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Stories filed under: "baseball"

How The Internet Enabled A Mariners Fan And DoorDash Driver To Connect And Do Something Cool

from the faith-restored dept

The world can be an awful, horrible place. Lately, it feels like, in America, things are only getting more difficult. And, because my country loves its scapegoats, the internet has been routinely blamed for all the country’s, perhaps the world’s, ills. Insurrections, political radicalization, obesity, poor socialization, literally any sub-optimal thing to do with children: blame the internet.

But that’s obviously stupid. The internet is responsible for both good and bad outcomes in society, as is pretty much everything else. But the internet also is only as good or bad as those that make use of it. And sometimes, the internet enables really awesome stuff.

Take the story of Sofie Dill, Seattle Mariners fan, and Simranjeet Singh, a DoorDash driver. This past weekend, without getting into too much detail, Jesse Winker was hit by a pitch while playing the L.A. Angels and a brawl between the teams ensued. Baseball fights are plainly dumb, but some fans enjoy them, or at least root for their players in the fight. To that end, Dill, from her home in Arkansas, decided to send Winker a pizza from a local Anaheim parlor to be delivered directly to the stadium. And, for added measure, she live-tweeted her DoorDash experience for everyone to follow along.

Baseball fan or not, you should go check out the full thread. It’s a harrowing journey to see if she could in fact deliver a pizza to a professional baseball player in a visiting Major League clubhouse to express her support. The spoiler here is that the pizza did in fact get delivered, Winker reached out to her on Twitter to say thanks, and a whole bunch of people were cheering on the DoorDash driver, Singh, as he went on his dutiful journey.

As a result, Dill managed to get Singh to share his Venmo QR code and shared it out to Twitter.

And from there, the internet did its thing. Plenty of folks started sending money to Singh’s Venmo. Other’s asked they could send him money via another platform. Singh himself started sending out tweets thanking everyone, clearly overjoyed at everyone’s generosity. Then, were that not enough, two other awesome outcomes happened, just to restore your faith in humanity.

While I can’t be sure how much was donated to Singh, he certainly didn’t keep all of it for himself.

There are good people in this world. Paying it forward would have been the feel good coda to this story on its own, but then the Mariners decided to get in on the fun as well.

TONIGHT ONLY at T-Mobile Park! 🍕🍕

Get a FREE @Mariners pizza pin with purchase of a Jesse Winker player t-shirt or jersey!

*While supplies last. Available at select locations only. Cannot be combined with any other offer. pic.twitter.com/dVx3Z0Yvgj

— Mariners Team Store (@MarinersStore) June 27, 2022

Dill got herself a Winker jersey from the Mariners. Singh had what he describes as a life-changing event. Mariners fans got to have a ton of fun on Twitter with all of this. St. Jude’s got a donation.

If there’s a loser in this story, I can’t find one. And all of this made possible by the evil, vile internet that too many people blame for every last thing.

Filed Under: baseball, fandom, internet, jesse winker, pizza, sharing, simrajeet singh, sofie dill
Companies: doordash, seattle mariners

What MLB May Need To Do After It Stops Its Player Lockout Bullshit

from the you-need-the-fans dept

If you’re not a sports fan, or not an American, you may not be aware that there is currently an owner’s lockout occurring in Major League Baseball. We’ve talked a bit in the past about some of the bullshit MLB is pulling with all of this, namely its decision to strip out all references to current players from its website. But in those discussions we never really got into what this lockout is or why it’s occurring. Let me give you a quick primer.

For starters, this is not a player strike. Ownership and players are currently negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The owners locked the players out of MLB facilities in December, claiming it did so as a defensive measure. This simply is not true. There was nothing in the pervious CBA that required a lockout once that CBA expired. MLB could have gone on with its normal schedule this year while it continued to negotiate a new CBA. Instead, MLB has imposed artificial deadline after artificial deadline and then blamed the players for not giving in to its bad-faith negotiations. MLB recently announced that the start of the season would be delayed and the games not played would simply be lost, again blaming the players for this. That isn’t true. MLB is choosing unilaterally to cancel MLB games.

