The Seattle Seahawks are in search of a buyer — but first they’ve locked up the organization’s first-ever global partner, signing a multi-year partnership with Accenture this week.

The deal pairs one of the world’s largest technology consulting firms with the NFL’s reigning Super Bowl champions, with Accenture bringing data and AI capabilities to bear on the franchise’s business operations and fan engagement.

Starting with data infrastructure and platform design, Accenture will work to modernize the Seahawks’ technology foundation with an eye toward broader innovation down the road.

The collaboration launches with a tangible fan-facing element: an Accenture-presented “Trophy Tour” taking the Seahawks’ Super Bowl LX hardware on the road to Germany, Australia and Canada — markets where NFL interest is growing and fans can connect to Seattle’s football story.

“This partnership brings together two organizations committed to innovation and global engagement, and is an exciting step forward for the Seahawks as we continue to expand our international efforts,” Isabelle Van Coevorden, Seahawks managing director of global markets, said in a statement.

The deal also has a local giving component, with plans for scholarship support, volunteer engagement and community access programs in Seattle. For Accenture, it extends a broader push into sports — the firm already works with the NFL, women’s tennis and golf organizations on technology and operations.

Accenture has a significant Seattle-area presence, and the Seahawks have been intertwined with tech since Paul Allen — the late Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist — bought the team in 1997, kept it in Seattle, and turned it into Super Bowl champs.

Allen died in 2018, and his estate put the Seahawks up for sale in February — shortly after the team’s Super Bowl LX victory over New England — with all proceeds directed toward philanthropy. The franchise is expected to fetch upwards of $7 billion.

Several high-profile names have surfaced as potential buyers. Former Boston Celtics majority owner Wyc Grousbeck and ArcelorMittal CEO Aditya Mittal were reported in May to be preparing a bid. Todd Boehly, who owns the Los Angeles Dodgers, L.A. Lakers and Chelsea Football Club, emerged as another potential suitor in June.

Accenture employs 799,000 people in offices around the world, including locations in Seattle, Redmond and Kirkland. The company says it serves approximately 9,000 clients and generated about $70 billion in FY25 revenue.

Seattle Kraken fans, Melinda French Gates is ready to “see you in the deep.”

The billionaire philanthropist and the NHL team’s ownership group announced Monday that French Gates is taking a stake in the Kraken as a minority investor.

One Roof Sports and Entertainment, which oversees the Kraken, Climate Pledge Arena and associated properties, said in a news release that French Gates “shares its commitment to civic engagement in Seattle and a shared dedication to investing in the region’s future.”

French Gates also appeared in an Instagram video announcing the news alongside Samantha Holloway, One Roof’s majority owner and managing partner.

“Melinda is an impressive business leader, philanthropist and importantly, a Seattle sports fan,” Holloway said in a statement. “We share many of the same values, including a deep commitment to Seattle and a belief in building organizations that create lasting impact.”

French Gates called herself “a big believer in the power of sports” and said that after many years of “cheering on Seattle from the sidelines,” she’s excited “to have an even deeper connection to the Seattle sports community.”

The ex-wife of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, French Gates has a net worth of about $30 billion, according to Forbes. That wealth has landed her on short lists of potential buyers for another team in town — the Seattle Seahawks — alongside other billionaires with connections to the region.

One Roof has said that it will pursue an NBA team in Seattle, should the league move forward with expansion, and French Gates could end up positioned to have a stake there, as well.

For his part, Bill Gates has expressed no interest in owning the Seahawks or any other pro sports team.

When it comes to tech notables, French Gates joins an ownership that includes Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Others in the group include Holloway, film producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Kraken CEO Tod Leiweke, hip-hop star Macklemore, and former Seahawk Marshawn Lynch.

French Gates founded Pivotal as an organization to oversee her philanthropic commitment to women and families in the U.S. and around the world. She was previously co-chair of the Gates Foundation in Seattle.

Earlier this year, she took part in the SheBelieves Summit in Seattle, a U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team platform to bring together influential voices across sports, business, media and culture.

French Gates’ Kraken stake is pending NHL approval.

GeekWire reached out to Pivotal for further comment and we’ll update this post when we hear back.

Former Boston Celtics majority owner Wyc Grousbeck and Aditya Mittal, an investor in the NBA team, are preparing a bid to purchase the Seattle Seahawks, according to a report Thursday by Sportico.

The report cites multiple people familiar with the process in saying that Grousbeck and Mittal submitted a letter of interest to the banking team handling the sale process for the Paul G. Allen estate. The Seahawks, Grousbeck and Mittal declined to comment to Sportico.

Mittal is a member of one of India’s richest families and is CEO of ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based steel manufacturing company. He invested $1 billion in the group that purchased the Celtics in 2025 for $6.1 billion.

Grousbeck led the ownership group that bought the Celtics in 2002 for $360 million.

At least one Seahawks fan site was optimistic about the potential bid. 12th Man Rising quoted Celtics expert Ben Handler, who called Grousbeck a popular owner who was “present but also hands off” — much like Paul and then his sister, Jody Allen.

“If the Seahawks are going to be sold, then Grousbeck and Mittal, who could invest the most amount of money, would appear to be the perfect transition from the Allen family,” the site said.

The estate of Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder, announced that the Seahawks were being put up for sale in February as part of the long process of divesting many of the assets and investments that Allen made during his lifetime. All proceeds are being directed toward philanthropy.

The team, which won its second NFL championship last season, is expected to fetch upwards of $7 billion.

A report last month named Apple CEO Tim Cook and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg as potential Seahawks suitors, but the two denied any interest.

After more than a decade building cricket fields, sponsoring youth teams, and developing local talent in the Pacific Northwest, a group of Seattle-area tech veterans has taken their investment in the sport to a somewhat unexpected place: Boston.

The five co-owners of the newly acquired New England Eagles, a Minor League Cricket franchise, are all based in the Pacific Northwest and have combined leadership experience at Microsoft, Zuper, T-Mobile, Capital One, and Bee Talent Solutions.

Their hearts, they say, are here, too. But when no local MiLC franchise slot was available and the group was ready to scale, they bought a team they could get.

“We prioritize the pathway over the geography,” said Anand Subbaraj, co-owner and CEO of Seattle startup Zuper. “If we have to operate a team 3,000 miles away to ensure our local players have a door to Team USA, we’ll open that door every time.”

The other four co-owners are Vandana Thomas, a senior product leader at Microsoft and one of only two women co-owners across the entire Minor League Cricket system; Gaurav Seth, a partner director at Microsoft with 23 years at the tech giant; Manoj Naidu, co-founder and COO of Bee Talent Solutions; and Satheesh Santhamurthi, a technology executive at Capital One and president of the Seattle-area USA Cricket Youth Hub.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The group has been heavily invested in Pacific Northwest cricket for years as coaches, sponsors, and youth program organizers. Seattle already has a Major League Cricket team in the Orcas, and the owners argue the region should have a deeper pipeline feeding into it. Minor League Cricket is the developmental tier that bridges local talent to MLC and ultimately Team USA.

They are hardly the first tech veterans in the Seattle area to see cricket as worth backing. The Orcas’ investor group includes Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Madrona Venture Group Managing Director Soma Somasegar, and Icertis co-founder and CEO Samir Bodas, among others. The Seattle Thunderbolts, the area’s Minor League Cricket team, were founded with backing from tech industry veterans as well.

The Eagles’ new owners plan to run the franchise like a sports-tech startup, using data for player health and performance, treating fan growth like a user acquisition funnel, and building business plans the way they’d build a product roadmap — an approach that fits squarely within that tradition.

“Our group brings best in class product thinking, engineering efficiency, and an AI-forward mindset to a traditional franchise model,” Seth said. “When you apply a disciplined tech stack to the passion of sports, the ceiling is genuinely high.”

The acquisition comes at a pivotal moment for cricket in the U.S. Major League Cricket launched in 2023 with six franchises, including the Orcas, and the sport is set to make its Olympic return at the 2028 Los Angeles Games — a deadline that has accelerated investment across the ecosystem.

For Thomas, the stakes are personal. Her son recently became the first fully homegrown male Seattle youth player to represent Team USA at the ICC Under-19 World Cup.

“Cricket in the U.S. is at an inflection point, and the people who get involved now will shape what it looks like for the next generation,” Thomas said. “I want my sons and every other kid playing in this country to see that the pathway from a local pitch to Team USA is real — and that women, families, and underrepresented communities are part of building it.”

While the Eagles will play out the upcoming season in New England, the ownership group has signaled longer-term ambitions to expand cricket programming in the Pacific Northwest. They also want to help seed a broader culture of private investment in a sport that, despite its massive global following, is still building the financial foundations that more established American sports take for granted.”

“Cricket in this country doesn’t just need more money — it needs more believers,” Naidu said. “Player pathways, ground maintenance, youth tournaments, coaching infrastructure: none of that gets built without people willing to put real capital and real time behind it. We’ve been doing that at the grassroots for years, and now we’re doing it at the franchise level.”

When Bill Belichick famously spiked a Microsoft Surface tablet as the New England Patriots head coach in 2016, the moment was a symbol of frustration with technology on the sidelines.

But inside the company, it actually became a point of pride. Thomas Labuzienski, a senior partnerships manager at Microsoft, shared the rest of the story with us this week: the Belichick device made it back to the company — where testing showed, amazingly, that it still worked.

That rugged (and apparently indestructible) hardware remains the tech giant’s most visible presence on NFL game days. But these days, the action is inside: Copilot, AI agents, and live data tools that are changing how coaches, players, and scouts prepare and compete.

That was one of the takeaways from an event Wednesday at Seattle’s Lumen Field, where Microsoft walked content creators and this reporter through some of its latest NFL technology. High above the field, social media and YouTube influencers posed for photos and selfies with a Microsoft Surface Copilot+ PC much like NFL fans would with their favorite players.

It was an off-season glimpse into the evolution of Microsoft’s partnership with the league, which started in 2013 and was extended last summer to go deeper on AI and cloud tools.

Just as with business workflows, these tools are changing how teams operate on and off the field. One big benefit of AI, Microsoft says, is speed: getting the right information to the right person fast enough to shape the next play call or adjustment. But the coaches, players, and staff are ultimately still calling the plays, both literally and figuratively.

“We’re not using AI and technology to make decisions for them,” Labuzienski said. “They’re the experts. They know what they’re trying to do.”

Even with baseball and soccer well under way, Microsoft seems as excited as ever about football, especially with its hometown Seahawks coming off a Super Bowl championship.

Here’s what we saw and learned during the event:

Copilot filtering: The NFL’s Sideline Viewing System now features Copilot-powered filters that let coaches and players instantly sort plays by down, distance, quarter, and gain type. 

Labuzienski demonstrated how a play that took a minute to find manually could be located in seconds using the filters. “That five seconds can mean giving my coach the right information so they can make the right adjustment or the right play call,” he said.

