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Attendance is down

Attendance is up.

These guys are already over paid.

Well, baseball makes a lot of money, but that's only because fans are willing to pay it. I'm sure you don't really expect a business to offer a discount just as a favor.

I don't fault the players for obtaining their share of the money. Should millionaire players be paid less so billionaire owners can pocket more?

Oh, I'm not actually using the format since it is so bad. Doesn't mean that I don't want to. Unfortunately Windows Media is the only format MLB offers their archives in. Fortunately Real is a working alternative for live broadcasts (and it works surprisingly well) but in the off-season I am pretty much hosed with my mac. The first time I heard of this third-party plugin I was quite enthusiastic, but it didn't work. I just tried again and it still doesn't work for the one thing I need it.

It's a shame, really, since it's such a nice service in theory, but what can you do? Now that WMP on mac is dead I can hope that baseball gets its act together and starts offering the archived games in an alternative format. Real would be enough, but of course I'd be happy with quicktime too.

Felipe Alou is the father of Moises. Close, though. Matty is Felipe's brother, and along with a third brother, Jesus, all played in the majors. All three played in the outfield together for the Giants in 1963. The opposing team was quoted as saying, "They're everywhere"

Felipe Alou is the father of Moises. Close, though. Matty is Felipe's brother, and along with a third brother, Jesus, all played in the majors. All three played in the outfield together for the Giants in 1963. The opposing team was quoted as saying, "They're everywhere"

I will have enought money to finish building my "real" woman.

I run this "real" site, and dumb men give me money.
http://www.moneyslave.fetishfantasygirl.com/
Well, not really, but I could do something like that.

Just like the dumb men that give money to the ppl here.
http://www.playboy.com/

or here.
http://www.nfl.com/
http://www.nba.com/
http://www.mlb.com/
http://www.nhl.com/

Yah, I said Christmas. Not Happy Holidays.

You're right - this link shows there were over 17 active pirates in 2005 alone, and that's not including other piracy-related groups such as buccaneers or raiders.

As an American, I have no problem with the current model. I get to see the best players in the world on a regular basis.

As a side note, they are attempting to implement something analogous to the World Cup. http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/wbc/index.jsp. I'm not sure how successful it will be though.

Ha! That's as bad as "The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" = "The The Angels Angels of Anaheim" in English and "Los Los Angeles Angeles de Anaheim" in Spanish.

They were given cushy jobs.

That's an important observation. Can you provide more explanation, and the URLs?

I visited the Major League Baseball site: http://www.mlb.com/ and my Firefox 1.06 CPU use jumped to 19%, with all pages loaded and NO browser activity.

I wish they would fix this; they've known about it for years. It has something to do with the Flash plugin, I understand.

This bug is a show-stopper for me. I wish they would concentrate on it.

There are at least a couple streaming video solutions out there:

ESPN Gameplan

MLB.tv

Probably not exactly what you're looking for, though...

There are a few counter-examples off the top of my head for that; my bank and mlb.com both support Firefox but not Safari. Pearson VUE also mention Firefox but not Safari (click on the "Sign In" link). I've also seen quite a few people still using IE on OSX (it still works). Not that I'm saying that you're wrong, it's just that it seems to me to be happening as Firefox gets bigger.

You just need to look in the obvious place for it.

The Major League Baseball..uh..arcade.

Also available from Amazon and the Learning Company's site, but the MLB (???) site had screenshots.

Of course, there are plenty of annoying uses of flash. But luckily Firefox's adblock plugin can block them selectively.

A good test would be the subscriber statistics from MLB.tv, where Major Leage Baseball allows people to subscribe for a day, month, or full season to watch games live via Real or WindowsMedia. It's far from perfect watching a baseball broadcast designed for tv shown in a 320x240 window, but the number of people who come back and pay again after paying for a single day or single month is probably a good predictor of how many fans would be willing to watch hilights on the sort of screen a vPod is likely to have.
-JMP

I don't think they're chasing open source developers; their target market for the servers (and hence, indirectly, the target for the dev tools as well) has always been hosting companies and large corporations. I think they're finally realizing two things: programmers have no desire to try to write code in Dreamweaver (they've been pushing DW as the replacement for ColdFusion Studio since the MX launch), and that their skill is in design tools, not coding tools. So, they're opening this up (and I would hope they'd put some cash into the CFEclipse project as well) so they can point to it as the preferred programming tool for the Flex platform.

