Rakuten Monkeys Will Play Before Robot Fans

Rakuten Monkeys Will Play Before Robot Fans

The Rakuten Monkeys, a Chinese Professional Baseball League team, will play games in front of 500 robot fans.

Apr 8, 2020 by FloBaseball Staff
Rakuten Monkeys Will Play Before Robot Fans

The Rakuten Monkeys, a Chinese Professional Baseball League team, will have fans in the stands when it opens the season on April 11 — just not at all the way you might've imagined.

The Monkeys will play before 500 robot fans. This is not a drill.

To be fair, some of the fans are just mannequins. That's still weird, of course, but nothing compared to the robots who've been programmed to hold up signs during the game.

All of that in an effort to create a more "normal" atmosphere, but it's tough to come up with many scenarios that are less normal than walking to the plate as R2-D2 and Wall-E sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

On the bright side, you'd have to assume that various RoboCops will be working stadium security, so that's likely a year-over-year upgrade.