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Missing the Strike Zone

mero — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:32:01 +0000

I rather like the concept of Major League Baseball’s mlb.tv. It lets you view baseball games on your computer. The service actually works pretty well and it’s neat to watch some games you won’t be able to see on regular TV, especially if you quietly follow an out of town team (like those lovable losers from the North Side). My only real complaint about the thing is that they insist on blacking out games that fall in your media market. That means I can’t watch Yankee games on the computer when I’m in the tri-state area. I more or less understand why this is (or at least I think I do… I imagine the owners and media folk don’t want to lose ad dollars by having people watch the games on anything other than the cable channels they worked out expensive deals for and that ad money) but it’s missing the point. Sometimes you’re just in a place where you can’t watch the game on TV but you could online. I’d love to be able to do this. If they’re worried about losing out on ad money, why not just show all the commercials and be done with it? Makes perfect sense to me. Then again, what do I know, I’m not a baseball team owner.

At least the rules aren’t as crazy and draconian as the NFL’s blackout rules (you can’t see your team’s game in the home market unless the game is sold out. What sort of nonsense is that?). Still, it’s time that baseball fully embraces this modern century and gives us the full online baseball experience.

Technorati Tags: baseball, blackout rules, mlb.tv

A Memo to the Gods at ESPN

mero — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:32:03 +0000

I have to say that one of the best things that ESPN has done over the past year or so was to start offering some real investment into getting some first class blogs going on their site. Hashmarks, their NFL blog, and TrueHoop, their NBA blog are both loaded with excellent writing, insightful analysis, some great interviews (the guys who write Hashmarks especially, as they are good with getting interviews with GM’s, team presidents, and other high ranking officials), and an in-depth look at stats.

My point is that I would love to see ESPN start up a similar blog for baseball. Right now, they have “blogs” from several of their correspondents that read more like daily dispatches from around the league than real blogs. I do like some of them. Rob Neyer has some decent dispatches that look at what newspaper writers around the league have to say about what’s happening in baseball which are insightful, but it lacks the real dedication that a permanent blogger can add to the mix because all the baseball guys are either TV analysists or columnists for the website in addition and you can tell in the quality of their work that this is the place where the put most of their concentration. It would make a great addition to the world of ESPN to see a baseball blog that’s as in depth and insightful as their excellent NBA and NFL blogs.

Technorati Tags: baseball, blogs, espn, hashmarks, truehoop

My Love Affair With Baseball

mero — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 07:08:39 +0000

I don’t approach baseball in the traditional male way. I can’t recite a volume of player stats from memory. I can’t really talk about how trading for this or that utility player will make my team great. Fantasy baseball? I tried it once and didn’t really get the point. Baseball was not a tool I could use to relate to my father. I never revolved my life around it. But don’t take that to mean that I’m not in love with the game, because that’s far from the truth. While I enjoy football and basketball, and even soccer on occasion, I have been in love with baseball for years now. I can’t even quite explain why, either. There’s nothing quite as enjoyable as a lazy Saturday afternoon in the summer watching a game. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of seeing your favorite player get a winning hit or watching your ace shut down the opposition. There’s nothing like going to your local minor league park and watching a game, even if the temperature is in the high 90s and the park runs out of bottled water (for I have been to a game in which this happened). There’s nothing quite like the suspense a tight pitchers duel or the overflow of joy when your team wins a huge playoff game. Baseball is one of the few games where you can go from the pinnacles of joy to the depths of despair in seconds (unless you’re the Knicks and Reggie Miller’s got the ball in his hands…). There’s just something so… wonderful… about watching baseball. It’s something that stirs the passions of life inside of me. That sounds stupid, I know, but I know I’m not alone in this love affair. Countless people have their own love affairs with baseball, for whatever reasons. I mean, how many books and movies have there been about baseball? There have been plenty of movies that have been deemed the best (insert sport name here) movie made, but there’s a reason The Natural is almost always thought of as the best sports movie of all time, and I think it’s because of the way it captures the love for the game, rather than the technical accuracy of it. Hell, as anyone who has seen the movie and knows about baseball can attest to, there are some really glaring errors in the baseball of the game (especially when Roy gets the game winning walkoff homerun in the game in Chicago… when he’s on the visiting team), but no one really cares. In the history of sports movies, Hoosiers was the only other movie to ever come close to putting the love of the game on the big screen. I think you understand what I’m trying to say best when you consider that despite the growing popularity of the NFL and NASCAR, and even with the growing steroids cloud, baseball remains America’s pastime. Baseball in the summer is somehow as American as rock ‘n roll and apple pie. For many of us, the love affair continues year after year, even as the sports world gets more and more absurd. In the end, all I know is that I’m glad spring is approaching. I’ve missed my baseball.

Technorati Tags: baseball