Using AI to try and recreate famous Yankees moments

If you’re on Twitter, particularly the parts that like to goof around, you may have seen people messing with the Dall-E 2 Mini image generator. For those unaware, Dall-E 2 Mini uses AI to generate images for any prompt you give it. While it can occasionally come up with something good, I wouldn’t worry about it’s potential harm for deep fakes and the world in general just yet. For an example, prompting it to come up with pictures of something fairly normal, like say Aaron Judge, doesn’t quite nail it.

While the figures in the pictures vaguely look like Aaron Judge hitting, I wouldn’t exactly describe them as realistic. As a result, most people goofing around with the generator having been using it to make deliberately weird pictures. For example, I wanted to see what it would look like if mascot Mr. Met won an Academy Award.

I also wanted to know what it would look like if award-winning actor Stanley Tucci played for the Knicks.

In both cases, the resulting images vaguely look like what I asked for, but are not exactly ‘accurate.’ With that in mind, I wanted to see what would happen if the prompts I put in were famous moments in Yankees history. Could the AI come close or would we end up with some very weird images? Let’s find out.

Let’s start out with a fairly straightforward one involving maybe the most famous Yankee of them all: Babe Ruth. Let’s make it probably his most famous moment, his alleged called shot in the 1932 World Series.

Hm, not off to a good start. While a couple of them have some Ruth-ish qualities, they also pretty much look like what would happen if you mixed the Babe with a weird fish man. Ok, let’s pivot to Ruth’s contemporary and see what we get when searching for Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man” speech.

Again, some of them look somewhat like Gehrig, although they’re what “The Iron Horse” would look like if he was a Thumb Thumb creature from the “Sky Kids” movies.

Ok, next let’s look up something related to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. There’s that famous video of him breaking through the banner with “56” on it, make it can come up with something that looks like that.

Ok, guess not.

What if we try to get it to recreate the picture of Mariano Rivera hugging Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte when they came to the mound to remove the legendary closer in his final game at Yankee Stadium?

Hey, not terrible. Can it keep it going by somewhat recreating another famous Yankee picture?

Moving on ...

A query for Derek Jeter’s famous flip play from the 2001 ALDS results in a bunch of images that somewhat resemble a pinstriped figure doing a flip.

Next up, I tried to see what would happen if we tried to get an image of Bucky Dent’s home run over the Green Monster to win the 1978 one-game playoff against the Red Sox.

The AI appeared to take “green monster” literally and has turned Bucky into some weird green baseball humanoid.

Alright, let’s try one last thing and see if we can conjure up something from Reggie Jackson’s three home run game in the 1977 World Series, and...

... it’s just pictures of baseball people inside homes. Great, thanks.