ATLANTA – Take me out to the ballgame always rings a bit hollow in my ears.
Sure, I get to attend a few games each year, but at most I’ll make it to only a handful of the Braves’ 81 home games. The worst, for me, are the dreaded weekday afternoon games when I’m torn between checking scores online and getting some work done.
So I got excited by MLB.TV’s latest offering, which promises viewers thousands of games this season for a $14.95 monthly fee or a $79.95 season ticket package.
The Internet arm of Major League Baseball, which has been showing games online since 2001, juiced up its offerings this year with “Mosaic,” downloadable software that lets fans watch six games at once, each in its own window.
I got a sneak peak – it’s scheduled for release any day now.
I couldn’t watch local games being broadcast in my market or nationally televised games because I couldn’t sneak around the blackout restrictions, but I found enough other games to keep me more than occupied.
I watched Barry Bonds swing for the fences, kept tabs on the home team’s National League rivals and booed the Yankees, all without touching my mousepad.
Before the games began, I fiddled with highlights and replays of the previous night’s game. And double-clicking a window zooms in on an individual contest, showing the game’s details in surprisingly clear detail.
But look a bit closer and you’ll see a whiff or two.
Even on my speedy Windows XP laptop, the program was slow in launching video. And the picture seized up more than a few times, leaving me to wonder whether the ump called a ball or a strike.
Most frustratingly, the mosaic needs a bit of patching up.
The window promising a matchup between the San Diego Padres and Florida Marlins was showing Yankees highlights until I clicked it. While the video turned to the NL matchup, the box score showed a 1-1 gridlock between the Boston Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Pirates. I had to pinch myself to make sure interleague play hadn’t started yet.
I’m a bit confused with the constant alerts flashing at the bottom of the screen with breaking news such as “Mike Sweeney is batting” and “Chien-Ming Wang pitching.” By their nature, shouldn’t alerts signal something crucial just happened? At least flash me with news of a monster homerun blast, not which batter is on deck.
And I had hoped the software would embraced the Tivolike digital video recorder technology I’ve grown to love. But instead of being able to rewind the video for my own instant replay, I could only pause and play the game I had zoomed in on.
The software designers say they are working out the kinks now. The beauty of the program, says Justin Shaffer, chief architect for MLB’s interactive arm, is that it will continue to evolve and automatically update itself with improvements. Eventually, programmers hope to embed stats, trivia challenges, interactive games and fantasy baseball tracking into the software.
And Ensequence, which helped develop the program, said the technology was designed to be deployed beyond computers into multiple platforms, so we may soon see it in TVs and digital devices.
The programmers recommend a computer with at least a 2-gigahertz Pentium processor, 512 megabytes of memory and a speedy broadband connection for the best results.
Casual fans interested in keeping tabs on a few favorite teams may want to stick with the Internet and sports highlight shows.
But hard-core devotees who dread missing a ballgame and don’t mind a little baseball overkill may want to sign up in the next few weeks.
This blue chip prospect could be a major league program once it gets into midseason form.
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