You may or may not care about any of this. Where this crosses over into Techdirt territory, however, is what is going to happen when an inevitable deal is reached and games resume. Why? Well, if the last prolonged work stoppage in MLB is any indication, teams will likely resume play with diminished attendance in the stands and viewership numbers down for teams across the board. Baseball fans will be very, very angry about all of this and the reprecussions of the lockout have the potential to be felt for years.

So what should MLB prepare to do to claw back as many of those fans as possible once games resume? Many of the things that it should have been doing to grow the game all along, except that this time they might have not choice:

Noticing a theme? MLB appears to really enjoy battling with everyone and everything, especially on the internet. This stands in stark contrast to what the other professional leagues are doing. Hell, MLB doesn’t seem to understand that my Twitter timeline is overflowing with amazing NFL and NBA clips from games, all by fans out in the wild and all of them driving my and others’ interests in these games. That’s what gets you to turn on the television or buy a ticket these days.

And MLB is going to need to do something to claw back fans when this all ends. Because the public in general knows this is an ownership lockout and are most certainly not blaming the players for this.

Filed Under: baseball, blackout rules, fair use, fans, lockout
Companies: mlb

MLB Commissioner Meets The Streisand Effect After Ousting Ken Rosenthal From The MLB Network

from the swing-and-a-miss dept

We’ve talked a great deal about Major League Baseball here at Techdirt. Notably, for a long time those discussions have positive in nature, whether it was MLB’s interesting pivots once COVID-19 went global or the expansion of its excellent streaming services. Now, while the league has also had issues playing IP enforcer in the past, or the more recent self-own the league conducted in response to its players lockout, the fact is that commissioner Rob Manfred has generally been a fresh voice of modernity and technological progress for the league.

That makes it all the more perplexing that Manfred is currently being introduced to the concept of the Streisand Effect. At issue is the ousting of famed MLB reporter Ken Rosenthal. Rosenthal is, perhaps, one of the most respected baseball reporters in the industry, and was apparently fired from the MLB Network as a result of a scathing piece he did on Manfred’s handling of baseball’s 2020 season as it relates to working something out with the Players’ Union for handling COVID protocols. Rosenthal was quietly suspended from MLBN airtime for three months over that article. Now, he’s out entirely.

MLB Network has cut ties with insider Ken Rosenthal in what is believed to be the end result of acrimony that peaked in the summer of 2020 after Rosenthal criticized commissioner Rob Manfred, The Post has learned.

Rosenthal, 59, remains at Fox Sports, where he is a fixture on its weekly coverage and is a dugout reporter for its top games, including the World Series. He also will continue at The Athletic.

What is interesting is that at least one of Rosenthal’s colleagues at The Athletic has been making the rounds on local sports talk radio pointing out that the piece critical of Manfred had barely any legs at all. It survived something like a day or two in a busy news cycle and very few people paid it much attention. Aside from Manfred, of course, who, those same colleagues at The Athletic are also insisting, did all of this to Rosenthal personally due to skin so thin it’s nearly translucent.

In June 2020, Rosenthal’s analysis of Manfred for The Athletic featured some light criticism, but it didn’t appear to delve into anything personal. In one piece, Rosenthal wrote, “As if the perception that Manfred is beholden to owners and out of touch with players was not bad enough, he was trending on Twitter on Monday after performing a massive flip-flop.”

Since then, Rosenthal’s role was slightly diminished at the network. Now, he’s out entirely.

And now that story is getting far more burn than it did initially. Streisand Effect. Also, Rosenthal has plenty of outlets to continue to criticize Manfred and MLB, whether it’s at The Athletic or on Fox Sports.

