AI or not, one MLB team's media coverage sounds like a patchwork job for 2025

When the Oakland A's announced they would temporarily relocate to West Sacramento for the 2025 season, the media responsible for covering the team largely responded in kind: with temporary plans.

There are exceptions to this rule, as Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday. Martin Gallegos, the A's beat writer for MLB.com, relocated to Sacramento. The A's new home field, Sutter Health Park, is making some fairly large structural accommodations for its new tenant: underground cables, a booth for visiting radio broadcasters, seating for visiting beat writers, and larger dugouts to accommodate cameras, among other upgrades.

MLB and NBC Sports Regional Networks announced a new partnership today to stream A's games direct-to-consumers through https://t.co/Nk2K9Y6ik7 during the 2025 season.https://t.co/kgqolibUmN
— Martín Gallegos (@MartinJGallegos) March 19, 2025

But in some fundamental ways, the A's will be covered differently than the other 29 teams, all of whom — even the similarly displaced Tampa Bay Rays — are playing close enough to home in 2025 to present few logistical hurdles.

Perhaps the biggest change is one sports fans don't consider often enough. The Associated Press is responsible for providing wire stories to media outlets around the world from every game in every major pro sports league. ESPN, Yahoo, and MSN (among others) all routinely relay the AP's accounts from individual games every day.

That includes, critically, the basic account of who won, who lost, and what happened along the way. For years, this has been true for all 30 MLB teams.

Unfortunately for the A's, the AP doesn't have a full-time writer based in Sacramento, As a result, Slusser reports, the AP will sometimes "cover" the A's using writers who watch the games remotely, on television, or with something that sure sounds like Generative AI.

For some games, the AP has relied on data accessed by Data Skrive and Sportradar to "generate" stories about the Sacramento Kings, among other teams not always staffed by an actual reporter. Here's one example.

According to Data Skrive's website, its technology "creates new content that is developed by seasoned-sports journalists and scaled using Generative AI as a 'co-pilot' to this content."

The AP's global sports editor, Ricardo Zuniga, told Slusser "that’s not generative AI, though, it’s the same technology we’ve used for years for MLS, WNBA and some college basketball.”

A seasoned sports journalist would know, among other things, that "seasoned-sports" shouldn't be hyphenated in that sentence. So too would they note the irony that the San Francisco Giants blocked the A's from moving to San Jose in the 1990s, when the Bay Area's population shifted closer to the technology capital of the world — a sensible place for an MLB team if there ever were one.

Now the A's are going to Sacramento, where their coverage will rely uniquely on Silicon Valley's latest crowning achievement: AI. Hmmm.

Setting aside the semantic debate around whether AI will "cover" the Sacramento A's or not, fans should know just how unequal the media footing will be for the team in MLB's newest market.

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