Slashdot Mirror

That's just the thing. AFACT, there is no "official rule." Feel free to look, here are the Official Rules. The nearest I can find is 3.10 - Equipment on the field, but that doesn't cover this.

Citation needed, I couldn't find anything even close to applicable in the current Official Baseball Rules.

If you want to world series to live up to their name, maybe, just maybe, you should invite other countries, no ?

Like Canada?

That's probably true of a number of people on Slashdot, but I think not that common among the general public. Sports especially are one thing keeping people on cable; a huge percentage of Americans watch live sports, and webs of TV contracts make it hard to get them otherwise, at least if you aren't internet-savvy enough to find pirated streams.

That will probably eventually change. The major sports leagues periodically re-run the numbers on whether it'd be more profitable to just sell direct streaming subscriptions to the public, rather than sign exclusive deals with TV networks. But so far the answer is that it isn't. So instead they're laying the groundwork for it, starting their own networks that could be delivered via other modalities in the future if it becomes profitable, and experimenting with selling streaming subscriptions to whatever content isn't locked up in the exclusivity deals.

I live in St. Louis but don't pay attention to sports much.

You must be new here. Give it time. In a few years, you'll be able to tell the seasons by the color of your blood. Red from April to October, blue from October to May (and hopefully June someday). Any overlap will cause a sickly shade of purple, as if your cardiovascular system had been retrofitted to circulate grape soda through your veins.

And, yes, we've all pretty much written off the Rams. Any NFL team that wants to stay in St. Louis is going to need to have a non-jackass owner. This fact leads me to believe that St. Louis isn't a long-term football town. The last good football team owner died of old age, then there was a stream of disinterested twits, and now we have this Walmart douchebag. Trust me, Arsenal fans, St. Louis feels your pain.

You can watch MLB, NHL, or NBA, if you don't mind paying for it.

I suspect that all of these sports have the same rules (which I know MLB has) that you cannot watch your local team live over the Internet...you must watch them on local TV (either OTA or the regional sports network).

Note that this means that if you live in Chicago and buy the MLB.tv package because you are a fan of the Cleveland Indians, you will not be able to watch over the Internet when Cleveland visits either Chicago team, or vice-versa. In some years, that would mean that out of 162 games, as many as 25 will not be available to you.

You can watch MLB, NHL, or NBA, if you don't mind paying for it.

One of the great pleasures of baseball is that it generates a vast amount of data for the analytically minded to use and abuse to their heart's content.

This purchase is presumably related to MLB's recent announcement of a new system that will constantly track and measure the movement of the ball and every player on the field. Supposedly this is going to generate several terrabytes of information each game, and some team has decided to buy a Cray as a way of processing all that data. Whether that's a better idea than the proverbial Beowulf cluster I don't know, but that seems to be this team's thinking.

Most, maybe all, baseball teams have been doing some variant of advanced analytics for quite some time now. Most of this work is proprietary and secret, but there's been a lot of "open source" (or at least publicly available) work that's probably along the same lines. Sabermatricians (baseball stat people -- from "SABR', the Society for American Baseball Research) have gotten very good at measuring offense, and reasonably good at predicting hitters' future numbers. Nate Silver's PECOTA system is the most famous, but there are others that work about as well (ZiPS and Cairo being the ones I've spent time with, plus the "dumb as the monkey on Friends" system called Marcel). Pitching numbers are understood pretty well, at least as they relate to the Three True Outcomes, which are the results or a batter v. pitcher matchup that don't involve any defensive players (i.e., walks, strikeouts, and home runs).

The next great frontier of analytics is defense. There's been a lot of work in this field over the last decade, but the problem has always been in getting good data. If a ball is hit towards the shortstop and the shortstop doesn't get to it, why is that? Is it because the ball was hit too hard? Is it because the shortstop was badly positioned by his coaches? Is it because the shortstop isn't very good? Data that's not much more than "groundball to shortstop" can't really answer that question, but the new tracking system promises to answer that sort of question in full by precisely measuring reaction times, routes to the ball, and so forth. This in turn might lead to greater and greater changes in defensive positioning, different emphases in player acquisition, maybe even in-game changes based on small changes in wind patterns or whatever.

