6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

Somehow I missed Ben Maller's September report that MLB had bought the angels.com domain for $200,000. What clued me in was seeing a tweet from Victor Rojas containing the angels.com domain name. A surprise to me, but overdue.

Labels: angels, mlbam

Regarding the new MLB 2011 iPhone app:

• Options have been scattered into more places. There are options under More -> Settings, and also on the favorite team page (the gear icon in the upper right). From the main Settings app, the old "MLB At Bat" settings have disappeared; they're now buried under General -> Notifications -> Location Services -> At Bat 11. This is all very haphazard and poorly considered.
• The ability to change the timezone to the current location no longer exists. All my game times — unlike the last two years' worth of At Bat apps — are now EDT. Thanks, guys — a pointless and unnecessary downgrade.
• One team and one team only appears on the home page at startup. If — as I do — you specify more than one team, the alphabetically first team appears to show up on the home page. It would be nice if I could select what I want the app to display when it starts up, rather than the team page.
• Update: The audio button on the game page has disappeared. In order to play gameday audio, you have to be on the general scoreboard page. The real estate where the audio feed button used to be on the game page has been replaced with a pointless ad in the upper right corner. Perhaps the most infuriating change here.

Seriously, this is the first time since I've had an iPhone that an upgrade to this useful app — once a paragon of how to do things — has actually turned into a step backwards. Please, MLBAM, fix this.

Labels: mlbam

Why, on the MLB.com Media Center page is Gameday not given as an option? I don't mean MLB At Bat, I mean Gameday. At Bat is big, flashy, and crashy. It gives me no additional data that I can't get from Gameday, and it's more gee-whiz than useful. Every time I go to the Media Center page, I click on the At Bat link, and immediately switch to Gameday. Why not give me the option on the Media Center page?

Labels: mlbam, tech

• I want a way to stay logged in, full damn stop.
• I don't want to see the idiotic autoplay video. And it should remember this across different machines if that's what I want.
• Bigger is not better. The new MLB.com At Bat is huge. There's still (AFAIK) no good small solution for keeping game status on your desktop.
• Good going on the box scores. (Example.) Concise, side-by-side, not very vertically tall, and shows the game summary without killing the information presented.

Labels: gameday, mlbam

Seriously, guys? Seriously?

Appears to be grayed out for the time being. The only online mention of it I can find from an MLB source so far is on By Gosh, It's Langosch, a Pirates blog.

Labels: gameday, mlbam

The Wood Who Wasn't There

In the last 48 hours we've had articles from Steve Bisheff and Rob Neyer (really, Bisheff's article with Neyer — a not-so-closeted A's fan — applauding) talking about Brandon Wood's surprising non-presence in the LAAnaheim lineup. One game is not enough to determine whether a player is or should be on a given day's lineup card, but I do have a question that neither of them asked, and that is: considering Jered Weaver is an extreme flyball pitcher (his career G/F factor is 0.53), why wasn't Wood manning short last night? If there were an ideal moment for him to get a shot where his allegedly suspect defense at short — or even third — would be only a minimal factor, this would have been it. I'm not ready to break out the pitchfork and torches, but it does seem odd, doesn't it?

Dodgers Streak Ends At Eight: Astros 8, Dodgers 5

Clayton Kershaw clanked one, giving up six runs over 4.1 very shaky innings, and the Dodgers' magic carpet ride comes to a skidding stop. That included a Carlos Lee homer that positively got Charley Steiner apoplectic with its majesty and distance; I forget where I saw it lately, but the Bull Durham quote ("anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it") seemed apropos.

If there were doubts that Russ Ortiz might have something left after a fairly brutal three-run first, they were erased when he failed to allow any more runs through four more frames. He's probably going to end his career soon, but it's good to see a guy who's struggled as much as he has recover just a little.

The best part of the game for the Dodgers was probably loading the bases in the ninth; along the way, Jose Valverde got hit in the shin with a batted ball, and this space sincerely hopes for his speedy recovery. That's gotta hurt.

Yahoo box • Dodgers recap

Angels Name Matt Palmer Thursday Starter

Good grief, I was wondering whether this was Coach Weathers and Cal State Long Beach. Interesting note on the 30-year-old righty's minor league career: all of a sudden he started striking guys out last year in the Giants organization at AAA Fresno as a starter at about double his career rate (9.0 K/9 in 2008 over 142 IP). Here's a three-year-old scouting report from Baseball America; he was an all-star as a closer in 2003, but then ...

Arm injuries forced him to spend most of last season rehabbing at the club's minor league complex in Arizona, but Palmer still entered this year sporting an impressive career 2.59 ERA. And he opened the eyes of club officials when he got an opportunity to move into the rotation at Double-A Connecticut.

Filling a spot vacated by Jonathan Sanchez, Palmer was 5-3, 1.30 in 15 games, including nine starts, and his ERA led the Eastern League when he was promoted to Triple-A Fresno. He had struck out 51 batters against just 10 walks in 62 innings.

