MLB GameDay rocks my dinner hour October 29, 2007
Posted by alivelee in Kinda cool, Personal rant/rave.Tags: baseball, Detroit Tigers, MLB GameDay
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I’m a huge Detroit Tigers fan. Being from Michigan, I’ve been a fan of Detroit’s storied baseball team since I was a little girl. And while this season wasn’t great, as a fan you know the Tigs will roar again, and you watch the World Series anyway because, well, it’s the World Series. Little did I know that online technology has already infiltrated America’s pastime, and in a very cool way. This past weekend, my boyfriend and I were listening to Game 3 of the Red Sox vs. the Colorado Rockies on the radio while making dinner, and of course a laptop is nearby for any split- second Googling we might need to do to settle an argument. (Sadly, I’m not kidding.) A batter waited on a particularly tough pitch, and Greg went straight to the laptop to see where the ball crossed the plate. He’s an avid user of MLB GameDay, this fabulous online feature from MLB.com. It’s got a bunch of different real time features — one of which will graph the path of the pitch. So, there we were in our Chicago kitchen watching exactly where the ball flew over a tiny plate in a ballfield in Colorado mere seconds ago, all while the radio announcer yapped away about the batter regrouping for the second pitch. It was kinda surreal.
Greg tells me MLB GameDay is also handy for those days when you can’t watch or listen to the game (i.e. when you are at work in a tiny cubicle). Just have GameDay up on your browser and you get the game live on your laptop. And suddenly, work doesn’t suck as much.
My dear, I must disagree. MLB GameDay is – to put it mildly – a piece of $hiT. It’s usually at least 30 minutes behind the game, and while I could get over that, I’ve checked in before at the 4th inning only to find that GameDay hasn’t even logged the first pitch!! Also, it’s been known to stall mid-game and never pick up again. MLB.com in general is crap (I recall checking standings earlier this year and they were three games behind).
There is, happily, an alternative for those of us who live far away from our home teams (now that MLB has blocked internet radio broadcasting of the games, those dirty ba$Tards) and can’t afford the $109 that TimeWarner Cable charges for the MLB network. ESPN GameCast has all the features of GameDay, including Greg’s favorite plate-cam. GameCast is only ~5-10 minutes behind the game and includes a running chat session with an ESPN analyst, so you can complain heartily about those unearned runs given up in the Series by our rookie set-up man who threw to Inge when he should have taken the force at 1st….oh, but that’s another year. And another blog.
Waiting impatiently for spring…..
ah, Greg is ALSO all about ESPN GameCast. I, sadly, am behind the baseball times…:)
oh, you wanna start some shit with me about your disney owned piece of crap network that cares more about showing me endless hours of poker than, i don’t know, an actual SPORT like hockey!?!?!
i’m kidding, i don’t really want to start shit, but it was kinda fun to write… but i really do hate ESPN for that reason.
i will say that the reason i prefer mlb gameday is that the graphics/animation of the pitches just looks a bit cooler than the ESPN version. Clearly, this is one of the best reasons ever!!!
Baseball should end in September. Can we work on a technology to do that?
Greg: I don’t watch ESPN because I’m too poor for NYC cable, so I have no beef with poker airtime. But I think I get your point….because imagine going to a sports bar during playoff baseball and finding only one tiny television (we’re talking 17-inch here) broadcasting this most important game, while all sixteen plasma screen TVs in the joint are playing pre-season NFL games. I begin to seriously contemplate murder.
Cara: I think baseball should end in February, or roughly two weeks before spring training starts.
Hmmm. I think I wandered a bit off the point of this blog. Sorry.