Some of what we're already learning about defense is very surprising. For example, there has been a lot of work done recently on catcher's ability to "frame" pitches, that is to make a borderline pitch look good. The most current results suggest that the pitch-framing difference between the best and worst catcher might be worth something on the order of 5 wins. That's roughly the difference between having a random scrub and an All-Star as your right fielder, and all from a catcher's ability (or inability) to fool the umpire. It's shocking.

As for what team this is, when the news first broke it was claimed that the purchasing team "would surprise most people". That rules out the teams that are well-known to be friendly to advanced analytics -- starting with the Red Sox, Yankees, Cub, and A's. The best guess I've seen is that it's the Phillies -- they have tons of cash and seem to be very behind on analytics, and seem likely to just go out and buy a supercomputer rather than have the MIT grads in their analytics department jerry-rig a bunch of Debian boxes into something cooler and weirder.

Afaik, testing for a hunting license consists of buying one at Wal-Mart.

A Powered Parachute, which I'm currently very interested in, requires one or two days training and no pilot's license.

The flaw in your solution lies in the fact that testing and licensing create artificial barriers to entry that the enterprising poor will circumvent by making low grade drugs or reusing needles or popping the first pill they're handed...

Hell, i've been poor enough to smoke butts from ashtrays to curb hunger.

I could follow up with a statement like "if crackheads could afford high quality drugs and a team of healthcare professionals to monitor their use, they'd choose to be safer in their use" but that will never be true.

The human condition will always allow people to drop, to isolate and to self abuse.. There will always be a low and, like has been mentioned here previously, there will always be a hideous new bottom.

Some of us should just just plain never be aware of those extremes... No need to be aware, we don't question, we're content, we'll never encounter it.. just.. a boundary we don't need to cross.

Some of us should use them as cautionary tales.. To make us aware of the path we're on and where it leads us. Of course, chances are that this class's primary concern is not education about the dangers of the methods we choose to escape. More likely we just... don't.. care... ..And some of us should use them as learning tools to council and support.. to get some grasp of what the people we deal with are capable of.

but..

In the end, the entire issue is rooted in a lost cause.. I have to think people that live in this realm are statistically written off... MAYBE there might be a success story or two.. a tale of faith for the other lost souls to latch on to.. the way the middle class uses those tales of that one kid from the neighborhood that became rich or famous and broke out. Most of us that get here will stay here. Most of us that start that road will die on it...

We need to see root causes.. isolated teens unable to relate to their peers looking to escape their anxiety.. abused kids unable to cope with their pain, battered wives desperate to keep their children safe in an abusive environment.. bored rich kids looking behind the wrong doors simple because they can..

Eh.. as with every argument/comment.. the answer is always "balance".. balance of helping ourselves enough so that we can help others, balance of managing our pain with experiencing joy..

Shock stories wake us up for brief moments, but at the end of the day we still livehere

yeah yeah.. preachy.. but any society that makes idols of people that play games for 12 year olds.. that builds their economy on them..

My soul hurts now... someone please pick up the argument and continue by explaining the correlation between prioritizing sports and abusing alcohol, why the latter fuels the salaries of the former, and how it only serves to exacerbate the problem of substance abuse.. how its far more "part of the problem" than it could ever be "part of the cure"

On mlb.com.

Yankees
St Louis Cardinals
Dodgers

etc.

Of course, Google can say that the patent was filed in 2007. But this is one of the problems with these patents. What they're claiming is obvious, but by the time the patent is granted, everyone has to scramble to prove that prior art existed many years ago, which can be very inconvenient. And of course, that's one of the things the patent hoarding companies are banking on.

On mlb.com.

Yankees
St Louis Cardinals
Dodgers

etc.

Of course, Google can say that the patent was filed in 2007. But this is one of the problems with these patents. What they're claiming is obvious, but by the time the patent is granted, everyone has to scramble to prove that prior art existed many years ago, which can be very inconvenient. And of course, that's one of the things the patent hoarding companies are banking on.

On mlb.com.

Yankees
St Louis Cardinals
Dodgers

etc.