Excel on the sidelines: One analyst per team has access to a real-time Excel dashboard in the coaches booth that pulls live play-by-play and player usage data from the NFL. 

Coaches can load custom templates before the game and use Copilot to run analyses on the fly — tracking formation tendencies, snap counts, and player load without having to manually write formulas mid-game.

NFL Combine: Microsoft built a custom AI agent trained on 10 years of NFL Combine data, allowing scouts to query prospects using natural language. This helps teams assess players faster than ever during one of the most time-sensitive periods of the NFL calendar.

For example, Labuzienski said, “If I really love this defensive lineman, I can pull his data compared to other prospects over the last 10 years.”

Tablets on game days: Hardware is still a key part of the equation, of course. Labuzienski said there are 2,500 Copilot Plus PCs throughout the league on game day, with 20 on each sideline, and 10 in each coach’s booth.

Tech as a coaching advantage: Back when Belichick got his start, NFL sidelines relied on thermal printers hardwired to stadium cameras. It was a process that took minutes, with runners ferrying photos into binders for coaches and players on the sidelines. 

Technology has transformed all of that, and a new generation of coaches has grown up never knowing anything different.

Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald, who has openly embraced his reputation as a “football nerd,” is a prime example. Labuzienski said he represents exactly the kind of coach Microsoft has built its NFL partnership around. Macdonald views technology as a differentiator across the league and has said it’s an advantage for the Seahawks to embrace it.

Even coaches less enthusiastic about AI are coming around, Labuzienski said, if only to avoid falling behind. “They do, sometimes begrudgingly, study up and make sure they get the most out of the technology,” he said.

Digital-first players: Labuzienski said he’s seen players become some of the most engaged users of sideline technology — sometimes more so than the staff around them.

“I was at the preseason game with the Bills against the Bears, and after every single drive, Josh Allen picked up this device,” Labuzienski said of the Bills QB. “He was talking with the other quarterbacks, and they were using it to go through the plays from that previous series.”

The system is designed to make that kind of real-time collaboration easy. The 20 devices on each sideline are all connected, with coaches in the booth able to write notes directly to individual player profiles — so a quarterback picking up a tablet can instantly see what his position coach upstairs is flagging, without having to radio up or wait for a break in the action.

That dynamic is likely to only deepen as younger players enter the league. 

Microsoft was at last year’s Rookie Premier — an event where roughly 40 top draft picks gather for brand activations ahead of their first NFL season — and showed the incoming class the Sideline Viewing System for the first time. The reaction was telling.

“A lot of them really quickly picked it up and were able to click around,” Labuzienski said. “They’re very digital-first — very savvy.”

The New York Yankees just cruised through Seattle and won two out of three games against the Mariners. On the other side of Washington state, the Bronx Bombers’ “torpedo bats” were being scientifically scrutinized.

In what Washington State University is calling the first-ever laboratory experiments on the new baseball bat design, researchers found that torpedo bats and traditional bats basically perform the same.

It didn’t look that way last season, when the Yankees hit a franchise-record nine home runs in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers and drew viral attention to the bats that they were swinging.

The torpedo bat design relies on a slightly different shape in which wood is removed from the barrel tip and added to the bat’s sweet spot, so that the diameter tapers down, a little like a bowling pin. But the hype appears overblown.

“Wood is wood,” Lloyd Smith, a professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and director of the university’s Sports Science Laboratory, told WSU Insider. “When it comes to baseball, there’s not a lot you can do with wood. If your goal is to keep the game steady and consistent and not have a lot of change, wood bats are good.”

Smith is part of a research team that includes Alan Nathan from University of Illinois and Daniel Russell from Penn State University. They’ll present their findings at the upcoming International Sports Engineering Association conference, June 1–4 in Pullman, Wash.

According to WSU Insider, the researchers created two maple bats that were duplicates of a standard Major League Baseball bat. Two additional maple bats were made with a torpedo-shaped barrel that gave them the same swing weight as the standard bat.

They measured how much energy the bat returns to the ball by firing baseballs from an air cannon at a stationary bat and using light gates and cameras to measure the speed of the incoming and rebounding ball.

The team found nearly identical performance for the torpedo and standard bats except that the sweet spot for the torpedo bat was a half inch farther from the bat tip than the standard bat.

“It was actually pretty phenomenal how close they were,” said Smith.

While some Yankees players said last year that any little tweak could provide an advantage, the team’s captain wasn’t convinced.

Aaron Judge hit an American League-record 62 homers in 2022, 58 in an MVP season in 2024 and 53 as repeat MVP in 2025. He had three homers using a traditional bat in that much-talked-about rout of the Brewers.

“The past couple of seasons kind of speak for itself,” Judge told ESPN last May. “Why try to change something?”

The Seattle Mariners open the 2026 season tonight at T-Mobile Park against the Cleveland Guardians. And perhaps the biggest question on the minds of fans, apart from whether the team will make another playoff run, is how in the heck to watch the games on TV or online.

It hasn’t been easy to figure out. But for fans who can’t be there in person, there are finally some answers to where and how you can see the team.

The Mariners announced more details on Wednesday for traditional cable and streaming viewers in the Seattle area and across the Pacific Northwest, including:

• Comcast/Xfinity subscribers can watch games on channel 1261.
• Charter/Spectrum subscribers in Seattle/Tacoma market can watch on channel 414.
• DirecTV watchers can turn to channel 687.

The Mariners listed other cities and providers in the team’s home territory — Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska — in a Wednesday post on X, below.

“Fans who are already subscribed to providers carrying Mariners TV will automatically see the channel populate into their channel lineup,” the team said.

The Mariners also enabled a “channel finder” on their website that lets fans search by zip code to find available providers and channel information in their area.

I hopelessly searched for YouTube TV, the service I use, on Thursday morning, and got this message: “Sorry, but the Seattle Mariners are not being offered by YouTube TV at this time. Please call them directly or click below to let them know you want the Seattle Mariners added to your channel lineup.”

Those without a broadcast provider in the mix can turn to Mariners.TV, the direct-to-consumer, standalone streaming option. Fans can stream games with no local blackouts via web or the MLB App on mobile or smart TV devices for $99.99/season or $19.99/month.

Fans who live outside the Mariners home market will be able to watch games with the standard MLB.TV package.

The team’s TV guide also lists games this season that will be shown exclusively on Apple TV, Peacock, NBC and elsewhere. For instance, this weekend’s series against Cleveland features two games on Mariners TV (Thursday, Saturday), one on Apple TV (Friday) and one on Peacock (Sunday).

The release of the details comes just hours before the first pitch of the new season, and some fans commenting on the team’s social media post appeared to have run out of patience. Those who purchased Mariners.TV only to find out that it’s now included in their cable/satellite/internet TV subscription, can request a refund, the team said.

The Mariners shut down Root Sports Northwest at the end of the 2025 season and announced that games would be produced and distributed by Major League Baseball for streaming, cable and satellite TV.

A new proposal to buy the Seattle Seahawks has been launched by a fan of the team who thinks such a community treasure should be owned by all of the 12s rather than one super rich billionaire.

Abel Charrow‘s “Let’s Buy the Seahawks” website is a fun little distraction for any fans still nursing a Super Bowl hangover or lamenting the loss of some key players in this week’s free agency transactions.

Charrow is a Seattle-based partner at Extra Good Studio, a collective of creatives that operates as a branding studio. As a longtime fan of the Seahawks, he was looking for a way to spark some interest in alternative ownership models now that the Paul Allen estate has put the team up for sale.

But Charrow admits the effort is more tongue in cheek than it is a serious bid to become NFL franchise owners, even if he finds the shareholder model of the Green Bay Packers attractive.

“Without being too on the nose, it’s sort of a criticism of billionaires and just how absolutely insane an amount of money it requires to buy something of that size,” Charrow told GeekWire during a phone interview Tuesday. “On some level, that’s what I wanted to highlight.”

The site proposal calls on fans to raise a $12 billion bid, which is not an unrealistic price tag but maybe a few billion more than the Hawks will eventually command. At one share per person, everyone gets an equal stake. If all 780,995 residents of Seattle pitch in, that’s $15,365.02 each. The cost would drop as more fans across Washington state, the Pacific Northwest and beyond contribute.

On Tuesday afternoon, 153 share-Hawks had been spoken for, including one by me. That put my investment at the time at around $79 million. I received a digital “receipt of intent,” but, sorry, I’m not good for that kind of money.

Charrow lived in New Mexico as a kid without a pro sports team to root for. When he moved to Seattle it was a big deal to become a Seahawks fan. And when he moved again to L.A. to attend USC, he was there during the Pete Carroll era. Again he ended up back in Seattle, at the same time Carroll became the Hawks head coach and won the team’s first Super Bowl championship.

This year, Charrow was equally excited cheering on USC alum Sam Darnold, the Seahawks’ newest Super Bowl-winning quarterback.

Charrow doesn’t consider himself a technically proficient person. He got an MBA in technology management from the University of Washington last year because he felt the need to “skill up.”

“In a way, it was a big experiment in vibe coding, to use a popular word these days,” Charrow said of the Hawks site he built. He explored a few different programs including Cursor, Replit, and Codex, and said Claude Code is next.

There are a few easter eggs built into the site if fans bother to click around. Clicking on the Space Needle triggers a “Beast Quake” and clicking on a dangling football launches a Jason Myers simulator that lets fans kick field goals.

The idea of community ownership has been kicked around since the estate of Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder, announced that the team was being sold in accordance with his wishes. Seattle-based tech startup Arrived is gauging fan interest in acting as a collective that would hold a private equity stake in the Seahawks. More than 12,000 fans have shown $113 million worth of potential interest.

Beyond that, most fans and sports prognosticators expect another billionaire to eventually step up. The list of such people who also have ties to Seattle includes a who’s who of tech, including former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates has said that he’s not interested.

Charrow isn’t keeping track of names or contact information of fans who actually signal their interest in owning a share of the team, admitting that it’s “mostly an art project.”

“If people are serious about it, they can subscribe and I’ll keep them posted on the progress,” he said. “Hopefully it’ll start some conversation and maybe people will get this idea of … ‘why not?'”

Cross Bill Gates off the list of super rich potential buyers for the Seattle Seahawks.

Gates said he has no interest in owning the NFL franchise that Paul Allen, his late Microsoft co-founder, purchased in 1997 and which is now seeking a new buyer, eight years after Allen’s death.

The question came up this week during a town hall meeting with Gates Foundation employees, The Seattle Times reported. Gates said his billions are dedicated to the philanthropic organization.

“This is a great city,” Gates said. “But my owning a sports team will not be a part of how I spend my time.”

He also joked about the makeup of the Seahawks.

“I noticed they only have men on their team, and I’m not sure I can go with that,” Gates said at the meeting, according to the Times.

