Case Study: Major League Baseball achieves 2-3x faster self-service BI and deeper fan engagement with Looker

MLB modernizes BI to give fans even more to cheer about

Major League Baseball (MLB), the oldest major professional sports league, faced a legacy BI environment that produced static, inconsistent reports and created a high technical barrier for non‑technical users. Reliant on a central BI team, Clubs received emailed PDFs, dealt with crashing tools and version‑control problems, and couldn’t fully leverage recent investments in cloud infrastructure—limiting timely, data‑driven decisions for marketing, sponsorships, and fan experiences.

MLB migrated its BI to Google Cloud Looker, using LookML, Git version control and SSO to build a standardized, customizable portal for all 30 Clubs and integrate marketing data with Google Ad Manager/Campaign Manager. The self‑service platform sped reporting dramatically (up to 23x), boosted Club marketing usage by ~60%, enabled measured social media ROI for sponsors, and delivered real‑time insights—from All‑Star voting to optimized instant replays—resulting in more trusted, accessible analytics and stronger fan engagement.

MLB

George Calvo

BI Engineer