Of course, Google can say that the patent was filed in 2007. But this is one of the problems with these patents. What they're claiming is obvious, but by the time the patent is granted, everyone has to scramble to prove that prior art existed many years ago, which can be very inconvenient. And of course, that's one of the things the patent hoarding companies are banking on.

There is, apparently, no rule against running the bases backwards.

It turns out it is against the rules to run the bases in reverse, but only "for the purpose of confusing the defense or making a travesty of the game." In that case, the baserunner is out by Rule 7:08(i).

However, by the same rule, if the runner is decoyed by the defense or the runner is simply confused (as Segura was), the runner can run forwards or in reverse, at his or her own risk.

source

It was stupid officiating by the umpires why would somebody assume that the score keepers or software would need to account for this? They should have correctly called them both out because they were both tagged presumably.

Both were tagged when both were standing on second at the same time. By rule (7.03), the trailing runner is out.
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/runner_7.jsp

No. It's a lot simpler than that, since you've kinda mashed the force rule (which doesn't apply here) together with base stealing into something that's incorrect. And then you said that some things were illegitimate or invalid, none of which were. In fact, ironically, you missed commenting on the only invalid action that actually took place in all of this.

The reason Braun was out is simple: you can't steal an occupied base (see 7.01 and 7.03). Because nothing was forcing Segura to leave second base and he failed to make it to third base, he was never considered to have vacated second base. As a result, Braun had no claim to second base, so he was out as soon as he was tagged. Nothing more.

The reason Segura could go to first was simply because it was vacant and he didn't break the rule (7.08i) that prohibits going in reverse to "confus[e] the defense or mak[e] a travesty of the game" (apparently some runners on second used to run back to first to give the runner on third a chance to steal home). Nothing more, and certainly not a rule that allows a runner to "run to the closest available base to be safe".

Regarding Segura stealing "too early", that has nothing to do with the rules and everything to do with it being a poor judgment call on his part, since it gave the pitcher the opportunity to throw the ball to the third basemen, thus making it likely that Segura would get picked off. Had he waited until the pitcher committed to the pitch (as per your hypothetical situation), I can see three possible outcomes:
1) The pitcher could have balked before completing the pitch, in which case Braun and Segura would be advanced automatically to second and third bases, respectively, and we would have gotten none of the excitement.

2) The batter could have hit the ball, in which case he would have created a force play. As such, Braun would have been forced to second, who would, in turn, force Segura to third. If the same scenario that we saw then played out, Segura would be out and Braun would be safe, since Segura would have been compelled to vacate second base by the force play while Braun would be entitled to it.

3) The batter could have not hit the ball, in which case we'd be left with the same situation that actually played out: Braun would be out since he can't advance to an occupied base.

The only thing I haven't covered at this point is the one invalid action that actually took place: Segura was tagged out while not touching a base, but no one noticed it at the time. If you review the video, you'll see that Segura gets tagged while on second base (he's safe), Braun gets tagged while on second base (he's out since he's not entitled to be on second base), and then Segura gets tagged while not touching second base (he should be out, but isn't, since no one noticed that he wasn't touching the base). As such, the whole thing with him trotting back to first base never should have happened at all, since he was already out for the most mundane reason imaginable: he wasn't careful and got tagged while off the base.

I think clip is available here: http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20130420&content_id=45278350&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb - you can clearly see the runner trotting off the field before he realizes that he's not out and safely reaches first.

Also, in this year's World Baseball Classic, Italy made it to the second round (top 8 of 16) and the Netherlands reached the semifinals (top 4). Not a bad showing for the Europeans....

Wow, so one day there might be a true international baseball competition. It should be called 'The World Series'.

The game was tied 2–2, going into the top of the 15th inning, until Mets pitcher Octavio Dotel gave up an RBI triple to Keith Lockhart, giving the Braves a 3–2 lead. In the bottom of the 15th inning, the Mets loaded the bases against Braves relief pitcher Kevin McGlinchy. Mets catcher Todd Pratt drew a bases loaded walk, tying the score 3–3.

