Baseball, the Internet & me (Part VI)
Once I'd got over the novelty value of the whole thing (weird fetish sites, discovering that you're not the only Del Amitri fan outside Scotland, looking up cult movies on IMDB, ...) it dawned on me that - since the Internet was such a treasure-trove (or should it be trash-ure trove?) of information - it was the ideal medium for me to renew my acquaintance with the sport of baseball. And so, from the start of the 2000 season onwards, I became a regular visitor on baseball sites - suddenly I went from having next-to-no information to having all the information I could possibly need: news, box scores, trades, stats, team histories, player bios, ballpark details...
Of course, it was fabulous - like finally seeing a talking picture after years of silent movies - but it was also only the beginning. Once I'd grasped the basics, I realised that I could also listen to games live on MLB Radio, which was something I hadn't be able to do since tuning into the Armed Forces Network in Cambridge 10 years before. I had to deal with the 6- / 7- / 8-hour time difference (which meant that I pretty much only got to listen to weekend games from the East Coast ), but I loved it. I was so hooked that I even managed organise my work / sleep schedule to follow the online audio broadcasts of the World Series. OK, so in an age of cable television and digital communication, getting all excited about audio broadcasts of the Subway Series makes me sound like a Back to the Future time-traveller, but I loved it - it was a real, live, real-time link with the sport of baseball. What more could I want? Well, as with any addiction, the answer was "lots"...
Fortunately, downloadable music wasn't the only thing that was developing rapidly on the Internet. The powers-that-be at Major League Baseball realised that the medium was perfectly suited to the type of content that they had available - streaming audio, video highlights, vintage radio broadcasts - and more and more content became available as time went on. I still only had a 56k modem connection at home, so information was pretty much limited to box-scores, photographs and radio feeds, but my Internet connection at work allowed me to take advantage of the video that was online.
And then, with broadband becoming much more widespread, MLB.com decided to create an offer that, to me, looked like Christmas and my birthday all rolled into one: MLB.TV. If you're reading this from the other side of the Atlantic, where baseball is available for six months a year (and more, if you have ESPN Classic) at the push of a remote-control button, it might be hard to understand my enthusiasm, but you have to remember that there's a reason this blog is called The Baseball Desert, and that is that I have no "regular" access to the sport. MLB.TV, however - whether it's live (which is rare, as, contrary to what you might think, I do have a life and a job...) or archived - gives me the same kind of access most US baseball fans take for granted. For all that I yell and curse when the connection doesn't work properly (see post of Oct 3), I couldn't live without that daily dose of baseball. I often feel like Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams, when he looks around at the baseball field that farmer Ray Kinsella [Kevin Costner] has built in his Iowa cornfield and asks: "Is this heaven?" Had that been me asking the question, Kevin Costner would have replied: "No, it's MLB.com"...
Of course, it was fabulous - like finally seeing a talking picture after years of silent movies - but it was also only the beginning. Once I'd grasped the basics, I realised that I could also listen to games live on MLB Radio, which was something I hadn't be able to do since tuning into the Armed Forces Network in Cambridge 10 years before. I had to deal with the 6- / 7- / 8-hour time difference (which meant that I pretty much only got to listen to weekend games from the East Coast ), but I loved it. I was so hooked that I even managed organise my work / sleep schedule to follow the online audio broadcasts of the World Series. OK, so in an age of cable television and digital communication, getting all excited about audio broadcasts of the Subway Series makes me sound like a Back to the Future time-traveller, but I loved it - it was a real, live, real-time link with the sport of baseball. What more could I want? Well, as with any addiction, the answer was "lots"...
Fortunately, downloadable music wasn't the only thing that was developing rapidly on the Internet. The powers-that-be at Major League Baseball realised that the medium was perfectly suited to the type of content that they had available - streaming audio, video highlights, vintage radio broadcasts - and more and more content became available as time went on. I still only had a 56k modem connection at home, so information was pretty much limited to box-scores, photographs and radio feeds, but my Internet connection at work allowed me to take advantage of the video that was online.
And then, with broadband becoming much more widespread, MLB.com decided to create an offer that, to me, looked like Christmas and my birthday all rolled into one: MLB.TV. If you're reading this from the other side of the Atlantic, where baseball is available for six months a year (and more, if you have ESPN Classic) at the push of a remote-control button, it might be hard to understand my enthusiasm, but you have to remember that there's a reason this blog is called The Baseball Desert, and that is that I have no "regular" access to the sport. MLB.TV, however - whether it's live (which is rare, as, contrary to what you might think, I do have a life and a job...) or archived - gives me the same kind of access most US baseball fans take for granted. For all that I yell and curse when the connection doesn't work properly (see post of Oct 3), I couldn't live without that daily dose of baseball. I often feel like Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams, when he looks around at the baseball field that farmer Ray Kinsella [Kevin Costner] has built in his Iowa cornfield and asks: "Is this heaven?" Had that been me asking the question, Kevin Costner would have replied: "No, it's MLB.com"...
posted by Iain at
08:45
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