Borderline Fantastic Sports

I only watched a little of this game. Little enough to see the Seattle goal and none of the Union goals. That’s not why I share the highlights with you here. I share them because the fact that the ESPN2 Bottom Line wasn’t cropped out of these highlights. It just looked odd.

Thumbs up for nice, long hightlights in good quality and for allowing them to be embedded. Just take a little more time and get some without the Bottom Line.

As for the MLS. I’m new to paying any attention (and I really haven’t yet, but will because of the Union). My problem is that the best players in the world are playing in a little competition called the World Cup and I haven’t heard anything about this being an issue for MLS teams.

A few weeks ago Evan called to let me know he had purchased a plane ticket to NYC. School would be over, so he was free. He didn’t have any plans for when he arrived. He checked the baseball schedule after booking the ticket and saw that the Phillies were in town on Thursday and the Mets would be there for the weekend.

Phillies? I’m in. I checked with Janos, he was in too. Evan’s sister’s boyfriend John rounded out the group.

I went on to StubHub and got 4 tickets in the very top row of the stadium, in a section where I thought we’d get a good view of everything. I think that goal was accomplished.

There were Phillies fans everywhere. By the end of the game, they were all that was left. The 9th inning took forever and the Phillies put a few more runs on the board, leaving to a slow exodus of the rest of the stadium.

I’d been to the old Yankee Stadium twice. Once when I was about 11 and during the last season because Evan hadn’t been there so we made the trip. The new one certainly doesn’t have the charm of the old one. I feel like they tried to copy how the stadium looked at the end. Meaning they attempted to make the new building look old instead of letting it age. It either will look great in many years or will fall apart very quickly. To me, the biggest improvement is the amount of extra space. The lines for food used to fill the concourses so you couldn’t even walk through. Now there is almost too much space, which is a good thing.

Any points gained by design improvements are lost by that ridiculous restaurant in center field. There is no excuse for the bleacher seats being blocked from seeing the other outfield. TV screens are not enough.

The video screen in center field looks amazing. I’m just not sure why they don’t use it for replays. I saw a few early on, but later in the game, there was nothing. Especially in the 9th when the Yankees left the field and no one could figure out what had happened. When I got home I saw that Ibanez had been hit by the grounder to end the inning. No replay or anything in the stadium to let us know what happened.

On last thing, every seat in the stadium has a warning: “Be alert for bats and/or balls.” Every seat. Even all the way in the upper deck. This picture isn’t even from all the way at the top where we were sitting, yet still, really, really far. No bat was making it’s way up there.

My iPad stand arrived this week. I went with the Twelve South BookArc for iPad. I wanted something that could hold the iPad in either direction. I would have liked one that adjusted the angle but they all looked pretty large. Last night I was finally able to use it how I envisioned it.

The Phillies were between innings so I had on the White Sox/Nats game on MLBNet. On the iPad I had the Gamecast up for the Phillies game in the MLB At Bat app. If I get MLB.tv, I can watch video on the iPad, but I don’t need that just yet, maybe in September.

The stand is exactly what I wanted. I will probably get a Bluetooth Keyboard soon and use the stand for things besides supplementing TV watching.

If I were running baseball …

The baseball season spans, what I consider to be, four major holidays. Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. The fourth? Opening Day. A non-baseball fan could argue it being a holiday, but for my purposes, you don’t need to worry about that argument.

First, and this should be how it already is if it weren’t for tv (which is the case for most things), all teams should open on the same day. A single Opening Day. Not an Opening Night followed by two Opening Days.

My proposal is that every game, all 15, on each of these holidays should be on some sort of national tv. ESPN and MLB Network will show quite a few games, but not all, and I don’t expect them to show all of them. Other channels should jump in on this new tradition. Broadcast or cable, whatever. On most of these holidays they are showing a marathon of whatever they find around on the floor. I don’t care what the channel usually shows. Food Network? Sure. SOAPNet? Perfect. Some would make sense: Nick, MTV.

I know your question, ‘why would a non-sports channel want to produce a baseball game?’ They don’t. All these games are already on somewhere. MLB Net shows a local feed for most of their games already. If you wanted to be real ambitions, you could alternate the feeds for the national audience to get a taste of each team’s announcers. For the local fans, the game would still be on their regional sports net as usual.

I mentioned Nick and MTV has channels that would make sense because I could see them producing it themselves and bringing their own style to it. I bet Nick could even convince Fox to let them dig up Scooter. In these instances, it will be even more important for the local nets to still broadcast the game. It would be great for their target audiences, but not the real fans.

This could make baseball a big deal on each of these holidays. It’s supposedly the ‘national past time’ (and is for me, but sadly, not for everyone), it should act like it on occasion. Instead of tweaking (ruining) the all-star game and having November World Series games that take all night.