The gathering with staff at the foundation included an apology from Gates for his past interactions with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Gates, who acknowledged that the situation puts the foundation’s reputation at risk, also admitted to two extramarital affairs.

With the Super Bowl-winning Seahawks expected to fetch anywhere from $6 billion to more than $10 billion, Gates logically landed on a short list of potential buyers because of his Seattle connection and his net worth of $107 billion.

Gates always regarded Allen as his more curious and cooler older friend. While the two bonded over computers and software and, later, their charitable pursuits, Gates admired Allen’s wide-ranging interests, including music and sports.

“Sports was another passion that Paul loved to share with his friends,” Gates wrote in a tribute shortly after Allen died in October 2015. “In later years he would take me to see his beloved Portland Trail Blazers and patiently helped me understand everything that was happening on the court.”

A 2003 image from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer shows Gates and Allen sitting beneath the basket at a game between the Seattle SuperSonics and Trail Blazers, alongside Gates’s wife at the time, Melinda French Gates.

While Gates said this week that he hopes the Seahawks get a good owner, the Times noted that he’d also like to see Seattle get a basketball team again.

But it doesn’t look like it’ll be one he owns.

Related:

• Seattle Seahawks are for sale as Paul Allen estate seeks buyer shortly after Super Bowl win
• Podcast: Debating who could emerge as potential buyers for the Seahawks
• When the Seattle Seahawks sell, will any tech execs step up for the 12s?
• Want to own a piece of the Seahawks? Seattle startup presents its private equity idea to fans

The Seattle Mariners opened their Spring Training schedule with a win and a loss on Friday, beating the San Diego Padres 7-4 but losing their first try with the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System.

The technology for tracking balls and strikes and challenging the human umpires behind home plate is making its Major League Baseball debut this season.

Mariners’ catcher Cal Raleigh challenged a ball call by umpire Nic Lentz seven pitches into the Cactus League season in Peoria, Ariz.

The ABS system, powered by T-Mobile, quickly showed on the stadium video board that the pitch from the M’s Dane Dunning to the Padres’ Jackson Merrill was high and out of the strike zone by 1.7 inches. The count went to 3-2 as some in the crowd moaned and chuckled.

The system relies on Hawk-Eye technology that monitors the exact location of each pitch, relative to the batter’s zone. Only players — the batter, the catcher, or the pitcher — can request a challenge of a ball or strike call they feel the umpire got wrong. Each team will have two challenges to start a game.

When a call is challenged, the Hawk-Eye view is transmitted over a 5G private network from T-Mobile’s Advanced Network Solutions and shown via video board to those in the ballpark and to home viewers via the broadcast. The ball-strike call is then either confirmed or overturned, and the game goes on.

When the league’s competition committee voted last fall to bring the system to the big leagues, Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless carrier T-Mobile called it an “exciting milestone” in its longstanding partnership with MLB. The company said that while it was helping the league innovate, it was also “preserving the character of the game we love.”

Video review of some calls on the field has been a part of baseball since 2008. The ABS system introduces technology that serves as a middle ground, preserving the human error that comes with real umpires and stopping short of giving all ball-strike calls to “robot umps.”

MLB.com has a lengthy FAQ on the rules around the ABS system, which will make its formal debut on opening night when the San Francisco Giants host the New York Yankees on March 25 on Netflix.

The Seattle Seahawks are officially for sale.

A week after parading through the city to celebrate the team’s second Super Bowl championship, the team announced Wednesday that the Paul G. Allen Estate is seeking a buyer for the NFL franchise.

A sale of the 50-year-old team is “consistent with Allen’s directive to eventually sell his sports holdings and direct all estate proceeds to philanthropy,” a statement posted by the estate read.

The news confirms reports from ESPN and others ahead of Super Bowl LX that team would go up for sale after that game on Feb. 8, in which the Seahawks beat the New England Patriots, 29-13. The estate, chaired by Allen’s sister Jody Allen, denied at the time that the team was for sale, and said “that will change at some point per Paul’s wishes.”

The team, which entered the league in 1976, could fetch as much as $10 billion according to projections following the championship season. The Washington Commanders sold in 2023 for a then-record $6.05 billion.

Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, bought the Seahawks in 1997 for approximately $200 million from previous owner Ken Behring, securing the team’s home in Seattle after Behring threatened a move to California. Allen ran the team until his death in 2018 at the age of 65 after he was diagnosed with a recurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The sale is part of the long process of divesting many of the assets and investments that Allen made during his lifetime. Since his death, Allen’s estate has steadily moved to sell major assets, including real estate holdings and, more recently, advancing the sale process for the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers.

The estate said Wednesday that it has selected investment bank Allen & Company and law firm Latham & Watkins to lead the sale process, which is estimated to continue through the 2026 off-season. NFL owners must then ratify a final purchase agreement.

Allen became the 12th member of the Seahawks’ Ring of Honor, a distinguished group of people who made significant contributions to the franchise, on Oct. 3, 2019.

“He was the proudest 12 of all,” Jody Allen said in a statement at the time, in a nod to the team’s fanbase nickname.

Related:

• Podcast: Debating who could emerge as potential buyers for the Seahawks
• When the Seattle Seahawks sell, will any tech execs step up for the 12s?
• Want to own a piece of the Seahawks? Seattle startup presents its private equity idea to fans

This one’s for Paul.

We were waiting for Seahawks owner Jody Allen to pay tribute to her brother, the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, when accepting the Lombardi Trophy on behalf of the team he saved and she preserved for their hometown. It didn’t happen, so we’ll say it here. 

Jody Allen is getting well-deserved recognition for her role as the franchise leader. As Jerry Brewer wrote in The Athletic, she’s been an architect of the team’s success, worthy of emulation by other owners in the league. 

“Jody’s been fantastic,” Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald said after the win last night, pointing in particular to her role in guiding the team through last season.

What a remarkable family legacy, all the way around.

Up for sale? Ahead of the Super Bowl, reports circulated that the Seahawks would seek a buyer after this season. Adding a championship may not immediately increase the team’s value, but as Sportico noted, “it certainly doesn’t hurt.” We’ll be watching any tech execs that might step up for the 12s as part of new ownership.

Seattle’s big win in the Valley: Sure, it was a win over New England, but as the blue and green confetti rained down in the heart of Silicon Valley, it was hard not to see a symbolic victory for the Pacific Northwest over the rival tech hub, especially given the Hawks’ trouncing of the 49ers in the playoffs. 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was among those celebrating the victory and congratulating our hometown champs, which made us remember the time he once told a Seattle crowd, “Every time I go to the Valley, I’m thankful that I’m here.” 

Here are details on the victory parade, set for this Wednesday.

A win for Surface: Microsoft’s tablets have become a mainstay on NFL sidelines, helping coaches and players review past plays. This season, the company added new AI-powered features. “What a moment for the Seattle Seahawks and Microsoft Surface,” said Sandra Andrews, Microsoft Surface CMO, on LinkedIn.

Alexa+ will try to kill you? OK, so maybe only in Chris Hemsworth’s imagination, but the premise of Amazon’s Alexa Super Bowl ad — that its next-gen AI assistant is “scary good” — seemed to emphasize the “scary” part a bit much. If you missed the upbeat resolution while grabbing another beverage from the fridge, you might have been left with the impression that Alexa is truly AI’s killer app.

Maybe Ring is the real threat: In its own ad, the Amazon-owned security camera company said it just wants to help find lost pets via its “Search Party” feature that relies on AI to scan whatever’s passing by your house, and tap into neighboring doorbell cams. 

Some viewers on social media shared that they were “creeped out” by the tech, and at least one privacy expert said tugging at our heart strings over a lost dog is a great way to make us willingly trade our personal data.

The “A.I. Bowl”? That’s what some are calling Super Bowl LX after nearly a quarter of the commercials featured artificial intelligence. The New York Times’ DealBook drew the historical parallel: the Crypto Bowl of 2022 (FTX went bankrupt by year’s end) and the Dot-Com Bowl of 2000 (Pets.com and others shut down months after the tech bubble popped). 

The NYT pointed to comments by investment pro George Noble: “When an entire sector floods the most expensive advertising real estate on the planet, it’s not a signal to buy.”

See our earlier roundup of Super Bowl tech ads, on the off chance you’re not sick of all the AI commercials by now. 

Stop the presses: Especially given the high-tech focus of the ads, it was fun to see an old-school newspaper front page held up in the midst of the celebration. Of course, that was a gimmick by The Seattle Times, with the generic headline, “CHAMPS,” and a stock photo, in the spirit of the pre-printed hats and shirts anticipating a possible victory. 

The actual front-page headline this morning is “REDEMPTION!” — not exactly inspired — but the Sports section came through with an appropriate pun: ‘D’omination!

GeekWire’s Kurt Schlosser and Grants Pass (Ore.) Daily Courier editor Scott Stoddard — both former Page One editors at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — settled on “D-HAWKS” in a post-game text exchange about their dream headline.  

It’s such a good feeling to know that the spirit of Mr. Rogers is still alive in the midst of everything going on in our world. Lady Gaga’s rendition of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” for Seattle-based Redfin/Rocket was one example. Later came an NFL ad with current and former players singing the just-as-classic “You Are Special” with kids. 

Both stood out as moments of calm in the commercial chaos.

The 12s have long been celebrated in the Pacific Northwest for their vocal support of the Seattle Seahawks. Could those fans also band together as a collective ownership force?

That’s the vision of Arrived, a Seattle-based tech startup that is typically associated with helping everyday investors gain a stake in rental homes.

After a week in which reports made a sale of the Seahawks seem especially imminent, and just days before the team competes in its fourth Super Bowl, Arrived launched a new initiative to gauge fan interest in participating in the next potential ownership group. Fans can use the website, which is not affiliated with the Seahawks or NFL, to share their hypothetical investment amount and learn more.

The company’s idea is buoyed by a 2024 move by NFL owners that allows private equity funds to buy stakes in teams. Arrived would act as such a fund.

“We built our [home] platform around a $100 minimum investment and making that very accessible. We’d love to do the same with this,” Arrived co-founder and CEO Ryan Frazier told GeekWire.

Arrived would put together a special purpose investment vehicle where it would collect fan investment through its platform and then serve as a single private equity investor in the Seahawks.

Frazier pictures bringing together 100,000 or more fans to help Arrived’s fund get closer to a stake of between 3% and 10% — especially considering rising franchise values and the expectation that the Seahawks could fetch as much as $8 billion.

“These teams’ valuations are so high, there’s so few people that can actually step up and acquire these teams,” Frazier said. “I really see this model working well where there’s a lead owner and then other minority investors that can help provide a more stable capital base.”