The 28-year-old was a 31st-round selection out of Southwest Missouri State in 2002 and sparkled in his pro debut. He had a 1.84 ERA at short-season Salem-Keizer and then had a 1.20 ERA in 44 games at Hagerstown while chalking up 25 saves.

But he still had plenty to learn.

"He was a hard thrower but he would try to muscle it," farm director Jack Hiatt said. "In muscling, he lost velocity. He was always in deep counts. We really had to keep an eye on his pitch counts.

"As he's gained his experience, he's developed a pretty good breaking ball and a changeup to boot. He is throwing 85-90 percent. It's allowed his fastball to explode."

Overdue: Trevor Reckling Makes Prospect Hot Sheet

Last Friday, clocking in at #8:

Team: high Class A Rancho Cucamonga (Angels)
Age: 19
Why he's here: 1-1, 0.75, 12.0 IP, 6 H, 2 R, 1 ER, 1 BB, 13 Ks
The Scoop: An eighth-round pick in 2007 out of Newark, N.J., Reckling jumped to BA's No. 4 Angels prospect after winning 10 games in the low Class A Midwest League and showing three pitches that graded better than average. It looks like he's picked up where he left off, only now he's dealing in the hitter friendly high Class A California League and doing so as he works on throwing arm-side away (he loves pitching inside). So far, he's stretched both of his starts to six innings, taking the loss Tuesday despite allowing just one earned run—on Collin Cowgill's first-inning homer for Visalia (Diamondbacks).

Keith Olbermann To Join MLBAM, Donate Salary To Charity

Via BTF, MLBAM has hired Keith Olbermann to write an at-large column; he will donate his at-large salary to three different charities.

At his request, Olbermann’s full salary for his work as an at-large columnist will be split equally among three charitable organizations. They will be: the Baseball Assistance Team, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and the Jayden Braden/Ariana Marzano College Fund, established in support of the late John Marzano’s grandchildren. Marzano, a former Major Leaguer and MLB.com host, died just over one year ago in a home accident in Philadelphia.

MILB To Lease Dodgertown

MILB will lease Dodgertown:

Minor League Baseball was set to announce today that it has reached a memorandum of understanding with Indian River County and the city of Vero Beach to lease and operate the Dodgertown spring training complex, which was left vacant this year for the first time since opening in 1948 after the Dodgers relocated to a new spring home outside Phoenix. MILB plans to take over in May and provide a year-round facility for tournaments, clinics and non-baseball events; attracting Northern teams to Florida for spring break trips is a central part of their business plan.

"This is a great opportunity for Minor League Baseball," MILB president Pat O'Conner said. "This moves the organization to another level. And we're excited about the prospects of working in Vero in such an historic facility.

"In the spring there is a tremendous influx of teams from the Northeast corridor wanting to come to Florida . . . It's an ideal place for colleges to set up shop."

Labels: angels, astros, dodgers, mlbam, recaps

Which explains why every time I launch Gameday Audio from the MLB Media Center page I always get the Giants' away feed. Don't get me wrong, I actually find Jon Miller a charming game caller, but he's not Vinny, and why is it that MLBAM manages to break something every damned year? Without fail? (WGN wasn't working last week, either. Really, MLBAM? Two of your hallmark franchises, and you can't get either feed working? Do Yankees fans have to put up with this kind of insufferable crap?)

Update, 1:48 PM: Looks like it's working now.

Labels: dodgers, giants, mlbam, tech

"New 2009 MLB.TV Media Player Coming Soon". Seriously, how many times do we go through this where they break stuff?

Labels: mlbam, tech

Possibly the best news we'll get all offseason, MLBAM has announced it's dropping Microsoft's Silverlight for 2009, and will deliver all video using Adobe Flash.

The deal, announced at the Adobe Max conference running in San Francisco this week, hands Adobe one of the largest and likely most profitable video services out there. MLB.com has signed up more than 1.5 million subscribers since 2003 and streams more than 2,500 regular and postseason games annually. Moreover, MLBAM has been a technological leader and is influential among Web video services.

At least it works on the Mac and under Linux. Wait — what's that you say?

"Microsoft has appreciated the partnership of MLB.com," said Microsoft Vice President Scott Guthrie. "Microsoft continues to be very pleased with the success of Silverlight. We have a great ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners."

But not YouTube, and now, not MLBAM. Buh bye, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. (Via BTF.)

Labels: mlbam, tech

MLB has reached a carry deal with Verizon's FiOS TV service, expanding the number of markets carrying the MLB TV network. This is actually semi-important to me, because we're reviewing our TV situation thanks to Time-Warner's clunky Scientific Atlanta DVRs that are hard to navigate and have problems with bizarre reset messages occurring sometimes even during programming, not to mention diffident service. (Here's the mlb.com press release.)

Unfortunately, I'm not all that impressed by the Engadget stories I'm reading about FiOS service; these include fast-forward disabled video-on-demand (not that I use that much, but c'mon), and weak but recently improved HD coverage that only recently has included Extra Innings. It's extra-relevant to me because I talked to a Verizon employee this morning who was this very day installling FiOS on my street.

