MLB.TV Strikes Out on Opening Day

Anon — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:52:18 -0400

Yesterday evening, middle European summer time, I rushed home from work...

Finally after months of waiting, Opening Day and many new techno-goodies promised by MLB.TV...

Powered up my computer and chose to watch Mets @ Reds, followed by the Pirates @ Cardinals before finally turning to my beloved Cubbies...

At about 3:00 AM, I finally went to bed feeling rather disgusted. I hadn't managed to watch more than five minutes at a stretch without some major glitch, frozen video, out of sync audio. I spent more time installing and re-installing the software prerequisites for MLB.TV Premium, testing the bandwidth between my computer and the streaming servers and surfing the support forum at mlb.com in a vain attempt to figure out what was going wrong.

And I was not the only one. As the evening progressed more and more complaints were being logged and MLB-support answers became rarer and rarer. It became rather obvious that the MLB servers and/or the NexDef system from Swarmcast had suffered a serious melt down. Even now more than 16 hours later, the many of games are still not available. The archives are supposed to be on-line c. 45 minutes after the last out.

The weirdest thing is that the MLB appears to be living in Cloud Cuckoo Land instead of being honest and forthright about what happened: "MLB.TV, season off to flying starts" <http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090405&content_id=4132698&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb>.

Yep, MLB you gotta learn how to walk before you learn how to run. Oh, and hire some Internet savvy tech people and competent programmers.

Life as Defined by the Cubs and Baseball at Wrigley

Anon — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:50:13 -0400

It hurts. Yes, it hurts. There is always next year; there is always next century. Yes, it hurts.

However...

As an American expat, as a North Side expat, who moved from Chicago to Europe in the late '70s, when I am asked about the United States and what it is like to live in the States, I almost invariably end up describing what it is like to sit way up above first base in Wrigley Field and watch a Cubs game. If there is one thing I really miss after all these years, it is a certain atmosphere only found along the lakefront, a smell of popcorn, cotton candy, hot dogs, the cry of the hawkers, the tarred smell of the El tracks when the heat goes up, the boats out on the lake, the wind blowing in, and the long slow ceremony known as baseball. Baseball—a mixture of team effort and the simultaneous duel between pitcher and batter, arcane rules, lazy afternoons, and shrine of tradition—is a key to understanding who I am and what America is.

They can't take this from the people on the North Side, so, win or lose, you have been blessed.

Bleacher Report - Articles by Anon

MLB.TV Strikes Out on Opening Day

Life as Defined by the Cubs and Baseball at Wrigley