Original story posted on The Athletic: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6273478/2025/04/11/atlantic-league-qr-codes-baseballs/
By Jayson Stark
April 11, 2025
The Atlantic League has long been baseball’s No. 1 test lab. And now it’s at it again.
QR codes on baseballs? They’re coming to an Atlantic League game near you this season.
It sometimes feels these days as if the whole world is a giant QR code. But one place those codes are believed to have never appeared is on a baseball in any professional league. Now that’s about to change in the independent Atlantic League, thanks to an idea that welled up in a league brainstorming session over a year ago.
“We have a weekly communications call,” Atlantic League president Rick White said Friday. “And during the call, one of us said, ‘Hey, have we ever tried a QR code on a baseball?’ … And literally within 60 seconds, we had decided we were going to move forward, and as long as it was feasible, we were going to do it.”
So how will this work? And why is this idea that could be copied by other leagues and sports? Here is just one example:
Imagine you’re attending an Atlantic League game and you catch a foul ball or a home run. You then scan the QR code with your phone. Instantly, you could be offered food discounts, 50 percent off tickets for a future game, free parking or an unlimited number of other ballpark perks.
The Atlantic League is going to allow each team to have different codes — and even include the signature of the team owner or managing general partner on the baseballs, alongside the signature of the league president. So the perks and promotions are likely to vary by team — or even by the homestand, game or inning.
“You can do all kinds of things with it,” White said. “And oh, by the way, you can also sell it to a potential sponsor.”
The league views this as an interactive, fan-friendly idea with marketing, revenue and attendance-boosting potential.
“We felt that this was a really interesting, novel and innovative next step,” White said. “And we expect it’s going to be copied relatively rapidly.”
Before the league began mass production of the ball six months ago, it did extensive testing on how the code would hold up in a number of different settings — but especially if bat meets ball right at the QR code. What the league found, White said, was that a smudged or smeared baseball could lose 25 percent of its readability and still work.
As an independent league that operates outside the framework of the affiliated minor leagues, the Atlantic League has been a longtime innovator in many areas. It has partnered with Major League Baseball to try out a variety of possible rule changes, such as the electronic ball-strike challenge system that was tested this year in big-league spring training.
But because it has a contract to manufacture its own baseballs, it also has the freedom to experiment with the ball itself — and out of that freedom grew the QR code idea.
When the league presented that idea to its factory in China, where all minor-league baseballs are manufactured, “they said they’d never been asked to do it before,” White said. “So we are as certain as one could be that nobody’s ever done this before.”
The world of QR code balls will arrive on April 25, when the Atlantic League begins its 27th season.
