. Those without VR headsets won’t have the fully immersive experience but can still watch the full film get a sense of how the immersive technology works by moving the screen around with their fingers or cursors.
Raimondi Park in West Oakland, home of the Ballers, who play in the independent Pioneer League. (Penny Collins / NurPhoto via Associated Press)
The game featured in the film was the Ballers’ Fan Appreciation Day on Sept. 6, which was also the team’s AI-managed game, though that experiment isn’t part of the film. Pioneer League games that are tied at the end of nine innings go to a knockout round, like the one MLB used in this year’s All-Star game. The game in the film went to the knockout round and the cameras were set up right behind the catcher to give viewers an intimate look at how the Ballers’ Cam Buford outslugged Great Falls’ Frank Podkul to give Oakland a 3-2 win.
“We think that the way this project was captured and shot is telling the (Ballers’) story, but it’s also doing it in a way where technology is helping the consumer experience, so you’re able to understand, we hope, what it’s like,” Zepp said.
Carmel admits it was a little nerve-wracking to see the expensive XR cameras behind home plate during the knockout round, where one foul tip could have caused significant damage, but Zepp said taking that risk was well worth it to get the shots.
“Having expensive technical equipment on the field, we’re gonna break a few eggs, both of us,” Zepp said. “But that’s OK, because when you get the winning format, which we think we’ve captured here, you’re really on to something that’s going to scale, not only for the Ballers, not only for Pioneer League, but maybe (beyond).”
The Ballers have had talks with Google XR about several other potential collaborations. Carmel says it isn’t hard to imagine how technology will continue to become a bigger part of the fan experience in the coming years as smart glasses and other wearable technologies become more prevalent and could, for example, someday allow fans attending a game to see stats and other pertinent data pop up on their smart glasses.
“They’re living in a content world and ecosystem that’s like five years down the line, so it’s just fun to brainstorm with them about what the future is for how you tell a story around sports,” Carmel said of their partners in the project.
Zepp hopes the film will give viewers a new way to appreciate live sports.
“It’s showcasing that there’s a more immersive way that you can enjoy sports and baseball, while at the same time understanding the story about innovation,” he said.