The next batter was Mets third baseman Robin Ventura. Ventura crushed the 2–1 pitch over the wall in right-center for an ostensible grand slam, winning the game for the Mets and driving the Mets players and fans into a frenzied celebration. Ventura, however, never reached second base as Todd Pratt, the runner who was on first, picked up Ventura in celebration. Subsequently, Ventura was mobbed by his teammates, never finishing his trot around the bases. Because he failed to touch all four bases, the hit was officially scored a single. Roger Cedeño, the runner on third at the time, was ruled the only runner to have crossed home plate before the on-field celebration began and the Mets were awarded a 4-3 victory. Thus, Ventura was only credited with a single and one RBI. As a result, there had never been an official walk-off grand slam in MLB postseason history until Nelson Cruz hit one to allow the Texas Rangers to beat the Detroit Tigers 7–3 in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series on October 10, 2011.

And the video on MLB.com http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=13062971

I think clip is available here: http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20130420&content_id=45278350&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb - you can clearly see the runner trotting off the field before he realizes that he's not out and safely reaches first.

Also, in this year's World Baseball Classic, Italy made it to the second round (top 8 of 16) and the Netherlands reached the semifinals (top 4). Not a bad showing for the Europeans....

Also, rule 5.06 applies... http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/ball_in_play_5.jsp

I learned an urban myth as a kid, I guess. Something about Babe Ruth not having to run the bases after he hit another out, he ran them for the crowd.

...and I've never seen a benefit for prostate cancer.

Watch baseball instead of football. Every year, they do a whole day around prostate cancer awareness and fundraising.

" Do you have any tips for stopping cable for people who live with fans of cable news or cable sports?"

Yes: kill them. Tell them all they need is /. If they don't understand get new fans, they're not worth having around anyway.

Only news I get is online (/.) or Colbert. Seriously news is waaay overrated. Haven't watched the local news in 4 years and I don't feel worse for wear.

But if someone must have sports *shutters* then there's NFL Game Rewind with every NFL game in HD, NHL GameCenter Live for live NHL games and MLB. There's also ESPN, ESPN3, Fox Soccer... just google it, and they all work with PlayON which is compatible with PS3 and Xbox360.

Rule 7.10(a):

"Any runner shall be called out, on appeal, when --
(a) After a fly ball is caught, he fails to retouch his original base before he or his original base is tagged;
Rule 7.10(a) Comment: "Retouch," in this rule, means to tag up and start from a contact with the base after the ball is caught. A runner is not permitted to take a flying start from a position in back of his base."

In case you're curious about the relevance of comments, there is this note in the Official Rules Foreword:

"The Playing Rules Committee, at its December 1977 meeting, voted to incorporate the Notes/Case Book/Comments section directly into the Official Baseball Rules at the appropriate places. Basically, the Case Book interprets or elaborates on the basic rules and in essence have the same effect as rules when applied to particular sections for which they are intended."

Rule 7.10(a):

"Any runner shall be called out, on appeal, when --
(a) After a fly ball is caught, he fails to retouch his original base before he or his original base is tagged;
Rule 7.10(a) Comment: "Retouch," in this rule, means to tag up and start from a contact with the base after the ball is caught. A runner is not permitted to take a flying start from a position in back of his base."

In case you're curious about the relevance of comments, there is this note in the Official Rules Foreword:

"The Playing Rules Committee, at its December 1977 meeting, voted to incorporate the Notes/Case Book/Comments section directly into the Official Baseball Rules at the appropriate places. Basically, the Case Book interprets or elaborates on the basic rules and in essence have the same effect as rules when applied to particular sections for which they are intended."

Runners can be called out for running outside the basepath, which is 3 feet to either side of the baseline. It usually only comes up on plays where the runner is trying to avoid a tag, but that's also usually the only time anyone ever goes very far from the baseline. It's quite likely a runner would get called out well before they got 18.5 feet away from the baseline.

No, that rule explicitly only applies when they're trying to avoid a tag. it's rule 7.08 (a) (1).

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/runner_7.jsp

You can be called out if you stray too far from the base line.

I cannot find anything in the rules saying that. Only thing I can find at all related is rule 7.08 (a) (1), which only applies if they move away from the base line to avoid being tagged.