To date, I will say that I have seen exactly one knock-your-socks-off "Rich Internet Application": the GameDay near-real-time app at mlb.com. I have no reason to mention this, other than that I am a baseball fan and I think it's cool.

it's like those "other cities" all the teams that show up to lose to the Yankees

Oh, THOSE Yankees.

Thanks for clearing that up. (snicker)

Firefly episodes were aired on Friday nights. No NFL football on Fridays. Fox didn't schedule any sports during that day.

Baseball.

It has been suggested in comments to previous posts that they are rolling out the SU selectively to different parts of the 'net to ease the load on their servers...

The process you suggest is not how Apple manages server load "bursting".

Instead, Apple is a customer of Akamai, pretty much the only vendor (now that they bought their closest competitor, Speedera) of distributed hosting for On Demand (burst) Management and Content Delivery (used for iTunes Music Store) for global enterprises. These folks handle sites like Major League Baseball who get flooded with traffic on opening day and during the World Series and don't need to invest millions in infrastructure to handle these high-traffic times.

If you want, take a look at the HTML source for apple's own websites. It used to be that all media (images, quicktime, etc) were served from an akamai URL but now apple has images.apple.com that must hide the Akamai relationship. Still, there are relecs like
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/apple/akamai/01 0500/keynote010500vod_300.mov
as an example.

The iTunes Music Store uses Akamai to deliver those great download rates for the 160,000 songs per day they sell.

"Rincon" is Spanish for "corner."

As long as paper is cheaper than video screens there will be free papers. Case in point, Washing, DC just gained a new free daily The Washington Examiner in the last month, and within the last two year the Washington Post launched its own freebie paper, The Express.

They both seem to have viable business models and in fact the Express has already decimated small group of targetted suburban papers that had cost $.35 which have now either gone out print, or or free depending on the suburban county each served. And the Post is finding that its free paper is doing better than it is. Though I think that growth will slow because of the Examiner which seems closer to a real newspaers (if one only on par to the NY Post or NY News) than the Express which consists entirely of heavily cropped wire stories. The Examiner at least has unique features and few of its own writers - plus it runs in depth wire stories, especially in SPORTS - which with the launch of the Washington Nationals should 'sell' a lot of free papers.

There are two parts to this tool, one of which is bad quite and one of which is quite good.

First, replacing links. This is a rather quite bad idea. Here's why, with an example.

In general, we can all agree that the technology behind Google is pretty impressive. It has its own "More Pages Like This" feature, which we can assume is at least somewhat similar to this one. Complex content analysis amoung billions of pages, to determine which are similar and which are different.

So, suppose we had a link to Major League Baseball, www.mlb.com on our page. And suppose, for whatever reason, that their site went away (perhaps a few more players' strikes?).

Well, what does Google suggest as a replacement? Check it out here.

First the National Football League (NFL), then the National Basketball Association (NBA), and then the National Hockey League (NHL). Followed by the ESPN sports network, and NASCAR racing.

Obviously if wanted to link to a site about baseball, all of those (other than ESPN) are really entirely irrelevant.

But if we wanted to link to a site about professional sports organizations, all of those (other than ESPN) are QUITE relevant.

Can this software know our intent?

Hardly.

You really have to question the ability of machines to select relevant links.

The situation is this: If someone goes to the trouble to manually create links in the first place, those should not be automatically changed to other sites that some computer program thinks may be related. Links shouldn't be inserted automatically; if someone needs more information on something you haven't linked to, they can use a search engine. And then your company isn't liable to look idiotic by linking to irrelevant sites.

Now, the other aspect of this product.

Removing dead or changed links is quite another matter. Automated removal of links is a great idea and quite useful. For example, consider when someone's domain name expires and it is taken over by a porn site. It'd be great to have a program that automatically removes links to it from your site. Like this tool, this could be based on a percentage of changed content--if the content changes significantly, remove the link quickly and automatically. If the content changes some intermittent amount, flag the link as needing review by the webmaster.

But in those both case, the software should present the webmaster with a list of such questionable links, those it has removed from the site temporarily, and then allow the webmaster to select replacement links.

Manually. With relevance.

Strictly speaking, there are some non-american teams elligible to playin the world series, they just don't usually get there :)

http://bluejays.mlb.com/

http://expos.mlb.com/

Strictly speaking, there are some non-american teams elligible to playin the world series, they just don't usually get there :)

http://bluejays.mlb.com/

http://expos.mlb.com/

Judging by how the Red Sox and Patriots have performed the last couple of years, it's no wonder people from Massachusettts try to forget about Fall as quickly as possible and just move right on with Winter.