Frazier has been aware for years of the wishes of late Seahawks owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen when it comes to selling the team, as has been done with other Allen assets. But reports from ESPN and The Wall Street Journal last weekend claimed that a sale could happen sooner rather than later. Allen’s estate, chaired his sister Jody Allen, denied that a sale would be put in motion soon after Super Bowl LX.

“I think we definitely felt the sense of urgency this week with some of the news breaking about the imminent potential for sale,” Frazier said. “Seeing Jody Allen speaking to how she thinks about the importance of the team to the fans of the city, we felt like maybe this is something that she would be supportive of as well.”

Although a different model, the NFL’s Green Bay Packers are the only major professional sports team in the U.S. owned by the community rather than a single billionaire or corporate entity. Established as a publicly held, non-profit corporation in 1923, the team is currently owned by over 538,000 shareholders who collectively hold more than 5 million shares. The shares do not pay dividends, cannot be traded for profit, and provide no equity interest.

Private equity owners that take stakes in NFL franchises aren’t allowed to have voting power. NFL.com columnist Judy Battista noted in 2024 that “it is not going to be like flipping real estate.”

“We’d want the shares to be participating in appreciation alongside other shareholders,” Frazier said. “We see this as an equity stake and getting exposure to value growth.”

Three teams — the Bills, Dolphins and Chargers — have added private equity investors so far.

Frazier said it’s inevitable that the model will spread as team valuations continue to grow across sports leagues and there’s a greater need for minority investors. If the plan with the Seahawks doesn’t pan out, he can see Arrived trying it elsewhere.

Frazier, who came to Seattle from Arkansas in 2014, and Arrived co-founder Alejandro Chouza, who came from Mexico around 2010, both moved during a surge in success and popularity for the Seahawks. Like homegrown and transplant 12s across the city and region, they’ve become obsessive fans, and they want to know what it feels like to have even a fraction of a stake in owning the team.

“You see these people, we bleed in and out every day for these teams, because it’s so exciting,” Chouza said. “There would be nothing better, even if it’s 50 bucks, if I had a tiny sliver, and my son had a tiny sliver of a team — that’s priceless.”

Founded in 2019, Arrived (formerly Arrived Homes) lets people buy fractional shares of single-family rental homes and vacation rentals for as little as $100. It’s pitched as an alternative way to gain exposure to real estate without taking on a full mortgage or managing a property.

The company identifies and acquires rental properties, then handles financing, renovations, property management and tenant relationships. Investors can buy shares in individual homes or pooled funds through the Arrived website. They earn quarterly dividends from rent plus a share of any appreciation when the property is sold after a multi-year holding period.

Nearly 1 million registered investors have invested more than $375 million on the Arrived platform. The company says it has distributed more than $63 million and funded more than 550 properties across 65 markets in the U.S.

Arrived raised $27 million in new funding last November and $25 million in a Series A round in 2022. The company, which employs 51, declined to share its current valuation.

The startup’s leadership includes Frazier (formerly with Simply Measured and Sprout Social); Chouza, the COO (Oyo and Uber); and CTO Kenny Cason (Simply Measured).

Investors include Neo, Forerunner Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Core, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.

Previously:

• When the Seattle Seahawks sell, will any tech execs step up for the 12s?
• Inside the ‘Stranger Things’ house that a Seattle real estate startup bought and turned into an Airbnb
  

The Seattle Seahawks have headed down to San Francisco to prepare for Sunday’s Super Bowl against the New England Patriots. Forgive us if visions of deep passes have given way to talk of deep pockets as reports keep emerging about a potential sale of the team.

The latest news comes from The Wall Street Journal, which reported Sunday that the NFL and some team owners have run out of patience with the Seahawks’ ownership structure and pressure is being applied to force a sale.

This follows ESPN’s report last Friday citing sources who said the team would seek a buyer after Super Bowl LX.

The Allen estate and Jody Allen, the sister of late Seahawks owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, denied the reports and said the focus was on winning a championship. But the time will come when the team will go up for sale, as mandated by Paul Allen’s estate wishes.

With a price tag expected to be in the $8 billion range, any prospective Seahawks sale is destined to be a record breaker. The Washington Commanders sold in 2023 for a then-record $6.05 billion.

So here’s a line-up of some very wealthy techies and others with Seattle ties:

• Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with a net worth of $134.6 billion, is a sports friendly contender. He already owns the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. Does he have any desire for another franchise?
• Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has long been floated as a potential buyer. But Bezos, worth $253.2 billion, left for sunny South Florida a few years ago and seems to more interested in super yachts and spacecraft.
• Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is worth about $105 billion and could do his late friend Paul Allen a nice solid by scooping up the Seahawks for pocket change.
• Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has a net worth of $1 billion, so he’d need some help. But he does have a passion for sports with stakes in the Seattle Sounders FC and the Seattle Orcas.
• Author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has shown how keen she is to spend her billions, even though her charitable givings are directed more toward nonprofits. But at least she still lives in the Seattle area.
• Melinda French Gates is worth $29 billion and could team with Scott to form another powerful women-led ownership group on the heels of Jody Allen’s stewardship.
• Zillow co-founder Rich Barton has $1 billion to throw into an ownership group, too. That’ll barely buy a house in Seattle, but it could get a stake in the Seahawks.
• Cellular pioneer Craig McCaw is worth about $2 billion. Work the phones, Craig, you’re gonna need more money.
• Seattle Mariners majority owner John Stanton is another wireless industry pioneer, worth about $2.4 billion. Maybe he’s feeling the sting of watching the Seahawks get back to the Super Bowl after the M’s came thisclose to their first World Series trip last fall.
• Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell is worth about $11 billion. His video game company found success with “Half-Life.” Would he want to be half-rich?
• Tanium co-founder and CEO Orion Hindawi is relatively new to Seattle’s billionaire circles with a net worth of about $1.1 billion. Born and raised in the Bay Area, he’s probably a 49ers fan.
• Former Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz is … never mind.

The buyer could also come from outside the region.

The NFL requires that a controlling owner hold at least a 30% stake in a team and limits institutional ownership, meaning private equity firms — now allowed to invest in NFL franchises — can only play a minority role. That makes an individual or family-led ownership group the most likely outcome.

ESPN reported that the Seahawks have passed a threshold after which a sale would no longer require sharing 10% of the proceeds with the state of Washington.

The sale is part of the long process of divesting many of the assets and investments that Allen made during his lifetime. Allen, who bought the Seahawks in the late 1990s, died in 2018 at the age of 65 after he was diagnosed with a recurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

His purchase of the Seahawks is widely credited with keeping the team in Seattle after a prior ownership group explored relocating the franchise to Southern California. Since his death, Allen’s estate has steadily moved to sell major assets, including real estate holdings and, more recently, advancing the sale process for the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers.

Allen purchased the Seahawks in 1997 for approximately $200 million from previous owner Ken Behring, securing the team’s home in Seattle after Behring threatened a move to California.

Jody Allen raised the 12 flag at the NFC Championship at Lumen Field, where the Seahawks beat the Los Angeles Rams to advance to the Super Bowl — the team’s fourth appearance and first since 2015.

The Seahawks play the Patriots Sunday at 3:30 p.m. PT.

After last season’s historic Seattle Mariners playoff run, there might be a lot more fans looking to tune into the team’s games on television this season. Now they’ll have new places to do it.

The Mariners, who shut down Root Sports Northwest at the end of the 2025 season, announced Thursday how games will be broadcast in 2026 — produced and distributed by Major League Baseball — via streaming, cable and satellite TV.

• Fans who want to watch on traditional cable or satellite providers will be able to tune into a Mariners TV channel, similar to how they watched Root. Specific providers and channel information will be announced closer to Opening Day.
• Fans without cable/satellite who prefer streaming games on assorted devices will use “Mariners.TV,” a new direct-to-consumer streaming platform allowing access to live Mariners games in Washington state, Idaho, Oregon, Alaska, Montana or Hawaii.

The streaming option, through the MLB app, will be offered at $99.99 per year or $19.99 per month. Subscriptions for the 2026 season will be available starting Feb. 10, according to the M’s.

Fans who live outside the Mariners home market will be able to watch games with the standard MLB.TV package.

Amazon is taking a private-label swing on the golf course.

The online retail giant started recently selling golf balls under its Amazon Basics brand in mid-October. Priced at just $15.99 for a dozen balls (when GeekWire purchased a box in November), Amazon is targeting a budget-conscious golfer with one of the cheapest options across its online marketplace.

The price got our attention. Next we needed to test performance.

The balls showed up on my doorstep a day after ordering. I swung by the Evergreen Golf Club practice facility near Seattle and enlisted the help of teaching professionals Austin Nutt and Tyler Yee.

I brought along the Amazon Basics balls, as well as two higher-end competitors: Taylormade TP5x ($45/dozen) and Titleist ProV1 ($55/dozen).

Using each ball, the pros hit 10 shots with three different clubs: driver, 7-iron, and wedge.

It wasn’t a huge surprise to see both professionals generate more distance and higher ball speeds with the Taylormade and Titleist balls, particularly off the driver (about 10 yards on average).

Yee said the Amazon balls felt like hitting a “marshmallow” as opposed to a firmer feeling with Taylormade and Titleist. Amazon brands the balls as “Core Soft.”

Nutt said it would be harder to control the Amazon ball with shorter shots around the green. “You get what you pay for in the world of golf balls,” he said.

However, Yee said he wouldn’t be opposed to a student using the Amazon Basics ball. And at the low price point, Nutt said it’s “certainly not a bad option.”

The Amazon ball also didn’t scuff — while both Taylormade and Titleist had small marks after the test run. That durability may appeal to some golfers.

Online golf reviewers have responded positively. Popular YouTuber Rick Shiels said he was “blown away” by the value in his own test, while instructor Matt Fisher called the balls an easy buy for golfers who “lose a bunch.”

The balls have a 4.5-star rating from nearly 600 reviews on Amazon.

It’s not clear where Amazon’s balls are manufactured. Shiels said they are supplied by the same company behind Costco’s Kirkland Signature balls.

Amazon’s golf balls are USGA-approved, meaning they can be used during competitions. The balls are currently listed as out of stock on Amazon’s site, but will be available again in early 2026.

Personally, as a golfer myself, I prefer the higher-end ball, just to get that slight edge to (theoretically) help lower my score. But I see the appeal for beginners, high-handicap golfers, and anyone more worried about losing balls than squeezing out extra yards down the fairway.

Amazon’s ball isn’t trying to beat premium tour-level options — but maybe it doesn’t really need to.

The Seattle Seahawks gave blind and low-vision fans a new way to follow game action this season as one of several teams testing a device from Seattle startup OneCourt.

OneCourt’s laptop device uses generative audio and haptics to translate live gameplay into trackable vibrations, so fans can follow the action with their fingertips. The users hear the team’s radio broadcast that is synced with the device with almost little to no time delay, according to the Seahawks.