Labels: mlbam, tv

I keep meaning to make some mention of this, but one problem I kept having with the new Gameday Audio launcher is that it assumes, incorrectly, that you're using Silverlight even when you aren't. The way around this is pretty simple: if you see the Flash control panel appear on the Gameday Audio launcher instead of the MediaPlayerConnectivity filler (you really should be using that), the trick is to go into the cookies and erase the SLInstall cookie (Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy, and click on the "Show Cookies" button, then search for "mlb.com"). There may be more than one, so erase all of them. You should then be able to start Gameday Audio using MediaPlayerConnectivity. This cookie keeps getting set, so you may have to go through this each time you log in or launch. It would be nice if there were a way to reject just specific cookies.

Labels: media, mlbam, tech

A sudden outbreak of common sense by the Supreme Court, which refused to review the MLBAM vs. CBC decision. Technically, the issue is still open and given what MLBAM has at stake (not to mention the player's union), I expect they'll just find a different forum to test their nonsense theories about "right of publicity" WRT sports statistics. But the matter should be good and dead as a practical legal case. Via BTF.

Labels: good riddance, haha, mlbam

Small sample size alert, but it looks like the mlb.com media center presents a slightly different gameday multimedia browser than the one on the team sites, angels.mlb.com in particular. This is mostly important if you're using MediaPlayerConnectivity under Linux to start Gameday Audio streams.

Labels: mlbam, tech

And now I am satisfied. Didn't have to do anything magical compared to last year, though there was a billing snafu I had to get corrected.

Update: Still having trouble with live feeds. I was using archived games last night and that seemed to work okay on my Linux desktop at home.

Labels: mlbam, tech

Is it too much to ask, MLBAM, that when you go to a team home page that plainly has an RSS feed on it, that it also has the <link> tag to promote autodiscovery? I provide this free, as an example, from my own blog, in the text of the HTML. C'mon, people, get with the program. It's just not that hard.

Labels: mlbam, morons, stupid ideas, tech

It's bad enough that MLB Gameday Audio is once again broken thanks to the idiotic choice of MLB switching to Silverfish, another Microsoft attempt to take over everything in sight, this time multimedia distribution. But there's just no excuse in the world for why their same-named mobile products aren't working. I removed the app from my phone hoping to reinstall it, but it's not available anywhere on Verizon's Get It Now menu, and the installation instructions no longer work. Hey, MLBAM, do you guys have even the remotest of clues?

Labels: mlbam, tech

There's a good if long thread at LinuxQuestions.org about the ongoing breakage of Gameday Audio under Linux. The concensus over there seems to be surrendering to the WINE emulator, but that seems to me like overkill. There's a difficult process to get the thing to work using the Firebug Firefox extension:

I got audio working under Linux today, but it's a pain in the ass...

Install firebug if you don't have it already. Enable it on the player page and reload. In the console you will see output that looks like:

----> prePlayerLoad:
o.mUrl=<URL HERE>

(The URL will be long, and contain the game ID and your login key. I was going to post a better example, but the forum won't let me include something that looks like a URL because I'm new. It will be a web dot servicebureau dot net address.).

Copy the URL, and pass it as the first parameter to VLC (you'll have to quote it, because it contains shell meta characters).

> vlc '<URL HERE>';

You should get your audio from VLC at this point.

Now all we need is somebody to whip up a Firefox plugin to do this for us...

I started looking into that today, but it's a big subject ...

In other news, anaheim.angels.mlb.com no longer works as a recognized domain in the MLB.com family of domains; it bops you to mlb.mlb.com. Just one more little bit of breakage from the idiots who like to break things for the sake of appearing "modern".

Update 5/1: This is now working, and I suspect the reason is because MLBAM pulled the plug on certain maldesigns.

Labels: angels, mlbam, stupid ideas, tech

A judge understands the legal canard MLBAM is trying to pass through the courts? Imagine!

“So, now we have a limitation (referring to the use of associating a player to their statistics), and now I come around to, ‘This isn’t about statistics’ -- the basic war of the brief .

‘This is about names,” you say. ‘This is about statistics,’ they say.

And I understand the practicality of the war because the statistics are in the public domain. And it seems to me, it’s clearly a use of public information to figure out that if you’re going to have an ongoing fantasy sports league over the life of a real professional sports league – clearly a collateral market – you have to have an opening set of statistics and evolving statistics that will allow competition and trades and so forth.

And so where do you get those statistics?

Well you can’t take the 1923 Philadelphia Athletics because that doesn’t evolve over a season. So you take these statistics that are in the public domain.

And as I translate the argument in this case.. ‘Well, we won’t argue with that (referring to the use of statistics without player association), but don’t you dare put a name next to those statistics.’

Well, of course that’s ridiculous.

MLBAM is purely slime here, and there's no two ways about it. This is rent-seeking behavior at some of its lowest.

Labels: mlbam, scumbags