And the MLB Network has lost at least some of its credibility. For years, it has worked to build itself up as a credible news venture — even as it was owned by the league — and seemed to try to bend over backwards to demonstrate the independence of its reporting from the league’s own direct interests. But now all of that is shot. This is playing the short game rather than the long game, opting to punish someone critical without understanding that having critics on staff gave MLB Network far more credibility than it has now.

Filed Under: baseball, journalism, ken rosenthal, reporting, rob manfred, streisand effect
Companies: mlb network

If MLB Thought Its Website Shenanigans Would Intimidate MLB Players, That Plan Has Backfired

from the swing-and-a-miss dept

We had just discussed some actions Major League Baseball has taken on its MLB.com website which is either fallout from the labor lockout currently going on or MLB playing leverage games with players, depending on your perspective. Essentially, MLB scrubbed most of its website, particularly on the home and “news” pages, of references to any current players. Instead, those pages are full of stories about retired players, candidates for the Hall of Fame, and that sort of thing. In the tabs for the current rosters, the site still has all of the names of players listed, but has replaced each and every player headshot with a stock image of a silhouette. MLB says it was doing this to ensure that no player “likenesses or images” are considered in use for commerce or advertising… but that doesn’t make much sense. The names are still there and this specific section is a factual representation of current team rosters.

Instead, this appears to be a small part of a strong-arming tactic, in which MLB is flexing its ability to scrub its and individual team sites of information and, in this case, pictures of players. But if MLB thought that it was going to cause the players any real pain by removing those headshots from the site, well, many players went ahead and proved on Twitter that, well, not so much.

A bunch of players, including [Noah] Syndergaard, joined in on the fun by using their new headshot as a Twitter avatar.

It’s way more widespread than that. Players all over Twitter and elsewhere took to replacing their own social media avatars with the silhouette “headshot”. It became very clear that the players were simply poking MLB in the eye, despite the league trying to punish players over these labor negotiations.

Which is yet another PR hit to the league. It’s worth keeping in mind that this is not a player strike; it is a owners lockout. That becomes very important in the wake of the last labor stoppage MLB had, which was the disastrous players strike in 1994. Because that was a player strike, the public very much blamed the players for the loss of an MLB season. That’s not the case here, where the owners are crying poor to the players union while also spending millions and millions of dollars to gobble up free agents just before the previous CBA expired.

With labor issues like this in professional sports, optics is everything. MLB only recovered from the last stoppage thanks to a steroid-driven homerun race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire, among others. You can damn well bet that the league doesn’t want anything remotely like that to happen again, which means it can’t let the public’s anger get out of control.

And a few days in, having the players publicly mocking MLB’s tactics on a platform designed to engage directly with the public and fans is not a good start if the league expects to have any of the sentiment out there falling in its favor.

Filed Under: baseball, cba, labor, lockout, photos, rosters, website
Companies: mlb

MLB Removes References To Current Players On MLB.com Due To Lockout

from the take-this! dept

Whether you’re a baseball fan, or a sports fan in general, or not, regular readers here will know that we’ve covered aspects of many sports leagues and Major League Baseball in particular. As you’d expect with any major business like MLB, some of those posts have dealt with some nonsense intellectual property actions the league has undertaken, but many more of them have been positive articles about the forward-thinking folks at MLB when it comes to how they make their products available using modern technology. The league’s website work has always been particularly good, whether it’s been the fantastic MLB.TV streaming site the league operates, or even simply the base MLB.com site itself.

But that latter site has now become a petty pawn being played by MLB as part of the owner’s lockout of players that just kicked off. For non-MLB fans, the quick version is this: the collectively bargained labor agreement between owners and players expired this week without a new agreement inked. As a result, the players are now locked out of team facilities by ownership. That last bit is important, because many people have been describing this as a labor strike. It isn’t. At all. This is the owners refusing to let the players fulfill their duties. And as part of that, it seems, MLB released the following news update on its MLB.com website.

You may notice that the content on this site looks a little different than usual. The reason for this is because the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the players and the league expired just before midnight on Dec. 1 and a new CBA is currently being negotiated between the owners and the MLBPA.