Testers at Lumen Field in Seattle used the devices at games, including against the Indianapolis Colts on Dec. 14, as part of the NFL’s pilot program exploring such accessibility. The Jaguars, Vikings and Falcons were the other teams in the pilot.

Participants shared feedback with the league and the Seahawks about how the device performed and takeaways will be analyzed and applied to an in-stadium accessibility strategy.

“Football is at its best when every fan can be part of the moment,” said Jonathan Beane, NFL senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, in a statement. “The OneCourt pilot showed how innovative technology can bring fans who are blind or have low vision even closer to the game, and the response was incredibly powerful.”

OneCourt was co-founded by a group of University of Washington graduates, including CEO Jerred Mace.

The NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers were the first professional sports team to provide OneCourt devices at every home game.

Generative AI has made its way onto the professional soccer field.

Laura Harvey, head coach of Seattle Reign FC, said this week that ChatGPT helped her come up with a new defensive strategy.

Speaking on the Soccerish Podcast, Harvey said she was curious if ChatGPT could answer questions about soccer. So she started prompting OpenAI’s chatbot with questions about her team.

At first, she asked broad questions like, “what is Seattle Reign’s identity?” She didn’t really love the answer.

But then she asked: “What formation should you play to beat NWSL teams?”

It then listed every team in the women’s soccer professional league, with a suggested formation. And for two of the teams, it suggested “back-five,” a defensive setup using five players in the backline.

Harvey said she wasn’t super familiar with the strategy and had not used it as a coach.

She took the AI suggestion to her staff and did a deep dive on the potential change.

“We liked it,” Harvey said. “And it worked — we won the game.”

Harvey, a three-time NWSL Coach of the Year, didn’t reveal the opponent but said they were “really good.” Now the team uses the formation as an option during matches. The Reign have improved since last season and are ranked fourth in the NWSL heading into the playoffs.

It’s a fascinating example of using AI as a tactical consultant, combining human expertise and intuition with machine suggestions.

“It didn’t tell you how to play it, what to do in it or any of that stuff,” Harvey said on the podcast. “But it was like, ‘This is what we would say to do.’ And I was like, ‘Hmm, interesting.’ And that was what spurred me to look into it. So then I really looked into it.”

Across industries, professionals are treating tools such as ChatGPT as sounding boards — running ideas by them, exploring scenarios, or pressure-testing strategies before making decisions.

OpenAI’s own research this year found that people increasingly rely on ChatGPT “as an advisor rather than only for task completion.”

“ChatGPT likely improves worker output by providing decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs where productivity is increasing in the quality of decision-making,” according to the research.

“It is here, it is real, it is happening,” said play-by-play announcer Ian Eagle. “The NBA on Prime.”

And with that, Amazon’s foray into live streaming NBA games tipped off.

Amazon marked a major milestone with its growing sports portfolio on Friday, broadcasting its first-ever live NBA game around the world. The matchup — Celtics vs. Knicks — was part of an 11-year deal that gives Amazon exclusive rights to select regular season and playoff games.

We watched the game via Prime Video — accessible with a $139/year Prime subscription — and came away impressed.

The stream ran seamlessly across Fire TV, iPhone, and MacBook. The quality was crisp, load times near-instant, and there wasn’t a hint of lag — at least on a home WiFi connection. Amazon’s 1080p HDR video and 5.1 surround sound were a slam dunk.

The broadcast looked and felt like a traditional national telecast. The graphics mirrored what fans expect from ESPN or TNT, the commentary came from familiar voices — Eagle and Stan Van Gundy — and the pregame show from featured a slick set with former NBA stars at Amazon MGM Studios.

But under the surface, Amazon quietly tested a new frontier: in-stream sports betting.

The most noticeable new feature was the FanDuel integration, Amazon’s latest experiment in blending live sports and interactive technology.

Fans watching on Fire TV could log into their FanDuel accounts through Prime Video to view real-time betting information and track wagers directly within the broadcast.

You can’t make actual bets on Prime Video — not yet, at least— but it marks a subtle yet significant shift in how live sports may evolve on streaming platforms.

And it comes at a fascinating moment: the NBA is dealing with a major betting scandal that made headlines this week and involves the FBI.

I was surprised when NBA Commissioner Adam Silver joined the broadcast for a live interview. Sideline reporter Cassidy Hubbarth opened by asking about the scandal.

Silver said he was “deeply disturbed” upon hearing the news.

“There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition,” he said.

Silver also praised Amazon’s coverage: “I should have started [by saying] how excited we are to be on Amazon,” he said. “I guess I wouldn’t have predicted that my first interview on Amazon would be about sports betting.”

The interview underscored how Amazon’s coverage didn’t shy away from real-time news relevance — adding a traditional journalistic layer within a tech-powered broadcast.

It was also a surreal moment: the NBA’s top official discussing a sports betting scandal during the league’s debut on a platform now integrating betting tools into its stream.

Amazon has other new tech-fueled features including advanced NBA stats powered by Amazon Web Services — but I didn’t notice that during Friday’s broadcast.

One of the only stumbles for me came on the Fire TV user experience, which feels clunky compared to mobile or desktop. Navigation wasn’t intuitive, and the remote’s button mapping made simple actions harder than expected.

But overall, the whole experience felt less like a tech demo and more like a finished product.

Amazon’s sports strategy is crystalizing: use live sports to drive Prime signups and boost engagement across its ecosystem. The broadcast was promoted on Amazon’s homepage and apps. Live sports also helps fuel Amazon’s growing advertising business.

Bloomberg reported that Amazon is paying $1.8 billion annually for the NBA rights.

As more people cut the cord, sports leagues are increasingly partnering with tech companies as their existing deals with traditional cable providers expire. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are hungry for valuable content such as live sports to draw more subscribers to their respective platforms.

Amazon also aired the Timberwolves vs. Lakers game on Friday evening. It will stream 66 regular season games this year, along with some playoff games.

The company also separate deals to air the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, WNBA, and Premier League, among other sports-related programming on its Prime Video platform.

The NBA debut on Friday was a reminder of Amazon’s approach to live sports: combine the reliability of broadcast TV with subtle tech layers — such as betting, data, and e-commerce — built on its AWS cloud infrastructure and Prime membership model.

The effects of the massive AWS outage reached the sports world on Monday.

Ticketmaster was dealing with ticket management issues as a result of the outage, according to messages shared by several sports teams hosting games on Monday, including the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Seahawks.

The Blue Jays, facing off against the Seattle Mariners in a Game 7 MLB playoff bout at Rogers Centre in Toronto, posted a statement earlier Monday about the outage and advised fans to “hold off on managing your tickets as we work through this.”

A few hours later, the team said ticket management was returning to normal.

The Seahawks, which are hosting the Houston Texans for Monday Night Football in Seattle, issued a statement about the outage “that may impact access to Ticketmaster, Seahawks Account Manager, and the Seahawks Mobile App.”

The Detroit Lions, hosting their own Monday Night Football game, also had ticketing impacted.

The outage effects went beyond just ticketing. The Premier League said its VAR tech system, used to determine offside calls in soccer, would not be available for Monday’s match between West Ham and Brentford.

Amazon’s outage began shortly after midnight Pacific in Amazon’s Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) region, which is AWS’s oldest and largest cloud region, a popular nerve center for online services.

In an initial update, AWS said the outage was related to a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB product, meaning the internet’s phone book failed to find the correct address for a database service used by thousands of apps to store and find data.

Amazon later said the root cause of the outage was an “underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

By 3 p.m. PT, the company said all AWS services had returned to normal operations.

Major sites and services including Facebook, Snapchat, Coinbase and Amazon itself were impacted — reviving concerns about the internet’s heavy reliance on the cloud giant.

The outage suggests that many sites have not adequately implemented the redundancy needed to quickly fall back to other regions or cloud providers in the event of AWS outages.

Previously:

• AWS outage was not due to a cyberattack — but shows potential for ‘far worse’ damage
• AWS outage hits major apps and services, resurfacing old questions about cloud redundancy

The crowd at T-Mobile Park has been waiting all week to move the earth again for the Seattle Mariners. They got their chance Friday night.

An eighth-inning grand slam by Geno Suárez sent more than 46,000 fans into a frenzy and triggered seismic activity registered by the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). The organization, which monitors earthquakes and volcanoes in Washington and Oregon, installed a sensor inside the stadium for the Mariners’ home playoff games.

Suárez’s second home run of the game put the M’s ahead of the Toronto Blue Jays 6-2 and sealed Game 5 of the American League Championship Series, which the Mariners now lead, 3-2. The team is one win from its first ever trip to the World Series as the best-of-7 series shifts back to Toronto.

PNSN’s device — nicknamed “Richter Rizzs” after longtime Mariners broadcaster Rick Rizzs — picked up sizable seismic energy a week ago when Jorge Polanco hit a game-winning single to win a 15-inning marathon against the Detroit Tigers in Game 5 of the American League Division Series.

The device, which measures vertical ground motion, registered activity after big plays throughout Friday’s game, including an earlier home run by Suárez that gave the M’s a 1-0 lead and a home run by Cal Raleigh that tied the game at 2-2.

The grand slam was the biggest show.

PNSN has done monitoring during Seattle Seahawks games — including for the famous “Beast Quake” — and at concerts.

The idea to measure shaking at T-Mobile Park came after Raleigh said he could feel the stadium vibrating during Game 2 of the ALDS earlier this month.

A video during the Suárez slam on Friday (below) showed the PNSN team contributing to some of the shaking in right field as a laptop displayed the seismic activity in real time.

“After Geno’s grand slam, I’m not sure I’ve heard that building any louder than that,” M’s manager Dan Wilson said after the game. “You can’t say enough about the support we’ve received from these fans this year.”

Asked about the support from the home crowd after his team’s thrilling playoff victory on Friday, Seattle Mariners’ Leo Rivas said it felt like the ground was shaking every inning.

Technically, he wasn’t really wrong.

The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which monitors earthquakes and volcanoes in Washington and Oregon, installed a sensor inside T-Mobile Park to record seismic energy during the American League Division Series game.

“T-Mobile Park is a little too far away from our nearest regular seismic station, so we quickly made a plan to put one of our research-grade instruments, called a ‘strong-motion seismometer,’ into the ballpark so we could actually measure that shaking,” explained Harold Tobin, director at PNSN, in an email to GeekWire.

The device — nicknamed “Richter Rizzs” after longtime Mariners broadcaster Rick Rizzs — picked up bursts of ground movement after key plays during the Mariners’ 3-2 win over Detroit, a 15-inning epic marathon affair in front of 47,025 fans that sent Seattle to the American League Championship Series for the first time since 2001.

PNSN streamed a live feed of the sensor’s output to show real-time shaking levels. The biggest peak appeared to be after Jorge Polanco’s game-winning RBI single, nearly five hours after first pitch, that sent the home crowd into a frenzy.