AFAICT, they can run where ever they like as long as they don't interfere with the fielders.

Flash 7 years ago was just beginning to perform data access; most Flash apps back then were static animations like fancy mouseovers.

Back in the here-and-now, I ask this: can you duplicate MLB Gameday with HTML 5?

Every single word will generate a popup or link to some ad or other non sequiter .

In the eyes of the law (and flash) they are facily-tatin' the illegal distribution of moonshine. At the very least, they look guilty as hell, with them outlaw haircuts and that fancy car."

I agree with this. I think that if they look guilty, and have a name that makes them sound guilty, they should be treated as though they were guilty of breaking the law.

Details like, "are they actually guilty" then become totally irrelevant! They are being treated as though they were guilty, so they must be!

Besides, they have "pirate" right in their name! Just like those IP thieves over at Puzzle Pirates, or those hired goons in Pittsburg.

Don't forget, those of the US of A have a baseball competition called the World Series ... totally ignoring the rest of the world as the players are all from the US of A!

Hey, you managed to be wrong twice in one sentence! First, because there are two Canadian teams, second because even I, who loathes baseball as well as football and basketball, know that there is a significant amount of the players that are not from the USA.

To be more precise: Overall, 28.0 percent of the 818 players (748 active 25-man roster players and 70 disabled or restricted Major League players) on April 5th rosters were born outside the 50 United States, representing 15 countries and territories. The all-time highs occurred in 2005, when 29.2 percent (242/829) of Opening Day players were foreign-born, and in 2007, when 246 players were born outside the U.S., totaling 29.0 percent of all players. Last season, 239 players from a pool of 855 were foreign-born, also totaling 28.0 percent. [...] In addition, 3,335 of the 6,973 Minor League players under contract -- 47.8 percent -- were born outside the United States, the same percentage as last season (3,356/7,021). Minor League players span 41 countries and territories, up from 36 one year ago.

On top of all this, you have these comments about the egotism of the US even though you are Australian. Have you seriously ever took a step back and looked at your country? In terms of ego, Australia is basically an order of magnitude greater than the US. The main difference is that the rest of the world just generally ignores them. And I say all that even though I like Australia (and will be there in a couple of months!) Imagine what the people who like Australia about as much as you like the US say...

It's like when you walk into a Tube station and see ten of the Met's finest standing there. In theory you ought to feel safer, but in practice you wonder what's happening that you don't know about.

See, I had this image of a bunch of guys dressed like the Three Tenors standing around in a subway, and couldn't figure out why that would make someone feel safe... I guess the Met makes more sense than the Met.

I was wondering how anyone but an opposing team would feel safer facing 10 Mets. Of course, I'd definitely be confused about their appearance in England, though. For that matter, I'd be confused about my own appearance there...

I don't even care anymore, being accustomed to "Personal Identification Number Number", "Automated Teller Machine Machine", "Network Interface Card Card", "With With Juice", and "Grilled Roasted Meat Steak"*.

Also, "The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" translates to "The The Angels Angels of Anaheim".

* Taco Bell used to advertise their "carne asada" taco as "grilled carne asada steak."

I found another site with the same problem:

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/scoreboard/20081029.html (try higher 13)

Do you get the same results? It seems like more and more Web sites are doing this. :(

I think that it'd be a straight up financially bad idea for almost everyone. In addition to making the barriers to entry for new developers and IT professionals higher, we'd all suffer in terms of the actual money we take home. Union contracts base pay around seniority, not productivity. In fact, most unions violently oppose productivity-based pay scales.

Not all unions are the same, you know.

Professional baseball players have a union. You think they're getting paid based on seniority?

Actors and writers have unions. You think they're not getting paid based on their performances?

A union is whatever the workers who form it make it. Those workers know the facts of their industries and form their unions accordingly. Just because some unions stress seniority doesn't mean yours has to.

It's happened, once again here in St. Louis:

ESPN - Suit claims restaurant kept giving intoxicated pitcher drinks - MLB

Idiot gets drunk, slams his car into a tow truck trying to remove a disabled car from the road. Idiot father refuses to admit that his son is less than the perfect goody-two-shoes that everyone wants their kid to be, figures someone else MUST be responsible, somehow. The asshole not only sued the bar, when the guy chose of his own free will to buy booze and then drive despite it being suggested that he call a cab; he also sued the tow truck driver and the guy whose car broke down. Apparently, you can now be dragged into court for having your car break down on the side of the road. As if people CHOOSE to have their car break down on the side of the road!