Until a new agreement is reached, there will be limitations on the type of content we display. As a result, you will see a lot more content that focuses on the game’s rich history. Once a new agreement is reached, the up-to-the minute news and analysis you have come to expect will continue as usual.

It’s unclear precisely what game MLB is playing with this move, but the end result is a website that is almost entirely bereft of content on any current MLB player. While the stats and standings from last season are still available in their tabs, the entire main page is now filled only with content about players no longer playing. Players that are on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, for instance, or check ins with Ichiro showing up at a high school to hit home runs. Interested in Vin Scully’s thoughts on Gil Hodges? MLB.com has you covered! Want to know anything new about Kris Bryant or Mike Trout? You’ll have to go elsewhere.

The league is making noises about having to comply with federal labor laws regarding the use of player likenesses in promotional or advertising material, but that doesn’t make that much sense in the context of simply listing players currently under contract and on team rosters. Instead, this looks to be an attempt to, in some manner, punish current players by ripping away any fame or notoriety they might get via the MLB.com site. It’s also notable that each individual team site gets feeds directly from MLB.com and those sites too are changed in a similar manner. Perhaps most strangely, the headshots of all current players have been removed and replaced by generic avatars of faceless heads

It could be that MLB is just playing it really, really safe on the labor laws situation… but I doubt it. This is more likely part of the overall strong-arm tactic by team owners that are crying poor to the players’ union while beating the CBA buzzer to hand players millions and millions of dollars at the same time. And, just to add more to the mix, this all is happening at the same time MLB admitted it has been messing with the types of balls within the game, introducing multiple differently behaving balls in a league that is absolutely driven by statistics for what is supposed to be a uniform game.

Not exactly the ammo the owners need going into CBA negotiations, to be sure.

Filed Under: articles, baseball, collective bargaining agreement, journalism, labor agreement, lockout, mlb, news, players
Companies: mlb

MLB In Talks To Offer Streaming For All Teams' Home Games In-Market Even Without A Cable Subscription

from the home-run dept

Streaming options for professional and major college sports has long been a fascination of mine. That is in part because I’m both a fairly big fan of major sports and a fan of streaming over the wire instead of having cable television. My family cut the cord a couple of years back and hasn’t looked back since, almost entirely satisfied with our decision. The one area of concern here continues to be being able to stream our local sports teams, as most of the pro sports leagues still have stupid local blackout rules. MLB.TV, the league’s fantastic streaming service, has these rules too. While using a DNS proxy is trivially easy, easier would be the league coming to terms with modernity and ending the blackout rules. Notably, MLB did this in 2015 when it came specifically to Fox Sports broadcasts for 15 teams, but as I noted at the time:

But don’t think for a single moment that that’s where it ends. Even if MLB can’t get similar deals in place for the other half of teams in the league, which would fully free up the fantastic MLB.TV product for local streaming, any modicum of success that Fox has with this program will be immediately adopted by the other broadcasters. They really don’t have a choice. Cord-cutting isn’t going away and it’s been professional and college sports that have long kept subscribers tethered.

It took longer than I expected, but it’s finally happening. Reports indicate that MLB is currently planning to rollout an all-league streaming option that would end local blackout rules entirely, even for cord-cutters. And, in case you thought this was going to be an MLB-only thing, its bringing the other major leagues along for the ride.

The web-based service — which could address a decades-old annoyance for baseball fans that some have partly blamed for the league’s steadily declining viewership — could launch as early as the 2023 season, a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations said.

The National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League are also considering partnering with MLB on the new streaming service, sources said. Insiders say subscription rates would vary by geographic market and could be between 10and10 and 10and20 a month — well below the monthly cost of most cable-TV packages, which can easily stretch past $100.

