Korean Robot Baseball Fans Are the Future

It's obvious robots will one day be performing many of the duties humans now do, even in sports. Baseball has already started to outsource some of its labor to robots: Players take practice hacks from pitching machines. There's instant replay for close calls. Target Field in Minneapolis has an automatic beer dispenser. But we have to head to South Korea for the latest sign of the rise of the machines. That's where the Hanwha Eagles have installed robot fans in their stadium.

The Eagles are the Houston Astros of the Korea Professional Baseball League, having come in dead last in four out of the last five seasons. (They're currently headed for another last-place finish.) The team is so bad opposing fans call them the Hanwha Chickens. The team has won the Korean Series just once, in 1999.

But the team says the gimmick is not about filling the stadium with three extra rows of mechanical fans: The robots in the Eagles' Daejeon Baseball Stadium hold up LED signs with appropriate cheers and text messages of support from fans who can't get to the game. Fans can also upload selfies to be displayed on the robots' faces, and even control some of their movements.

"I like the fact that I can send messages even when I am not in the ballpark or not watching the game on TV," Eagles fan Kim Seung-bi told Korea Biz Wire. "I am proud of being an Eagles fan as the club has pioneered the world's first all-digital cheerleading troops."

The ominous use of the word "troops" aside, this all seems pretty innocuous. When they're not relaying texts from Eagles fans and showing their faces, the robots are using the team's traditional cheers: "Go Eagles!" and "I Love You, Eagles!"

The robots sit in the outfield, and the players—or at least the player quoted in the team's official promotional video—seem to enjoy it. "The signs out there, out in the outfield, it's a pretty neat idea," 28-year-old Eagles pitcher Andrew Albers said in the video. "I think it gets the crowd into it and really helps them get involved." (Albers, a Saskatchewan native, made ten starts for the Twins last season.)

This isn't the first time a team has experimented with putting fake fans in the stands; Italian soccer side Triestina tried a similar gimmick in 2010. The team, which at the time competed in Serie B, covered up 10,000 seats in the stadium that faced the TV cameras. The team sold ads on the vinyl coverings, but also had photographs of cheering Triestina fans printed on them. It looked a bit silly, mainly because when they unveiled this scheme it was a warm September day and the fake fans were wearing scarves and winter jackets.

While the owner and GM told the Wall Street Journal the team was forced into the situation, supporters were less enthused. "It's depressing," supporter Marco Caselli told the Journal. "It's as if we're sending out the message that Trieste has no flesh-and-blood fans, just cardboard cutouts."

the team drew just 4,546 fans (in what should have been a 32,454-seat stadium) that first game, but the reduction in attendance saved the team $130,000 that season in personnel and insurance costs and was expected to pay for itself. The extra cash flow wasn't able to help the team, however, and it was relegated from Italy's second division that year and eventually folded in June 2012. Reformed a month later, it now plays in Serie D—the top level of Italian non-professional soccer.

The robot fans aren't a cost-cutting move for the Eagles, though attendance is down since star Hyun-Jin Ryu (who was MVP of the Korean Series in 2006, his rookie year, when the Eagles lost to the Samsung Lions four games to one) left for the Los Angeles Dodgers after the 2012 season.

It's unclear if the robots will help attendance in the future, but we do know one thing: This is only the beginning. Robot fans could probably help the Tampa Bay Rays out, and after that, who knows? Robot managers who can calculate the odds of stealing bases and pulling pitchers? Robot pitchers who never need Tommy John surgery? Someday, baseball will be played by and for robots, which will give humans a lot more free time.

Follow Dan McQuade on Twitter.