An IT Home Run For The Cleveland Guardians Baseball Club

A communications network upgrade has proven to be a huge hit for the Cleveland Guardians, its facilities operations, fans, players and staff.

October 1, 2024

Fielding a winning professional sports team is like succeeding in any business: It’s about executing the fundamentals better and more consistently than the competition. An organization’s ability to excel at the fundamentals depends not only on the skill of team members, but also on the infrastructure—facilities, technology, systems—that supports those team members and the people who evaluate, develop, train, coach and lead them.

As hard as it is to quantify with data, it’s clear that an upgrade in communications network infrastructure has played a subtle but important role in powering the Cleveland Guardians to a winning 2024 season. As of this writing, the Guardians were headed to the playoffs and ready to compete for a championship, far exceeding prognosticators’ preseason expectations for the team.

Ultimately, a decision to shift the organization’s outdated legacy communications network to a more powerful, secure and resilient cloud-based communications network is translating into a better product on the field and a better experience for Guardians fans at the ballpark.

A Network Modernization Long Overdue

That shift occurred several years ago, prompted by a realization among Guardians decision-makers that the team’s aging communications network was limiting their ability to gather, leverage and analyze data in a timely, reliable way and to access the cutting-edge software that the team’s baseball people need to maintain a competitive edge, while also impacting facility operations, detracting from the fan experience at the ballpark. Network outages were too frequent, and the legacy communications equipment on which the team was relying was time-consuming and costly to repair or replace. In baseball terms, the network was a highly paid, past-its-prime veteran who spent too much time on the injured list.

Thankfully, a more-than-capable successor was waiting in the wings. In this case, the replacement amounted to a highly touted prospect: a software-defined wide-area network, or SD-WAN. A cloud-based network construct, SD-WAN has emerged as the gold standard in network communications for a wide range of businesses, from professional sports to healthcare to retail, because it offers a unique combination of redundancy, resilience, reliability, scalability, security and cost-effectiveness, plus the high bandwidth and low latency that enterprise organizations must have to support a digital IT infrastructure and intelligent, data-intensive apps, including the new wave of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software that pro sports team like the Guardians are eying for the future.

SD-WAN came with another feature that the Guardians IT team deemed essential: It was managed by a third party, which meant they could hand over responsibility for overseeing day-to-day operation of the network to an expert, Windstream Enterprise, so they could focus on supporting their end customers.

The Right Move At The Right Time

The move to SD-WAN, which occurred during late 2020 and early 2021, has proven to be a home run for the Guardians’ baseball and facility operations staff, IT team, fans and vendors. Here’s a look at some of the benefits the organization is seeing from its decision:

1. A single unified, mobile-enabled network to serve all the organization’s facilities and locations. With SD-WAN, the Guardians’ communications network is now fully integrated across the organization’s eight locations, including its headquarters and home field, Progressive Field, in Cleveland, along with its minor league affiliates, spring training facility in Arizona, and player development operation in the Dominican Republic. Data, systems and apps are accessible, on-demand, to players and personnel at all those locations. SD-WAN gives the Guardians IT team a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage systems, apps and data. They also have more flexibility in routing traffic and in synching data to and from various locations, and can onboard new services without having to adapt one particular site or another. What’s more, the WE Connect network management portal gives them a single-pane-of-glass view into conditions across the network in real time, with dashboards to monitor and manage it all.

2. Support for advanced apps. The move to SD-WAN and the cloud has been instrumental in providing the data transport capabilities, computing power and bandwidth required to run the intelligent analytics software the Guardians are using on the baseball side, as well as the facility management systems that support everything from digital displays inside the stadium to club offices to training sites. Guardians facilities and operations staff have the real-time, mobile-enabled connectivity they need to provide a superior experience to staff, vendors and most importantly, fans.

3. A more reliable and resilient network. Network downtime, once a big problem for the Guardians, has been virtually eliminated with SD-WAN.

4. Stronger cybersecurity. As a cloud-based network, SD-WAN tends to do a much better job of protecting sensitive data from today’s increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks than a legacy network that incorporates a patchwork of older software and on-premises hardware. SD-WAN comes with built-in security measures like private connectivity and encryption, helping the Guardians be good stewards of their own data and that of their fans.

5. An experienced technology teammate. By opting for SD-WAN as a managed service, the Guardians gained an experienced hand to co-manage their communications network, freeing the team’s internal IT people of day-to-day, moment-to-moment network duties so they can focus on strategic tech-related pursuits that directly impact baseball decision-makers, the product on the field and the fan experience. Windstream handles monitoring, troubleshooting, upgrading and maintaining the organization’s entire communications network.

On Deck: AI

The Guardians’ experience with a cloud-based network looks much like the team’s 2024 season: It’s been strong to this point, but there is unfinished business.

In fact, the move to SD-WAN and the cloud has laid the foundation for the Guardians’ IT team to explore the new wave of AI-powered apps to help the organization’s operations teams run their facilities more efficiently, to continue to elevate the fan experience, and to help decision-makers on the baseball side glean important strategic insight from all the data to which they now have ready access. AI is a potential gamechanger in each of these areas, and in the months and years to come, the team will be piloting new intelligent apps to begin tapping that immense potential. SD-WAN and a move to the cloud make it possible.

Ultimately, the Guardians are behaving as any progressive business should with respect to digital communications, AI and IT infrastructure in general. They’re investing in fundamental IT capabilities that will give them an edge in identifying, acquiring, developing and training talent to field a consistently winning product, and from a facilities perspective, that will put smiles on fans’ faces with in-stadium experiences that create a lasting, winning relationship between the team and its fanbase.

Whitney Kuszmaul is senior director of infrastructure and operations for the Cleveland Guardians.
Mike Flannery is president of Windstream Enterprise.