Archive for Technology Thing

Is this the best possible use for Google Alerts? If not, I’m thinking it’s close, at least.

H/T: Unfettered Joy

See that above? That’s a snapshot of a graphical box score available at Back to Baseball, which is a computer Web site that is fast becoming very beautiful to me. How beautiful? Cheryl Tiegs, make room at the front of the line!

The Revolution smiles upon this because you can see the play-by-play of any game going back to 1950. Once more, for maximum emphasis: You can see the play-by-play of any game going back to 1950. Now who among us can best let the burdens and obligations of adulthood wither on the vine while we toy around with this thing?

(Lingering embrace: BBTF)

Mankind has often wondered aloud — or in the form of modern epic poems — where the line is exactly between self-promotion and community service. This post seeks to ride that line as one might a 1950 Triumph 6T Thunderbird motorcycle — that is, very stylishly and with seemingly no effort.

The reader might be aware that we at FanGraphs recently released our preseason fantasy guide, The Second Opinion. Given its low price-point and white-hot content, the Second Opinion itself is more or less a gift to humanity.

The reader might also be aware that, unlike last year, we neglected (at first!) to provide a PDF version of same. Reader demand, however, has prompted the Dark Overlord not only to provide a PDF download, but to suggest that a more satisfyingly formatted one might be available next year.

On its own a PDF can be slightly unwieldy — good for printing, certainly, and maybe searching, but not necessarily ideal for reading. However, with iBooks, users of the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch can import the Second Opinion PDF into a considerably more friendly “reader” format. Search functionality also remains available in this form, too, allowing readers to access all player-specific information (in preparation for — or even during, I suppose — a fantasy draft). Furthermore, links to FanGraphs player pages remain active, in the event that readers require deeper statistical information on a player.

So, uh, “Ta-da!” is what I mean to say about all this. And also maybe “What a country!!!”

In the event that you didn’t see, Major League Baseball announced over the weekend (at least, that’s the earliest that I, personally, saw it) that, while they’d be streaming spring-training games on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, they would not be doing so on connected devices (PS3, Roku, Boxee) until opening day.

Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t what one might call a “tragedy” — and is likely something that, like snow in the first week of the season, will be forgotten quickly — but it’s a bit frustrating for this author who (a) purchased a PlayStation 3 almost expressly for the purpose of watching baseball and (b) sometimes needs/enjoys to work on the computer while a game is playing.

In any case, this prompted me to download (for $15) the MLB At Bat app for the iPod Touch — another device I acquired over the winter as part my civic duty to resuscitate the global economy. For those who already subscribe to MLB.TV, there’s no additional cost beyond the app.

I watched parts of yesterday’s Phillies-Yankees and Angels-Dodgers games. Here are some notes on the experience of watching those games on the iPod Touch.

• Make sure, when prompted, to approve location detection. If for whatever reason you don’t approve it, go back to the main screen and go to Settings → General → Location Services, where you’ll be able to change location detection to “Yes.” Otherwise, video won’t work.

• In terms of video quality, I was accessing the internet via my home wi-fi connection (< 3mbps), and the video streaming was very clean about 90-95% of the time. The Dodgers game was choppy for the first couple minutes, which prompted me to go back to the PHI-NYY game. After returning to the LAA-LAD game about 10 minutes later, it was working fine. • I got kicked out of the app back to the main screen maybe a half-a-dozen times. This never happened mid-stream, but generally when I was trying to load video or a new screen. Given that the app loads rather fast, this is only minimally inconvenient; however, I can imagine that for a fan wanting to toggle between games, for example, it could be frustrating. I'd wonder if this would be addressed in a software update. • A slightly unrelated note: if you're watching spring-training baseball games, be prepared to hear the word "berm" with some frequency. Both the YES Network's Michael Kay and (Seattle-based) KIRO's Rick Rizzs used it. It's the grassy area beyond the outfield wall in spring-training ballparks.