PNSN isn’t doing actual research during games — it’s more just for fun and public engagement. Though structural engineers do use similar types of data to understand stresses and strengths of buildings, including stadiums, Tobin said.

PNSN has done monitoring during Seattle Seahawks games — including for the famous “Beast Quake” — and at concerts.

The idea to measure shaking at T-Mobile Park came after star catcher Cal Raleigh said he could feel the stadium vibrating during Game 2 of the ALDS earlier this month

Tobin said his “amazing” team pulled off the T-Mobile Park setup in just two days. “And now we are ready to ‘Seis The Moment’ when the ALCS games come to Seattle next week,” Tobin said, alluding to the Mariners’ late-season mantra of “Seize the Moment.”

Shivaas Gulati is ready to build his next “big company,” and he’s excited to do it in Seattle.

While he’s keeping details close to the vest, the co-founder of digital remittance company Remitly told GeekWire this week that he’s launching Arkero AI, a startup that aims to help sports organizations and the live events industry as a whole leverage artificial intelligence to their advantage.

Gulati said a lot of business owners are stuck on a key question: How do I use AI to unlock value in my business?

“I think we figured out that we can answer that question in novel ways,” he said. “We understand how they operate.”

A longtime angel investor, Gulati left Remitly in 2022, and for the past year he’s been learning the intricacies of operating a sports venture as part of the ownership group of Southend United, which plays in the fifth tier of English football. For the past six months, he’s also served as a technical advisor to Seattle Sounders FC helping the Major League Soccer club with its AI and tech strategy.

Arkero is the culmination of his learning about the industry and seeing it all from the inside. Specifically, he said his work with the Sounders allowed him to connect some of the dots on his latest venture “where I think we can create some interesting business value.”

Gulati is working on assembling a team and attracting investors. He said there are some “smart folks” that he’s worked with previously who he is going to try to bring on board, and as a member of the board of Foundations, an organization to support startup founders, he’s looking forward to building in Seattle.

“Seattle is an amazing, talent-dense place for us,” he said. “It’s a great place to build a company, and we’re going to double down on that and build another big company here.”

Remitly was founded in 2011 and has grown to 2,800 employees at offices around the world, with more than 500 of them in a new and growing headquarters space in Seattle. Publicly traded on Nasdaq, Remitly now boasts a market value of $3.3 billion.

Arkero is looking for what Gulati calls “AI native product builders.”

“It’s this new breed of builders that we’re seeing in the market who are really in the weeds with all the AI tools and using AI to create leverage for them,” he said.

While he wasn’t ready to share names yet, Gulati said he’s creating an investor roster that includes some “big hitters and some team owners around the nation,” adding that he’s fortunate to be in a position where investors want to back him again. Arkero has also attracted three initial design partners in the U.S. and England.

“I’m an entrepreneur at heart,” Gulati said. “Whether it’s Southend or Remitly or my past ventures, I’m always building, lots of irons in the fire in different places. This is very energizing for me. I think ultimately it’s the chance to solve another big problem, go after another exciting space.”

Amazon is not only streaming NBA games for the first time this season — it’s also aiming to establish a new data-driven way to understand the sport.

The league on Wednesday announced a new multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services on Wednesday that includes “NBA Inside the Game,” a new basketball intelligence platform fueled by AI.

The platform, built on AWS’ AI infrastructure alongside billions of data points, will enable new statistics such as “Defensive Box Score,” which uses AI to assign responsibility and measure individual defensive impact.

• There is also “Expected Field Goal %,” which calculates the likelihood of a shot going in based on positioning, pressure, and other variables.
• “Gravity” quantifies how much defensive attention a player attracts and the space they create for teammates even without the ball.

The new stats will show up across the NBA app, NBA.com, social channels, and during NBA on Prime broadcasts.

The partnership will also roll out “Play Finder,” a tool that lets broadcasters and fans search thousands of games for similar plays.

Julie Souza, AWS’ global head of sports, said the deal mirrors the company’s role with the NFL’s Next Gen Stats — framing it as both a technology showcase and a long-term innovation partnership.

For AWS, it’s an opportunity to turn basketball into a case study for AI at global scale.

“The reason we do these deals is to let us tell highly technical stories in really accessible ways,” Souza told GeekWire.

The deal establishes AWS as the official “cloud and cloud AI partner” of the NBA, WNBA, G League, Basketball Africa League, and NBA 2K League.

The partnership highlights Amazon’s dual role in sports: distributing games through Prime Video while embedding its technology deeper into leagues’ data and operations. The company already works with Formula 1 on real-time race insights, and with Bundesliga on its match data.

Microsoft has a similar deal with the NFL, which uses the company’s cloud tools and Surface tablets.

Later this month, Amazon Prime Video will kick off new 11-year NBA rights deal, with 67 games streaming globally each season.

“NBA on Prime” is a significant addition to Amazon’s sports streaming catalog, which includes the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football” as well as live action from MLB, NASCAR, and Premier League soccer.

Related: Amazon’s ‘NBA on Prime’ streams will include FanDuel bet tracking, shopping integration, and more

Amazon is planning a number of interactive features and personalization for fans when it begins airing NBA games on Prime Video starting Oct. 24.

The offerings from Prime Sports will include a personalized bet tracking experience with FanDuel, a fully-customizable multiview offering, AI-driven highlights on demand, live stats, the ability to shop within the game, and more.

Amazon scored an 11-year deal with the league last year that begins with the upcoming season and includes exclusive streaming rights to 66 regular season games as well as playoff games.

“NBA on Prime” is a huge addition to Amazon’s growing sports streaming catalog, which already includes the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football” as well as live action from several other leagues and teams, such as NASCAR and Premier League soccer.

Amazon uses its Prime Video arm to help drive signups for its Prime membership program, which costs $139/year and offers various benefits including free shipping and streaming.

As more people cut the cord, sports leagues are increasingly engaging with tech companies as their existing deals with traditional cable providers expire. Those companies are hungry for valuable content such as live sports — one of the most-watched telecasts — to draw more subscribers to their respective platforms.

Bloomberg reported that Amazon is paying $1.8 billion annually for the NBA rights.

Here are the highlights of the new game integrations:

Personalized bet tracking and Odds View with FanDuel

The opt-in, personalized bet tracking experience with FanDuel provides real-time integration of betting information during live game action. When a fan links their Prime Video profile to their FanDuel account, their active NBA bets will be displayed and updated on the screen, along with relevant progress and won/lost status. The feature does not offer the ability to place bets directly on Prime Video.

In addition to tracking personal bets, an immersive Odds View experience (available on supported devices) can be activated that presents a rotating feed of live odds, lines and probabilities associated with popular bets, including moneylines, spreads, totals, player props, parlays, game props, and more. The overlay adds context to the game and highlights how players and teams are performing relative to betting markets.

In 2018, Amazon rolled out a quarterly predictions feature for its livestreamed NFL games on Twitch. There wasn’t really anything on the line other than fan bragging rights, but it alluded to how live interactive technology could take off as sports betting becomes legal in more U.S. states.

Multiview

Viewers who subscribe to Prime Video and NBA League Pass, the league’s subscription streaming service, can simultaneously watch a combination games across a majority of devices. Fans can create their viewing setup by selecting their primary game for the larger window while keeping tabs on other NBA matchups in smaller windows.

Key Moments

Key Moments allows fans to access the most exciting and pivotal plays throughout the game in real-time. The feature utilizes AI to curate what Amazon calls “plays that matter” — such as a big dunk or a pivotal three-pointer. At any point in the game, fans can relive or catch up on the growing collection of in-game highlights, each featuring a full description of the play.

Rapid Recap

Using more AI, Rapid Recap provides a curated highlight reel to bring fans up to speed on a game in two minutes or less, with views of the most impactful basketball moments before transitioning back to live action.

Stats

Fans can check player and team stats — without leaving the live game — with traditional box score stats as well as advanced stats powered by AWS.

Shop the Game

Shop the Game gives viewers access NBA fashion items and deals without leaving the action. Viewers can search “shop the game” in the Amazon Shopping app, or use their remote’s “up” button while watching NBA on Prime to reveal an interactive Shop tab that sends notifications to their mobile device.

The Seattle Mariners announced Friday that they will shut down Root Sports Northwest at the end of the 2025 season, shifting all aspects of broadcast production, carriage, and streaming of Mariners games to Major League Baseball beginning in 2026.

It marks the end of a decades-long run for the regional sports network, dating back to 1988 when it launched as Northwest Cable Sports. The Mariners took full ownership of ROOT Sports in 2023.

“We continue to focus on finding new ways to bring our games in 2026 and beyond to our fans and we’ve determined joining with Major League Baseball is the best path,” the Mariners said in a statement. “Beginning in 2026 and moving forward, Major League Baseball will provide opportunities to bring new features and benefits to viewers of Mariners baseball.”

MLB already supported production for Mariners games. By 2026, it will take over all broadcast duties.

The move underscores the deteriorating economic model for regional sports networks amid a shift in how live sports is consumed, as more fans “cut the cord” and abandon traditional cable packages from providers such as Comcast and DirecTV.

As part of the trend, tech giants including Amazon — which streams a package of New York Yankees games and has invested heavily in NFL and other rights — are spending billions to air live sports on their platforms.

MLB has stepped in to assume control of broadcasts for other teams including the San Diego Padres and Colorado Rockies in recent years.

Mariners fans should expect similar access to games next season via linear TV and streaming under MLB’s production and streaming infrastructure. Many details — channel assignments, etc. — still need to be ironed out as MLB takes over fully.

“Mariners.TV” could become the portal for live games online, similar to other MLB-powered team streams that charge an annual subscription.

Earlier this year the Mariners launched the ROOT Sports Stream app, offering fans live games for $19.99/month.

It’s unclear whether current Mariners announcers and analysts will remain on the air next season.

More than 25 staff members at ROOT Sports will be laid off, according to The Seattle Times.

The news comes with just three days left in the 2025 regular season and as the Mariners prepare for a postseason run after winning the AL West division title this week, for the first time since 2001.

The Mariners are led by CEO and Chairman John Stanton, a wireless and mobile pioneer in the Seattle region who took over the franchise in 2016.

Human umpires will remain behind the plate calling balls and strikes in Major League Baseball games, but in 2026 their calls will be officially open to challenge via technology for the first time.

The league’s Joint Competition Committee voted Tuesday to bring the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System to the big leagues next season, following several years of experimentation in the Minor Leagues and use in MLB Spring Training and the All-Star Game this year.

According to MLB.com, Hawk-Eye technology will continue to run in the background and monitor the exact location of each pitch, relative to the batter’s zone. Only players — the batter, the catcher, or the pitcher — can request a challenge of a ball or strike call they feel the umpire got wrong.

