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Know your baseball? You could win $1 million from MLB!

May 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I follow the growing number of apps and games that are emerging from Major League Baseball with solid approval. While not everything MLB does is great (I hate interleague play for instance) but most of the apps and programs serve to enhance baseball’s fans experience.

I only glanced over the Million Dollar Pick’em game the first time I noticed it but did not really give it any thought. Then while waiting for some of the Friday night games to start so that I could have one running on my computer I noticed an article at MLB.Com.

It talked about how three fans were in the running to win a million dollars this weekend playing the game, and laid out a number that had won thousands of dollars already playing the game.

The game is simple to understand, but hard to win. All you have to do is pick all of the winning teams on both Tuesday and Friday in the same week to win the $1 million prize. Picks must be in by 7 pm ET, but can be changed up to that point A few other rules, US citizens only, you must be at least 18 years old to play. Easy right? I tried it for Friday and did not win, and was not that close to be honest.

The game is free, so the entry price is no barrier, and the top weekly score is $1,000. I am a bit surprised that no one has won yet, or if they have I have not seen it publicized yet. The reason is not that I see a lot of experts picking games, instead I view it much like the NCAA’s March Madness, there always seems to be someone that picks everybody, or close to it, and since this keeps repeating, there are more chances.

Filed Under: Baseball, Contests, Major League Baseball Tagged With:

Vote For MLB All-Stars- And Triple-A All Stars as Well

May 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Right after the MLB season started I was at the league’s site and noticed that you could already start voting for the All-Star game, and the one moment I gave it any thought was that it was way too early for me to even start considering voting.

I am in the ‘what have you done this year’ group of voters, one of a number of major groups I see voting. There is also fans I know that only vote for players on their team, ones that vote for last year’s performance, and a few rare ones that only vote for a player in either the NL or AL.

It is now getting to the point that I will vote and have really appreciated the fact that I can do it online for two reasons. I no longer live in a town with a major league team and the closest is a two hour drive. The second is IBM punch cards went out with the VAX.

What I have not realized until a MLB Advanced Media note came my way that you can also vote for Triple-A All Stars. I suspect the voting in this contest will be much more team-oriented since if you do not live in a town with a AAA team it is unlikely that you have watched any of the players perform, although games are shown on MLB’s network.

The fan voting will represent 1/3 of the total vote with other votes being cast by by members of the media and each club’s field manager, coaches, and general manager.

However this is a good move by MLB in trying to bring more attention to its minor leagues. It certainly looks like it is trying to make the Triple A All Star game, which will pit players from the Pacific Coast League against players from the International League, into a must see event. While I doubt it will ever reach the NFL’s minor league games’ popularity — i.e BCS college football, this is a good way to increase interest in baseball.

The Triple A All-Star game, which has been played for the last 24 years, will be played at Coca-Cola Field in Buffalo, N.Y., home of the Buffalo Bisons, on July 11 at 7:00 p.m. EDT

Filed Under: All Star Game, Baseball, Major League Baseball, Triple-A All Star Game Tagged With: , ,

MLB’s Latest Playoff Move a Head Scratcher

May 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Major League Baseball has announced its playoff broadcast partners for the year 2012 and 2013, and normally that would seem to be a rather innocuous announcement, until you notice that it will be broadcasting two of the games itself.

Rather the MLB Network, which is a property of MLB, will get two of the games, and not the Wild Card games that have been added to the schedule but two of the more desirable division series games. It has also awarded the Wild Card games to TBS.

I had taken a glance at the release on the playoffs but did give it much thought until it was mentioned by Michael Hiestand over at USA Today. He points out that while the NFL broadcasts some of its own games, they are regular season games and they are shown locally on broadcast TV so that the home town fans can watch.

This strikes me as a very short sighted and backwards move. They risk alienating home town fans by a refusal to follow the NFL’s example of at least throwing a bone to the locals.

But more so is that with the still limited reach of the MLB Network they miss out nationally on appealing to fans. There is really no real incentive for a fan of baseball that is not a fan of the teams involved in the selected games to offer to pay for the privilege of watching two teams that they are uninterested in. I suspect that if the fans had the option of just tuning in on regular broadcasting of the game they likely would.