The kicker? The idiot was on his cell phone at the time he drunkenly plowed into the stopped tow truck and car and didn't even TRY to brake.

Stupid dies as stupid does. Good riddance.

Thankfully, the case was thrown out, I believe, and an investigation showed that the restaurant had done nothing wrong.

Missouri ATC clears Shannon's | StLCardinals.com: News

The short answer is yes.

You won't be the only one maxing out their link when the Yankees play at home.

MLB.TV video is $60-$90 a year.

The premium level service includes standard-def video, Player Tracker Live-At-Bat and up to six live game feeds. To me this screams "hard-core fan who will be sucking up all the bandwidth he can get at peak usage hours."

Since we all just got Rick Rolled, why not Rick Roll someone else, why not Rick Roll the ENTIRE STATE OF NEW YORK! Go here: http://newyork.mets.mlb.com/nym/fan_forum/singalong_vote_form.jsp Put in "Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley" into the other query. Then put 11215 into the zip code query. We can all do it if we try!

I don't know about basketball and football, but baseball has a doping league. Their website is here.

One of the selling points of some stadiums is Wifi all over. Take the San Francisco Giant's baseball stadium.

http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/sf/ballpark/wifi.jsp

While yes a Union would curb management excess, it also tends to retard employee excellence.

Creative people can have unions and still have room for individual excellence. Just look at the writers that are on strike; the fact that most writers are living from job to job hasn't prevented superstars like J.J. Abrams (who is a WGA member) from building empires.

I don't know... I guess I just prefer the free agency of it all.

Speaking of Free Agency, baseball players have a union too, and nobody's sitting around waiting for A-Rod to die so that they can move up.

A union reflects the people who organize it. Creative workers organize unions that leave their members plenty of room for creativity and individual achievement, but that still allow them to pull together when they are getting the shaft (as the writers have been).

Their EULA is horrible and long.
Its also buried away in a tiny text frame and opens up to a novel size.

however there is one gem which made me smile:

2. Message Features

          Participation. The Website may offer opportunities for you to transmit messages in connection with various features including, but not limited to, vanity email, auctions, contests, games, blogs, video submissions message boards and chat features ("Message Features"). You must use Message Features in a responsible manner, and are solely responsible for any content you transmit. You must not transmit any message ("Message") in connection with any Message Feature that: (i) imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on the Website's infrastructure, or otherwise adversely affects, restricts or inhibits any other user from using and enjoying the Website; (ii) is threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, offensive, pornographic, profane, sexually explicit or indecent; (iii) constitutes or encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability or otherwise violate any local, state, national or international law; (iv) violates, plagiarizes or infringes the rights of third parties including, without limitation, copyright, trademark, patent, rights of privacy or publicity or any other proprietary right; (v) contains a virus, trojan horse, worm, time bomb, cancelbot or other similar harmful or deleterious programming routine; (vi) contains any information, software or other material of a commercial nature; (vii) contains advertising, promotions or commercial solicitations of any kind; (viii) constitutes or contains false or misleading indications of origin or statements of fact; or (ix) contains material irrelevant to the subject matter of the Message Feature. In order to participate in any Message Feature, you may be asked to register by providing certain personal information such as your name and/or email address. (The Website's Privacy Policy explains how such information may be collected and used.) You may also be asked to select a screen name ("Screen Name") for identification purposes. You must not use any Screen Name that violates any term of subsections (i)-(ix) above, or any other operating term set forth by MLBAM.

They don't seem to be able to deal with normal web traffic for selling things.

Colorado Rockies Suspend World Series Ticket Sales because Monfort Brothers want to make sure Denver looks like a cow-town -- Assistance was gladly provided by California based web server farm morons who haven't heard of load-balancing or using something other than JSP on their smokin' Pentium III machines

They apparently don't realize that there are whole companies that do all of their sales online, who could lead them to the promised land of "server farm best practices".