When a call is challenged, the Hawk-Eye view is transmitted over a 5G private network from T-Mobile’s Advanced Network Solutions and shown via videoboard to those in the ballpark and to home viewers via the broadcast. The ball-strike call is then either confirmed or overturned, and the game goes on.

Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless carrier T-Mobile called it an “exciting milestone” in its longstanding partnership with MLB, adding that while it was helping the league innovate, it was also “preserving the character of the game we love.”

Some video review of calls on the field has been a part of baseball since 2008. The ABS system introduces technology that serves as a middle ground, preserving the human error that comes with real umpires and stopping short of giving all ball-strike calls to “robot umps.”

When Seattle hosted the All-Star Game at T-Mobile Park in 2023, we caught up with baseball fans to ask whether they were ready for “robot” umpires. Baseball traditionalists and champions of change offered opinions about how technology could alter the sport for better or worse. Most agreed that a human being needs to remain behind home plate even if that ump has to cede some control to a robot with a better eye for balls and strikes.

MLB.com has a lengthy FAQ on the rules around the ABS Challenge System, including how many challenges a team gets, how it all works and more.

Who needs analytics? Sometimes in football you have to trust your gut in real time, and Seattle Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald ran into that situation during the team’s season-opening loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday.

“It was a tough one,” Macdonald said during his radio show on Seattle Sports 710 on Monday with hosts Brock Huard and Mike Salk (starting at 9:45 above). The Seattle Times broke down the play call here.

Macdonald was recounting the scenario late in the fourth quarter, with the game tied at 10 and the Seahawks facing a 4th-and-1 from the 49ers’ 19-yard line.

The second-year coach admitted that the team’s analytical model favored going for it and trying to pick up the first down in that situation. The goal would be a new set of downs and the increased odds to come away with a touchdown.

“But you are making these [calls] in real time,” Macdonald said, illustrating the dynamic at play in tense football situations where increased access to data and predictive analysis in-game can run up against the human instincts and experience of coaches making the calls.

Ticking off a variety of reasons for why he chose to ignore the model, Macdonald kicked the field goal to take a 13-10 lead. The 49ers came back and scored a touchdown and won the game 17-13.

While Macdonald said he felt pretty strongly about his decision to kick, there was “definitely an argument to go the other way.”

In a previous interview with GeekWire, Macdonald said his philosophy in Seattle is a combination of “old school principles and new school methods,” where the team is embracing tech for any edge it can get. That includes around decisions about whether to go for it on fourth down.

“We have a way to measure the advantage you get for going for it on fourth down,” Macdonald said. “Every team has that.”

Through its partnership with Microsoft, the NFL makes a variety of tech tools available to players and coaches during games. This year, a new GitHub Copilot feature is introducing enhanced AI capabilities for quicker filtering when reviewing plays. Generative AI is not being used to make in-game decisions, according to the league.

“We feel AI can streamline processes, but cannot be a substitute or supplement for coaches developing adjustments and strategies on game day,” the NFL said.

Previously:

• For Pete’s sake, what does AI think of the play that haunts Seattle Seahawks fans — run or pass?

There’s been a lot of chatter heading into the new NFL season about how artificial intelligence will be an innovative new sideline tool for coaches and players, thanks to the league’s partnership with Microsoft.

We checked back in with the NFL to clarify just how AI can and will be used during games, just to make sure humans and not chatbots will still be the deciding force when it comes to calling plays. And along the way it made us want to revisit one of the most painful plays in Seattle Seahawks history — sorry!

First, the NFL stresses that its Sideline Viewing System, with a new GitHub Copilot feature from Microsoft, is mainly a filtering tool for the sideline and booth Surface tablets used by players and coaches. The filtering function connects play data to still images, allowing users to rapidly reach a category or subsection of plays for review. 

Copilot is also enabled in analytics devices used in the coaches booth, where teams have access to specific game data within a “bespoke build” of Microsoft Excel. The Copilot function offers a sounding board to check the accuracy of formulas and generate visualizations, according to the league.

Here’s more nitty-gritty from the NFL regarding the use of tech:

“The technology tools coaches use on game days are primarily governed by the NFL’s electronic device policy which states that only league-issued technology can be used by team staffs on sidelines/the coaches booths (prohibiting devices like smartwatches, cellphones, and personal computers). Club committee guidance informs the approval process of what is league-issued. Our committees of coaches, front office executives, and owners have historically focused on innovations that serve all clubs equitably and emphasize enhancing processes over determining in-game outcomes. Through our Microsoft partnership, we feel AI can streamline these processes, but cannot be a substitute or supplement for coaches developing adjustments and strategies on game day.”

So while you might be using AI to craft your next clever work email, or your kid is using it to cheat on his math homework, NFL coaches won’t be using it (yet) to decide whether to pass or punt on 4th and five.

But that doesn’t stop us from using AI to second-guess — or at least revisit how the internet summarizes all the second-guessing.

And there’s no bigger play in Seattle football history to revisit than the play that cost the Seahawks a second Super Bowl title 10 years ago.

If you don’t pay attention to football, or time has successfully erased that memory, it’s the play where the Seahawks were trailing 28-24 against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX. There was 26 seconds left in the game. It was 2nd-and-goal at the 1-yard line, and the Hawks had one timeout remaining.

Rather than hand the ball to running back Marshawn Lynch, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll opted for a pass play, and quarterback Russell Wilson’s throw was intercepted. Game over. Dynasty denied.

The Seahawks have a new coach now and the team has come a long way from not being back-to-back world champs. But AI is such a hyped commodity now it makes sense to use it for its take on that play, and much like the human analysts, fans and players who have dissected Carroll’s decision, AI wishes he would have run it to Lynch, too.

Here’s the prompt we fed to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5 and Google’s Gemini 2.5:

Should the Seattle Seahawks have run the ball with a chance to win Super Bowl XLIX against the New England Patriots?

Both bots do a good job of quickly generating the facts around the play and analysis of Lynch’s power in such a situation. The bots then offer arguments for why running the ball and passing the ball both could have made sense.

But the “verdict” from ChatGPT and the “conclusion” from Gemini both lean toward Lynch and the run.

“In hindsight — and even at the time — running the ball was the higher-percentage play,” ChatGPT said. “The risk of an interception on a short slant in a crowded goal-line situation didn’t justify the potential reward. It remains one of the most second-guessed play calls in NFL history.”

“In the end, while the play call was strategically justifiable, especially in a worst-case scenario, the immediate result — a game-ending interception — made it seem like a monumental mistake,” Gemini said. “The universal consensus among fans and many analysts is that, given the talent and the game situation, the Seahawks should have simply run the ball.”

As the NFL kicks off a new season, and AI becomes even more ingrained in certain aspects of team decision making, here’s to hoping Seattle fans have reason for more positive prompts about future play calls.

There’s a lot of hope that goes into being a Seattle Mariners fan. Going deep on data and crunching numbers related to the team’s day-to-day success or even World Series chances just seems like a ticket to baseball heartache.

Adam Jacobson is a lifelong Mariners fan and an analytics geek who is subjecting himself to that unique form of fandom by running a new website called Grand Salami Time.

But in the midst of a late-season slump in which the team has lost four straight and 15 of their last 21 games, he appears to be taking a rather zen approach.

“People get way too passionate,” Jacobson told GeekWire this week. “I think, ‘Oh, man, the Mariners are blowing it’ and I get frustrated, too. But I kind of expect it.”

From what his work is telling him, the angst could persist until the final game of the season.

Born in Bellevue, Wash., and raised on Mariners games with his season-ticket-holding family at the Kingdome, Jacobson is a University of Washington graduate and tech veteran. He interned at Amazon and even with the Mariners in 2013 as a business analyst looking into how to improve season ticket holder retention rates — hot tip: winning helps.

For the past 13 years, Jacobson has worked in finance and data science, first with eBay and now with Walmart where he’s tackling e-commerce supply chain issues.

Grand Salami Time — named for a catchphrase from Mariners Hall of Fame broadcaster Dave Niehaus — is a passion project born in part out of a paternity leave.

Growing up, Jacobson wanted to be a professional baseball player. Lately he’s thought he might like to eventually be the Mariners general manager. The website is filling the time in between.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to work in something that I love,” Jacobson said. “Baseball is just a big hobby of mine.”

And tracking stats and analytics in baseball has been beyond a hobby for years. The serious business of it all was popularized in the book and movie “Moneyball,” about how the 2002 Oakland A’s used computer-generated analysis to acquire players.

Jacobson likens Grand Salami Time to a Mariners-focused version of sites such as FanGraphs or Baseball Savant, or the old FiveThirtyEight site. He felt like Seattle-area media was lacking in such an offering that could go deeper on data and analytics.

Baseball geeks seem to agree. The site has attracted more than 10,000 unique visitors since launching a few months ago and it’s growing. Fans can also subscribe to a weekly newsletter.

Examples of analysis and stories include:

• Why more than the marine layer makes T-Mobile Park a tough place to hit.
• The one defensive adjustment that could earn Julio Rodriguez a gold glove.
• Why Cal Raleigh would break Aaron Judge’s AL record of 62 home runs if he played at Yankee Stadium.

Jacobson has a couple buddies contributing help, including writer Evan Franklin, who has a recent piece looking at whether M’s starting pitcher Bryan Woo has what it takes to be the next Greg Maddux. Podcast co-host Robby Gross is another UW friend whose claim to fame is that he was recognized as the 3 millionth fan to watch the M’s at the Kingdom during the 1997 season.

And beyond baseball, Jacobson’s tech pedigree goes pretty deep — his mom Sandra Jacobson joined Microsoft in 1983 and was the company’s longest-tenured woman employee at the time of her retirement in 2014, after 31 years.

“She says I have her side of the brain,” Jacobson said.

Beyond data-specific stories and visualizations about individual Mariners players, Grand Salami Time’s key focus right now is its “Playoff Odds Simulator.”

As of Saturday morning, with 21 games remaining, the site puts the likelihood of Seattle reaching the postseason at 49.1%. The team has a 6.9% chance of winning the AL West division, a 42.2% chance of winning an AL Wild Card spot, and a 2.1% chance of winning the World Series.

The percentages jump a bit higher when the site runs odds based on the WAR statistic — an especially nerdy stat based on how valuable a player is compared to a backup or minor league player. It also runs the odds of reaching the 54% Jerry Dipoto benchmark, a cheeky reference to the Mariners GM’s comments regarding consistency in 2023.

Jacobson was feeling much better a few weeks ago. In the midst of a Mariners hot streak and trades that brought in stars Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez, his data projections showed the team with a 97% chance to make the playoffs (based on the WAR simulation) and a 10% chance to win the World Series.

“And then we tanked,” he said. “The Mariners are Mariners-ing.”

Now Jacobson is in full Mariners fan semi-panic mode, half laughing his way through explaining how for the third straight season, the team’s playoff hopes will likely be decided by one game.