A last tidbit is that according to the USA Today piece baseball’s national television rights will be up for bid again in 2013, and networks might not want to increase their fees if premier portions of the sport are going to be broadcast by MLB. This will be interesting to see if MLB backs down or alters the plan by the time the playoffs reach us.

Filed Under: Baseball, Major League Baseball, NFL, TBS Tagged With: ,

Will NFL Concussion Issues Drive Athletes to Other Sports?

May 9, 2012 by 2 Comments

If you are a fan of the NFL, or really just football in general, you cannot have avoided the ongoing debate on concussions-an issue that was recently brought once again to the forefront with the tragic death of former NFL star Junior Seau.

I am in no position to say how this should be handled but I am curious if it will have an impact on the sport by driving multi-tool athletes to head to other sports, particularly baseball but I expect others might see a growing interest as well.

The death of Seau, Dave Duerson and others and the growing understanding of the possibilities of damage that impacts on the brain in the form of long term health issues such as Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, dementia, depression and others might cause players to consider a different sport, at least players that are good at more than one.
I will point out that while a growing body of evidence appears to point to the impact as causing the damage most also say that they have nothing definitive to link the two. Also when the damage offered is a contentious issue as well.

However someone, or more than one, is taking it seriously and that is the more than 1,200 former NFL players that are involved in the over than 50 lawsuits against the NFL over this issue. You can get a breakdown here on all of the cases so far.

That amount of players and the comments they are making about the sport are enough to make anybody pause about their intended career. But there are other draws to play rival sports.Pay and career lengths are also issues that could come to the forefront. According to this story the average pay for a player in MLB is $3.44 million last year and the average career length is 5.6 years.

The NFL claims that the average career is almost the same, at 6 years, although others claim that it is roughly half that at 3.5 years. The average salary is about $1.1 million. Of course there are a ton of qualifiers including bonuses, etc… but the biggest seems to be that in baseball your contract is guaranteed while in football it is not aside from the first years usually.

Crossover players are nothing new, both into baseball from football and vice versus. Reggie Jackson and Dave Winfield are always the first to come to my mind. Winfield was drafted by four teams in three sports coming out of college-The San Diego Padres as a pitcher with the 4th pick, the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA and the Utah Jazz in the ABA as well as the Minnesota Vikings in the NFL, despite the fact that he never played football.

Jackson, having been recruited to play at Alabama, Georgia and Oklahoma in college ended up playing football at Arizona State. Having broken bones in his back in a high school game Jackson new the issues with injuries and quickly ended up with the baseball team. Both are now in MLB’s Hall of Fame.

The current generation of baseball players has lots of athletes that played other sports at a high level, players such as the Twins’ Joe Mauer was a top ranked quarterback in high school, Rockies 2010 first-round draft pick Kyle Parker was also Clemson’s starting quarterback and others include Jeff Francouer and Carl Crawford.

Off course this happens the other way as well- with Tom Brady getting drafted by the Expos, Jack Del Rio drafted by Toronto and Jake Locker drafted by the Angles before all of these players went on the college and pro football.

I am sure there is no real way to see if the concussion issue, along with pay and career length, will make a difference. I enjoy both sports greatly and do not want to see a drop off in talent in either sport, but if the concussion studies do turn out to be accurate I hate to see someone die before their time just for my entertainment. However hopefully technology will come to the rescue.

Filed Under: ABC, Baseball, ESPN, Junior Seau, Lawsuit, Major League Baseball, NFL Tagged With: ,

Friday Grab Bag: Harvard Bass Fishing?

April 27, 2012 by 2 Comments

MLB has teamed with Kinect Star Wars to present what it calls the “Ultimate Father-Son Sweepstake” in which participants can win a variety of prizes including a grand prize that includes 2 tickets to any 2012 MLB game and 2012 Opening Day game of their choice and a $200 MLB gift certificate.

What strikes me as odd is that of course in Star Wars the father spends the bulk of three movies trying to kill his son (and daughter) and is only reconciled on his deathbed. Not quite the message you might want to send.

App helps you see what apps are stealing your info
With all of the news about how insecure some apps are, and that they harvest data from your smartphone, tablet or elsewhere, the question is how do you find out which are secure and which are not?

Well one company, research firm PrivacyChoice has a program called Privacyscore for Facebook that it claims will explain which are and which are not to be trusted. The program explains the degree to which your information is protected, if you are being tracked and if so by whom.