West Addison, Chicago, Illinois, 60613 is the address for Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. the joke is that in the movie The Blues Brothers Elwood Blues gives a policeman who stops him the address for wrigley field as his home address.

Suchetha

West Addison, Chicago, Illinois, 60613 is the address for Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. the joke is that in the movie The Blues Brothers Elwood Blues gives a policeman who stops him the address for wrigley field as his home address.

Suchetha

Ok.. If you don't know what baseball is, raise your hand and Tommy will come over and hit you on the head with a tackhammer because you are a RETARD!

Actually, coming from Europe to the USA I only had a vague idea that Baseball was something like the sport of Rounders and was beloved of Charlie Brown. Aside from a few other countries it's not really well known outside of the US, which is a great shame since it's a sport I've come to love since moving here.

Here's a good introduction to the sport courtesy of Wikipedia. Or, better still just watch a few games. Warning: addictive!

Go Yankees!

The pitcher gets too much praise for when most of the work is actually done by his teammates.

I'll agree with this in principle, but in this particular game, it didn't really look like the Diamondbacks needed anybody besides the local high school's 8 to secure the perfect game. See the 27 outs if you're skeptical, but I'll summarize:
13 strikeouts
7 routine fly balls (one was basket-caught, of all things)
4 routine ground ball outs
a close out on a leadoff drag bunt
and a couple of decent plays by the shortstop. Nothing a big leaguer would take any credit for.

So in this case, while you certainly needed a AA-level first baseman and maybe a AAA-level shortstop, I don't think there was much else going on.

But if you're arguing that you needed warm bodies in the outfield and a third baseman to stand there and do nothing, I guess everybody did contribute.

Care to explain the naming of the World Series? ;-)

My wife and I said our vows in a traditional setting, but our reception was at Oriole Park at Camdem Yards in the right field warehouse. It was certainly more memorable than a typical hotel wedding reception.

http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/b allpark/sf_ballpark_history.jsp

It'll be Armageddon: dogs and cats living together, Detroit winning the World Series AND the Super Bowl, etc.

Hey, football is over (MTV pop-up video of pop-out titties notwithstanding), wake up! Shouldn't that be a reference to the Bambino Curse?? I mean, if a Canadian team can win the World Series twice in a row, surely the Sox can go all the way this year. Time to refocus the vicarious sports energy, gang.

Tin foil won't be enough. It doesn't stop Major League Baseball from reading our minds!!!

Hatch is trying to pull this off at the same time Congress is debating whether the BCS violates antitrust laws. The NCAA doesn't have an antitrust exemption, and neither does the NFL. To my knowledge, Major League Baseball is the only group of that sort to have an antitrust exemption, and even that's come up for debate during all those strikes.

A simple public awareness campaign should put an end to the madness. In the context of other "market realities," it simply doesn't make sense. In fact, Congress has taken an active interest in limiting those other "market realities." Seriously, what's the difference between one group controlling all access to recorded music and one group controlling all access to pro football?

An honest-to-goodness cluebat for the manager that Just Doesn't Get It[tm].

This manager ?

You make very good points.

Shirky is correct.

The other articles linked to don't seem to make a good case. They seem to argue that micropayments will succeed because content producers need them to succeed. But in a marketplace that is driven by consumers, not producers, that's not much of an argument.

Shirky is right on in his discussion of "mental transaction costs." I think another way to view the same phenomenon is as a bunch of toll booths on the Information Highway. Driving from Washington, DC to New York City comes to mind. You drive a few miles, then pay toll. Drive a few more miles, then pay yet another toll. Etc. It's not pleasant.)

However, McCloud does make a few good points. Funny how all of his good points center around the sale of music, and not what we typically think of as web content. And therein I think lies the gist of the argument in favor of micropayments. If the experience of micropayments is like driving a toll road (Shirky's view), then micropayments will definitely fail. On the other hand, if the experience of micropayments is like shopping on eBay or going to a yard sale, then micropayments will work. The key difference here, is that in the latter case, the user is looking for and expecting a shopping experience.

So, then what are some situations where micropayments might just work? First, I think they might work for content that is not traditionally considered web content, such as music. Selling popular songs for $0.99 constitutes micropayments in this view. But I can think of other examples, some of which already exist: Paying for search information for investigative purposes. (You can get all kinds of information from many public databases about individuals.) Paying for live events. (Currently, you can pay $1 and get live coverage of ML baseball games for one day. This is in contrast to the subscription, the only option available at the beginning of the season.) Researchers can get access to archived, peer-reviewed journal articles. Ordinary computer users can get desktop themes. Powerpoint users can buy templates. There are many more instances where micropayments would work.

