Joe Lemire

Senior Writer at Sports Business Journal

Contributor at MLB

Senior writer: @SBJ. Contributor: @MLBNetwork. Prior: Sports Illustrated staff writer. Other work: NYT, WSJ, USA Today, B/R, Men's Health.

Articles

Torpedo bats are the talk of baseball, but experts offer a reality-check

3 weeks ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

As the Yankees tied a record with 15 home runs in their opening weekend three-game series, attention has grown around the so-called torpedo, or bowling pin, bats that five players have been swinging. That quintet -- Jazz Chisholm Jr., Anthony Volpe, Austin Wells, Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt -- slugged nine of those 15 home runs while wielding a seemingly misshapen bat: with the sweet spot thicker in size and a more pronounced taper toward the end.
Rematch lets parents record their kids’ sports highlights after they happen

3 weeks ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

Rematch, a sports video service started in France, is expanding to the US market to help parents and amateur sports organizations better capture and distribute content. The core technology is its AI-powered auto-rewind feature. A common problem facing anyone trying to tape key moments in sporting events is either not knowing when to press record — it’s easy to miss a highlight — or recording too much and filling up your device’s storage with less memorable moments.
MLB.TV suffers Opening Day outage

3 weeks ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

MLB’s national streaming package, MLB.TV, suffered a nationwide outage in the early afternoon hours of Opening Day. On what is typically one of the most watched days of the season, subscribers were unable to load individual games. Only the MLB Big Inning whiparound show was being carried by the service, with fans unable to tune into any one of the 10 concurrent games. An MLB spokesperson said the league was aware of the technical issue and working to restore service as quickly as possible.
WNBA partners with nVenue for microbetting, interactive gaming

4 weeks ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

Microbetting company nVenue has partnered with the WNBA to provide its predictive analytics for the 2025 season, the startup’s first deal with a women’s sports property after previous work with the NBA, NASCAR and Apple TV for its Friday night MLB games. This follows a recent multimillion-dollar funding round from strategic investors FDJ Ventures, The Collectiv, and DigitalWin. Lead investor KB Partners also added participated with a follow-on check.
UFL strives for innovation and access

4 weeks ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

ARLINGTON, Texas -- As the first joint practice of UFL training camp was underway on the Choctaw Stadium turf, the press box was full of commotion. This was the technology team’s first dress rehearsal, and the UFL prides itself on incubating new ideas and implementing them quickly for its own benefit as well as broadcast rightsholders ESPN and Fox Sports. With all eight teams holding training camp in Arlington, Choctaw is its primary lab -- outfitted with 5G antennas and just a short walk from HQ.
ShotTracker embraces AI to improve coaching products, reach fans with monetizable assets

4 weeks ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

The T-Mobile Center videoboard at the men’s and women’s Big 12 Conference basketball tournaments often showed shot charts and 3D heat maps, showing where players had been making shots. Fans could log into the conference app and play interactive games, such as a version of Bingo based on advanced stats. All season at Kansas’ Phog Allen Fieldhouse, the two new corner videoboards showed similarly immersive data culled from the court.
Ryan Rossner has gone from beating the clock with kicks to stopping the clock with science

1 month ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

Ryan Rossner starred as a kicker at Stephen F. Austin before taking two years to pursue an NFL career, signing as an undrafted free agent with the Atlanta Falcons. When he didn’t break through, he returned to school and went on to earn a Ph.D. in molecular aging, studying under University of Washington professors Brian Kennedy and Matt Kaeberlein and pursuing research with Scott Leiser.
AI training firm Svexa joins the NVIDIA Inception accelerator

1 month ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

Svexa, which uses artificial intelligence algorithms to design training programs, recently accepted an invitation to join NVIDIA Inception, an accelerator sponsored by the AI computing giant. NVIDIA Inception intends to help promising startups through preferred access to technology, technical support, introductions to venture capital firms and a bump in market awareness.
A Pitch Back In Time

1 month ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

Baseball has many forms, from the pros on pristine big-league diamonds to the crabgrass-strewn fields where I now coach my young children. There are innumerable intermediary variants, including a Wiffle ball game invented by my old high school friends called Boosh Ball, coined for a playful mispronunciation of the bushes in front of Draper Cottage where the games were played. Where the ball landed determined the type of hit. It was slow-paced, no base running allowed.
ChatGPT helped SBJ Tech’s Joe Lemire fill out his men’s March Madness bracket.

1 month ago | sportsbusinessjournal.com | Joe Lemire

When SBJ’s Joe Lemire first used ChatGPT to help fill out his March Madness bracket last year, AI was “more of a tutor than a cheat,” as it guided him to resources to solve his own problem rather than serving as the back-of-the-textbook answer key. This week, however, ChatGPT minced political niceties and started making predictions. See what GenAI had to say about all the action and which teams could make it all the way.