The post positions were set today, so you can now make your picks.

Make ICH Picks

You pick how you expect all 20 horses to finish. The default scoring is as follows (you can change any of these values if you create your own group):

Correct Pick: 2 points
Correct Win: 20 points
Correct Place: 10 points
Correct Show: 5 points
Correct Last: 1 point
1 Finish Position off: 1 point
Each Finish Position off by more than 1: -0.2 points (If you pick a horse to finish 5th and it finished 7th, that is 2 positions off, so you would get 0.8 points)

Perhaps a little complicated, but I wanted something more than just Win, Place, Show. It’s so difficult to get finish positions exactly right, so I wanted some value in being close. Create your groups with whatever settings you like. If you have some suggestions to improve the default scoring, leave a comment.

Today’s Phillies game was nuts, but this one play was just amazing.

Watch

First, mlb.com called this clip ‘Howard’s strong throw home’. Umm, did you watch the clip? Schneider turned into an acrobat to make up for the poor throw by Howard.

Look at everything that went in to the play:

Howard decides to go home instead of getting the 2nd out at 1st. The infield was in, but he still could have gone with the easy out, letting the Giants tie the game. He made the throw and it made it to the catcher.

Schneider catches the off-line throw. Spins around to get his glove to the plate. He not only gets it there, he gets it in front of the plate. This blocks the front of the plate and he’s in position to sweep the plate. He does this and Uribe plants his hand right on the glove. The bat was even in play, if Uribe had decided to go a different route.

Schierholtz, who was on 2nd after a double, doesn’t advance on the play. I don’t know what game he was watching. At worst, he froze on the hit. Once Howard goes home, he should have broken for 3rd. Even if the throw is on line, it’s very unlikely that he’s getting thrown out at 3rd. The Giants were left still a run behind with an out left, but the tying run was on 2nd, not 3rd.

The Phillies got that last out and won the game. I still would have been just excited about this play had it all fallen apart, again.

I wasn’t sure about the new Thursday/Friday NFL draft idea. Seemed a little unnecessary and that the NFL was thinking it was too important.

Turns out, it was a good idea, at least for me. I don’t really like watching the draft anymore. I like to keep up with the picks and trades but I don’t need the analysis. I read enough online leading up to the draft. With so many people covering the draft on tv now, the quality of analysis had dropped off a cliff. Toward the end of the night I was able to flip between NFL Net and ESPN. NFL Net was good (once Deion stopped interviewing people) and ESPN had a lot of holes (I barely heard from Mel Kiper with so many people on the panel).

The Thursday night worked because I wanted to watch the Flyers playoff game and Phillies more than the draft. Thankfully NFL Network was streaming online. I was able to fire up the draft on my laptop and flip to the Phillies during breaks and intermissions in the Flyers game.

The Friday bonus: I don’t think this was fully taken advantage of. This morning every site should have been pushing mock drafts for rounds 2 and 3 along side their recaps. Everyone was already invested in what happened in Round 1. They also had a good idea of who was left on the board. No one cares about the guys ranked in the 30s before the draft. Now, the top 10 guys not picked in the first round are known with a day of coverage to devote to them. The mock drafts have been coming out during the day but they weren’t on them this morning.

Now, the draft will pick up tonight. 6pm is a brilliant move as well. They’d lose a ton of audience if they started at 8pm, fewer people would even start watching. Now fans will get to see most of the 2nd round and maybe get hooked for the rest of the night.

Saturday for rounds 4-7, who really cares. The underrated benefit of all of this is that the NFL has given me a Saturday back. I probably won’t do anything useful with it, but I could.

It’s Opening Night. Baseball Picks is back on Ice Cream Helmet again this season. Here are the top 10 rated series that can be picked for Week 1. No surprise, tonight’s Yankees/Red Sox game is on the list. Make your picks!

But is Bracket Boy Fail necessary?

I’m catching up on back issues of SI. I need to mention that because the story isn’t exactly timely since it relates to the Olympics. Although, I think Olympic sports should be talked about year round.

The story was ‘A Tale of Two Lindseys.’ It discussed Lindsey Vonn and Lindsey Van. You know Vonn, but who is Van? She’s a female ski jumper. I mentioned how ridiculous it was that there was no woman’s ski jumping in the Olympics in the last IDM. I wasn’t aware of the fight over the idea. The IOC says it’s not competitive enough. In the article, they compare the woman’s ski jumping world championships, which had 39 competitors, with the woman’s skeleton at the games, which had 26 competitors.

I really don’t understand what the issue is. They’d have to buy a few extra medals? That’s all I can think of.