In summary, the situations where micropayments would work are (1) non-traditional web content (2) in the context of a marketplace, where buyers come seeking to buy.

If you make it to Chicago check out the SkyDeck high atop (103 floor) the Sears Tower, don't forget to lean forward ala Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I also recommend the architectual boat tours up the Chicago river and on lake Michigan. While you are in Chicago see a Cubs baseball game at historic Wrigley Field built in 1914.

From definitions section the Official Rules of Major League Baseball:

The Strike Zone is that area over home plate, the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hallow beneath the knee cap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.

The rule is constructed to allow hitters to adjust their stance according to their distance from the plate. A hitter who likes pitches closer to him can stand closer to the plate; a hitter who likes to extend to hit the ball can stand further from the plate. The point, though, is that the strike zone is over the plate, not a particular distance from the hitter.

The problem with umpires is that they often will call an outside pitch a strike if a player is standing close to the plate, or an inside pitch a strike if a player is standing in the back of the batter's box. This is essentially trashing the intent of the rule.

Umpires need to call strikes when the ball is over the plate. Better yet, umpires should be kept off the field and used only to remove unruly players and to make judgment calls (using instant replay and such) on very close plays. Otherwise, take advantage of technology and get umpires out of the way.

Of course, I like umpires there. So maybe there is a happy medium here. If umpires start calling strikes as they should be called, they can stay. :-)

From definitions section the Official Rules of Major League Baseball:

The Strike Zone is that area over home plate, the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hallow beneath the knee cap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.

The rule is constructed to allow hitters to adjust their stance according to their distance from the plate. A hitter who likes pitches closer to him can stand closer to the plate; a hitter who likes to extend to hit the ball can stand further from the plate. The point, though, is that the strike zone is over the plate, not a particular distance from the hitter.

The problem with umpires is that they often will call an outside pitch a strike if a player is standing close to the plate, or an inside pitch a strike if a player is standing in the back of the batter's box. This is essentially trashing the intent of the rule.

Umpires need to call strikes when the ball is over the plate. Better yet, umpires should be kept off the field and used only to remove unruly players and to make judgment calls (using instant replay and such) on very close plays. Otherwise, take advantage of technology and get umpires out of the way.

Of course, I like umpires there. So maybe there is a happy medium here. If umpires start calling strikes as they should be called, they can stay. :-)

Umpires will emphatically not be losing their jobs because of QuesTec.

The Rules of Baseball are complex and arcane. The strike zone is a mundanity embedded within them. There are nuances on swinging and tipped strikes, plus batters-box infractions, catcher's interference, dead balls, etc.

Few humans understand the Balk Rule; forget about teaching such recognition procedures to a machine.

If the QuesTec system is not testably 100% reliable on called balls and strikes, then the umpires are right, it does not improve the situation at all, and could make it significantly worse.

The Phillie Phanatic has had one of these for many years.

"Yahoo's news coverage" consists of feeds from major wire services like the Associated Press. The next time you go to Google News, I want you to count all the stories that are posted from 400 news sites. Notice how many of them are reprinted wire stories?

At least with Yahoo News I can customize the page so I see news for, say, sports I care about instead of cricket and soccer.

A friend of mine has been running PhilsPhans.com since the beginning of this year with a focus on forum discussions, in response to many people who complained about the forums at the official site being crowded with spammers. The site gathered popularity among Phillies fans pretty quickly, and soon a lot of users from the official Phillies forums switched to the little new site. About a month or so ago, he received a letter from the Phillies ordering him to shut down his site due to "trademark infringement"; their claim was that the word "phils" is their property, and thus he can't use it as part of the site's name. How could anyone trademark such a common word is beyond logic, but since he doesn't have the resources to fight this, so he's being forced to move the site to a different domain.

Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify.

name me a baseball club anywhere else that could compete with the us pro teams

Ok, how about the Blue Jays?

Would be +1 informative if with wasn't entirely untrue

The asbestos lawsuits have caused me personal harm. Peter Angelos made millions from the asbestos cases, which enabled him to buy the Baltimore Orioles. Because he thinks it might cause him to lose a couple of bucks, he is the sole reason the Expos haven't been allowed to move to my hometown.

The asbestos lawsuits have caused me personal harm. Peter Angelos made millions from the asbestos cases, which enabled him to buy the Baltimore Orioles. Because he thinks it might cause him to lose a couple of bucks, he is the sole reason the Expos haven't been allowed to move to my hometown.

is amusing, but recognizing its base as the proposed ballpark for the St. Louis Cardinals makes it appear a little odd.