“I think we’re going to land somewhere around, I hate to say, 83 or 84 wins,” Jacobson said. “If it’s 84 we’re in, 83 we’re probably out. We’re gonna come down to the final game again, our simulation projects.”

He doesn’t really even need to look at the dizzying array of stats and predictions to agree with those findings.

“Based on Mariners history, that’s also what I think.”

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his NBA team, the Los Angeles Clippers, are disputing a report alleging the team funneled $28 million to star player Kawhi Leonard through an endorsement deal designed to circumvent NBA salary cap rules.

A new investigation from former ESPN reporter Pablo Torre focuses on a $28 million endorsement deal in 2022 between Leonard, one of the NBA’s biggest stars, and Aspiration, a sustainability company that filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

Torre, who interviewed former Aspiration employees, reported that the deal helped the Clippers evade the NBA’s salary cap. 

The arrangement between Leonard and Aspiration was allegedly a “no-show job” contract, Torre reported.

One month after the Clippers signed Leonard to a $176.3 million extension in August 2021, Ballmer personally invested $50 million into Aspiration, according to Torre. That same September, Aspiration also announced a $300 million sponsorship deal with the team.

The NBA said it is investigating the matter.  

In a statement to GeekWire, the Clippers and Steve Ballmer denied the allegations. Here’s the statement in full:

“Neither the Clippers nor Steve Ballmer circumvented the salary cap. The notion that Steve invested in Aspiration in order to funnel money to Kawhi Leonard is absurd. Steve invested because Aspiration’s co-founders presented themselves as committed to doing right by their customers while protecting the environment. 

After a long campaign of market manipulation, which defrauded not only Steve but numerous other investors and sports teams, Aspiration filed for bankruptcy. Its co-founder, Joseph Sanberg, recently pleaded guilty to a $243 million fraud. Neither Steve nor the Clippers had knowledge of any improper activity by Aspiration or its co-founder until after the government initiated its investigation. Aspiration was a team sponsor for the 2021- 2022 and 2022- 2023 seasons before defaulting on its contract.  

There is nothing unusual or untoward about team sponsors doing endorsement deals with players on the same team. Neither Steve nor the Clippers organization had any oversight of Kawhi’s independent endorsement agreement with Aspiration. To say otherwise is flat-out wrong.

The Clippers take NBA compliance extremely seriously, fully respect the league’s rules, and welcome its investigation related to Aspiration. The Clippers will also continue to cooperate with law enforcement in its investigation into Aspiration’s blatantly fraudulent activity.”

Aspiration, which offered banking and other services for sustainability-related initiatives, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March. The company’s co-founder, Joseph Sanberg, was charged last month and agreed to plead guilty to defrauding investors and lenders.

Potential penalties for skirting NBA salary cap rules can involve fines, loss of future draft picks, or even voiding contracts, as seen in the league’s 2000 punishment of the Minnesota Timberwolves.

The NBA previously investigated complaints involving Leonard and improper benefits.

Ballmer, who led Microsoft as CEO from 2000 to 2014, bought the Clippers in 2014 for $2 billion, which was a record at the time. The team is now worth $5.4 billion, the eighth-most valuable NBA franchise, according to CNBC. Ballmer’s net worth is more than $174 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Before the Seattle Sounders topped Inter Miami in dramatic fashion to capture their first Leagues Cup championship, a smattering of tech execs roamed the pitch at Lumen Field on Sunday before the big match.

We spotted several Seattle-area tech leaders who have ownership stakes in the Sounders, including Truveta CEO Terry Myerson, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, Zapier CTO Chee Chew, Redapt CEO Rick Cantu, and former Microsoft leader Joe Belfiore.

Several other tech execs are also part of the Sounders ownership group including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky.

There is plenty of crossover between Seattle’s tech sector and the city’s pro sports franchises. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, for example, is a minority owner of the Seattle Kraken hockey team. Paul Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder, owned the Seattle Seahawks football team.

The Sounders were the seventh-most valuable Major League Soccer team as of February 2025, according to Forbes, at $800 million — up from $310 million in 2018.

Other high-profile guests on the field Sunday included comedian and longtime Sounders owner Drew Carey and Inter Miami owner David Beckham.

In front of a raucous and record crowd of 69,314 at Lumen Field, the Sounders defeated Inter Miami to claim the Leagues Cup 2025 championship. The Sounders held soccer legend Lionel Messi and his team in check for a convincing 3-0 win, becoming the first team to win all five major North American soccer trophies.

Leagues Cup is an annual tournament that includes teams from MLS and Liga MX, the top soccer league in Mexico. It is held in the middle of the MLS season.

See more photos from the match below.

Microsoft is extending its longtime partnership with the National Football League, integrating AI and cloud tools into assorted workflows from the sidelines to front offices to stadium operations.

The multiyear extension, announced Wednesday morning, will lean on technologies including Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI to usher in a “new era of AI innovation across the league,” Microsoft said in a news release.

The NFL’s Sideline Viewing System — with real-time game data and analysis tools — has been upgraded with more than 2,500 Microsoft Surface Copilot+ PCs for 32 clubs, roughly 1,800 players, and more than 1,000 coaches and club football staff.

Tech upgrades include:

• A new feature built with GitHub Copilot allows coaches and players to filter plays based on criteria such as down and distance, scoring plays, and penalties so they can analyze formations, decipher coverages, and make more data-driven and strategic decisions.
• A Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered dashboard helps club analysts in the coaching booth identify insights faster to influence game strategies — such as personnel groupings and snap counts.
• Beyond the sidelines, AI could support roles like game operations managers with a Copilot-powered game day operations dashboard to better anticipate and plan such things as weather delays or technical equipment issues.
• Microsoft is also working to infuse Azure AI video tools during practice sessions to aid in reviewing coaching, evaluations and player injury assessments.

“Making sound decisions and putting players in the best spots on the field is a coach’s ultimate responsibility,” said Sean McVay, Los Angeles Rams head coach, in a statement. “Microsoft Copilot enhances our efficiency and accuracy by breaking down complex data into digestible insights that can be quickly communicated to our players and help them realize their highest potential.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft rolled out a new AI assistant within its NFL Combine App used by coaches and scouts. The assistant, powered by Copilot, lets scouts ask questions and instantly get responses about player statistics from the NFL Combine, the week-long event that lets teams evaluate college football players ahead of the NFL Draft.

The NFL and the tech giant first partnered in 2013 in a reported 5-year, $400 million deal, back when Microsoft wanted to showcase how Xbox could be used to watch live games and access fantasy football stats. Eventually, after a rocky sideline start, Microsoft’s Surface tablet became the centerpiece, and it changed the game forever.

In 2020, Microsoft and the league extended the deal, adding Microsoft’s Teams collaboration tool to the mix for both teams and NFL staff.

Beyond the NFL, Microsoft also works with other sports leagues including the NBA and LALIGA.

The NFL, meanwhile, has key tech partnerships with Amazon across live game streaming and cloud-fueled “Next-Gen Stats.”

Editor’s note: We originally published this interview in August, ahead of the 2025 NFL season. With the Seahawks now heading to the Super Bowl, we’re resurfacing it for a closer look at the data-driven mindset of head coach Mike Macdonald.

It’s about 10 minutes into my interview with Mike Macdonald, and I get the sense that the Seattle Seahawks head coach is a little geeky.

“Geek is a compliment,” he said. “I’ve been called a football nerd.”

Macdonald, 38, became the NFL’s youngest head coach when he joined the Seahawks last year. He was also a straight-A student in high school and graduated summa cum laude with a finance degree from University of Georgia.

So it’s not a big surprise that Macdonald embraces innovative tools and strategies.

In an interview with GeekWire earlier this year at Lumen Field, Macdonald described his approach as a hybrid of traditional football fundamentals and modern technology.

“We have a philosophy in Seattle: old school principles, new school methods,” he said. “We’re going to build on a strong foundation, but whatever we can do to give us an edge — we’re going to get after it.”

Thanks to advanced tracking and analytics, NFL teams have more data than ever — and it’s changing how the game is played. One clear example: how coaches approach fourth down decisions.

“We have a way to measure the advantage you get for going for it on fourth down,” Macdonald said. “Every team has that.”

That data can shift play-calling not just on fourth down but throughout an entire drive, Macdonald said.

Macdonald doesn’t see analytics and instinct as mutually exclusive — instead, he views data as a decision-making tool to support what coaches already know from film, practice, and experience.

“It’s a constant balance,” he said.

We spoke to Macdonald as part of an event showcasing Microsoft’s partnership with the NFL, which now includes use of the company’s Copilot AI software for scouting, allowing teams to get immediate insights by simply asking questions versus waiting for analysts to crunch spreadsheets.

“Earlier information is better,” Macdonald said.

Macdonald, who was previously the Baltimore Ravens defensive coordinator, last year became the first coach in franchise history to reach 10 wins in his first season. He’ll try to top that mark as the Seahawks kick off their 2025 season next month.

We ended our chat with a little quick-hit Q&A.

Mac or PC? “I had a PC in college. I switched to Mac. But ever since I’ve been working in football, I’ve been on a PC.”

Favorite video game: “Madden. I’ve stopped playing the last couple years, but I love Madden. Loved NCAA back in the day. MVP Baseball 2005 was a great game.”

Favorite app: “Text message app. I get more text messages now, holy smokes.”

What should GeekWire readers know about you? “I’m an open book on this stuff. I think it’s cool to be into stuff that is high-tech, data-driven. You’re telling me you’re smart and you’re trying to find edges and trying to find new frontier — that’s cool to me. It sounds like a winning formula.”

The owner of the Carolina Hurricanes NHL team has reportedly reached an agreement to buy the Portland Trail Blazers NBA team from the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Dallas-based billionaire Tom Dundon confirmed the deal but declined to give specific details on Wednesday, according to CNBC. ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the price tag was over $4 billion.

The Oregonian reported that Dundon heads a group of investors that includes the co-president of Blue Owl Capital, Marc Zahr, as well as Portland-based Sheel Tyle, co-CEO of Collective Global. A source said the group “is passionate about basketball and intends to keep the team in Portland, where it belongs.”

Any deal will require NBA approval.

The Allen estate announced in May that it was seeking a buyer, consistent with Allen’s wishes that his sports franchises be sold off, with the proceeds going to philanthropy.

The sale is part of the long process of divesting many of the assets and investments that Allen made during his lifetime. Allen died in 2018, at the age of 65, after he was diagnosed with a recurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Allen’s estate, headed by his sister Jody Allen, previously said the Trail Blazers announcement does not impact its ownership of the Seattle Seahawks NFL franchise, or its 25% stake in the Seattle Sounders MLS team, which are not yet for sale.

The Trail Blazers started play during the 1970-71 NBA season. Allen bought the team in 1988 for $70 million.