Perhaps Jeff Bezos could give them a call and help them pull their heads out of their asses, tell 'em about this little site called Amazon that handles millions of orders a day during holiday season.

Does it work for this one? If so it may be worth buying a Mac. :-)

Seriously, please let me know... Baseball is one of the worst offenders on this. Even their subscription audio streams require Flash!!

Yes, the MLB site is stuffed full of all sorts of crap. Much of which slows the pages down horrifically. Even using flashblock and adblock don't help much there. Their quality control on some of their links and code is pretty poor too.

I recommend using their narrowband portal whenever you can. It's here. It's cunningly hidden in the depths of the site.

I actually welcome competition for Flash, a technology I have always despised, even if it does come from MS. However an open source version would be much better.

Still, since Flash must be the most misused technology on the web, we can assume that Silverlight will be misused even faster. When is the Silverlightblock Fx extension coming. Please say within days. I feel I'm going to love that as much as I currently love flashblock.

You apprently are not a subscriber to http://www.mlb.com...live sport on the web...

TV as a separate device is obsolete. All displays are now computer displays and the network really is the computer.

The motive behind this is simple. MLB wants you to purchase the ability to watch games away from home from them. $15 a month or $80 a season. Of course they charge you more for post-season baseball as well.

3. The United States and its citizens needs to place as much importance and admiration on the sciences, and those who persue knowledge in them, as they do on sports players, movie stars, and "socialites"

That was the case in the 1950s. Baseball players made $6,000 to $10,000 per year. And they had to unionize to get that. The movie industry had the studio system, where actors were hired as employees under a deal which allowed them to be fired but not to quit and go to another studio. That lasted until 1954, and except for a very few performers, being a movie star didn't mean being rich. Musicians were doing even worse; the big money in music was being a band leader or a record company. People who inherited money but weren't good enough to make it themselves were derided as useless wasters and taxed at very high levels.

But physicists and electronics engineers were almost worshipped. They were the people who ended WWII. Understand what a big deal this was. Without radar, the Battle of Britain probably would have been lost. British Spitfires only had enough fuel for about twenty minutes of combat, so Fighter Command had to have accurate information about where the enemy bombers were, or the fighters would be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Without the atomic bomb, defeating Japan would have been a long, bloody slog. Invading and conquering Japan was expected to be at least as big a job as invading and conquering Europe had been; harder because the distances were longer, bloodier because the landing area was totally hostile, unlike France. Then, one day, the US dropped the Bomb. And suddenly it was all over. (Read Thank God for the Atomic Bomb, by Paul Fussell. Fussell today is a famous essayist, but in 1945, he was an infantryman who'd been in combat and was part of the army getting ready for the invasion of Japan.)

That's how we got Big Science. Big Science was invented to win WWII, and it paid off. Big time. It continued to pay off during the 1950s and 1960s, with jet aircraft, computers, rockets, nuclear power, antibiotics, color TV - things that affected daily life.

We've been there. It's over in the US. Today, in China, being an engineer means a much better life than most of the people around you. That's why they're on the way up and we're on the way down.

how about a pirate on a fanny pack? http://shop.mlb.com/sm-concord-industries-pittsbur gh-pirates-leather-fanny-pack--pi-1875812.html

Looks like Firefox 1.5.0.6 will be released very quickly to fix a bug in some streaming media links in 1.5.0.5. Specifically, Windows Media ".wmv" when called using "mms://", maybe real using "rm://", does not work. Breaks streamining video links on http://mlb.com/ Release candidates for Firefox 1.5.0.6 are already on the way.

I'm going to play devil's advocate with you a little on 'very unique'.

I think most people know that 'unique' means 'one of a kind'. When you say 'very unique', you want the listener to know not only that the item in question is not only not the same as anything else, but that it's significantly different.

Baseball fans might say that Colorado has unique uniforms because they don't look like other teams. But when you look at their black vest (only one in MLB history) with silver shoulder piping (never seen that before either), well, that's very one-of-a-kind.

Dig Safe works for all New England states except Connecticut. Freaking Yankees-lovers.