It looks at each app and examines the privacy policy, and notes that some basically have none whatsoever, and provides a rated listing. The program is endorsed by the FCC.

NHL jumps of PrePlay bandwagon
So PrePlay, the app developer that lets you make micro-bets on any individual event during a sporting event has extended its reach and now covers the National Hockey League games. The goal of this and other predictive games is to engage users with fans around them or online where they challenge each other to predict the outcome, in this case maybe the final score or who wins a faceoff.

The company had a Subway sponsored Super Bowl push but that did not have the blessing from the NFL while this does have the NHL’s approval. The app, which is available at iTunes, will compete with others such as GrabFan that seek to establish themselves in this area.

Apple’s latest iPad has connectivity woes?
After the iPad overheating issue cooled it now appears that the very popular tablet may have connectivity issues. According to a report in Macworld it has a range of Wi-Fi issues that are annoying users.

It appears that the device has problems finding local Wi-Fi networks, drops connections and has slow upload and download speeds, among other issues. And that is just the Wi-Fi, for people that paid for cellular connectivity it apparently also has issues with connecting to 3G networks.

Harvard has a bass fishing team?
For that matter I was surprised that there is fishing tournaments in college-man did I go to the wrong school! This nice read from the Harvard Crimson talks about the challenges of forming a fishing team in an area, and at a school, that does not have a tradition of bass boats.

The overall sport is run by the Association of Collegiate Anglers (ACA) that currently has 30,000 members across 47 states. I wonder who the holdout states are? The ACA holds tournaments, offers discounts and provides a host of other amenities.

Ice Core Beer Pitcher
With summer looming we owe it to ourselves to ensure that we have the best tools available to enjoy the outdoors. One such tool, perfect for BBQs, is this simply device that is designed to keep beer ice cold without watering it down.

Using a center core made from aluminum a user simply fills the core with ice and attaches it to the center of the pitcher, which holds 60 oz. In a pinch you could fill it with ice tea or soda, I guess.

Microsoft loses Motorola patent case
The ITC has ruled that Microsoft did infringe on patents that are held by Motorola Mobility. The issue has to do with patents that relate to wireless connections and video compression that is incorporated in Microsoft’s popular Xbox game console.

The ruling found that Microsoft infringed on four of the five patents in dispute. It will have an opportunity to respond to the court’s ruling next month and if the comments from Microsoft are any indication expect more action on this front, not less.

And Motorola beats Apple as well
The ITC also handed Motorola a victory in one of its cases against Apple, this time ruling that Apple was guilty of infringing on a 3G wireless patent that is owned by Motorola. In addition the court found that Apple induced others to do the same.

The ruling comes on a lawsuit filed in 2010 and initially covered 5 patents but as the case progressed the case was whittled down to one. There is still a lot to be seen in this case as much of the determination is still classified but Apple appears confident that it can develop a work around to the issue, either via an alliance with partners that have rights to the technology or by developing alternatives itself.

Filed Under: Apple, Apps, Baseball, Humor, iPad, iPhone, Lawsuit, Major League Baseball, Microsoft, Motorola, NHL Tagged With: , , , ,

Cleveland Indians Open Suite for in-Game Twitterers

April 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

A special section for Twitter users? Well that is the plan for the Cleveland Indians who already have a strong following in the twittering crowd apparently. The team will now cater to this market segment by creating a social media suite.

The effort actually has been an evolutionary progress, dating back to 2010 according to ESPN, which also once labeled the Indians as baseball’s most Twitter friendly team.

Fans can get invites to the suite, which are available on a game by game basis and then enjoy not only the view from the seats but also chat online from the Wi-Fi enabled suite with friends not in attendance and ones that are present.

This is part of a greater trend in baseball to make the ballpark experience much more social media and online friendly. There are already 4 stadiums that have in-house networks that enable fans to use mobile apps from Facebook to YouTube with a great deal more ease than in the past when network overloading often shut them off from connections.

Anything that helps boost attendance will be appreciated by the team. With a huge amount of rain last month the team suffered from poor per game attendance, but has seen it shoot up by more than 10,000 a game as the weather has dried and warmed. Who knows maybe the twittering masses can help shoot that number even higher.

Filed Under: Baseball, Cleveland Indians, ESPN, Facebook, Major League Baseball, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , ,
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