As you might imagine, the cable companies are not thrilled with this. After all, while cord-cutting has been a steady force in the American media landscape, the dam has yet to burst and that is almost certainly due to the appetite for live sports broadcasts that still sit behind complicated cable television deals these leagues have with broadcast partners. So how is this going to work?

Well, MLB is doing what I suggested almost a decade ago: making the streaming broadcast identical to the television broadcast and giving broadcast partners some of the revenue, while also giving the broadcast commercial advertisements the additional reach of the stream.

Sources said MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred could end up offering cable-TV giants a piece of the streaming revenue to compensate for potential subscriber losses. Manfred’s pitch is that cable TV won’t lose many subscribers, as MLB is mainly targeting younger customers who have already cut the cord, sources said. The cable companies don’t have streaming rights but could retaliate by paying less to broadcast games if they don’t like the bargain, sources said.

As for the teams, MLB’s streaming service would pay them based on viewership in their local markets. One MLB owner said the league has kept its owners appraised, and believes it has general support though no vote has been taken. Indeed, the MLB and team owners are concerned over dire forecasts for viewership. Roughly half of Americans will not be watching cable or satellite TV within a few years, according to Pew Research Center annual surveys.

There is no firm deal yet, as MLB is currently working with broadcast partners and its teams to finalize the plan. Sinclair Broadcasting is a major piece of gum in the works, because of course it is. Sinclair has the broadcast rights for nearly half the league’s teams and is putting up a stink, though MLB’s strategy appears to be repeatedly pointing out that Sinclair may be in such dire financial trouble such that it can’t be trusted to continue operating far into the future.

At first, sources said Sinclair tried to persuade MLB to allow it to control the service for several years before handing the reins to MLB. But the league wasn’t having it, citing Sinclair’s financial condition and raising concerns that the company won’t be able to spend the money that’s needed for high-quality broadcasts, sources said.

In 2019, Sinclair’s Diamond Sports subsidiary paid 9.6billionfortheFoxRegionalSportsNetworks,sincerebrandedtoBally’s,givingitexclusiverightstothe14MLBteams,16NBAteams,and12NHLteams.Itborrowedastaggering9.6 billion for the Fox Regional Sports Networks, since rebranded to Bally’s, giving it exclusive rights to the 14 MLB teams, 16 NBA teams, and 12 NHL teams. It borrowed a staggering 9.6billionfortheFoxRegionalSportsNetworks,sincerebrandedtoBally’s,givingitexclusiverightstothe14MLBteams,16NBAteams,and12NHLteams.Itborrowedastaggering8 billion to fund the deal, sources said. Since then, Dish, Hulu and YouTube TV have stopped carrying the Bally’s RSNs, even as revenue from existing distribution deals has been slammed by cord cutting and subscriber declines. An August Moody’s Investors Service report found that Sinclair “now has an unsustainable capital structure given its very high leverage and weak liquidity.”

Don’t threaten me with a good time, Sinclair.

Regardless, everything about these plans represents a massive step in the right direction. Sports leagues will be eyeing how this goes with great interest. When it goes well, as it almost certainly will, this could be the start of a massive change in how sporting events are consumed by the public.

And the end of cable television as we know it.

Filed Under: baseball, blackouts, cable tv, cord cutting, sports, streaming
Companies: mlb

Tech And COVID-19: Stop Using Video Game Graphics For Fake Crowds, Fox

from the not-working dept

Professional sports is now fully in the weeds trying to navigate reopening live sports events during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not going great, frankly. NFL players are beginning to opt out of the season, citing health concerns. Golfers have been trickling out of events due to positive COVID-19 tests. MLB, meanwhile, just found itself with four teams unable to play the other night due to roughly a third of the Florida Marlins popping positive for the virus. Given that these leagues just started reopening, it’s not a good sign.

Still, I won’t lie and say it hasn’t been nice to see baseball back on my TV again. And, as we wrote about recently, what the league is trying to do with innovation around piped in crowd noise and its MLB app is downright cool. But not all tech solutions are good ones and Fox Sports’ use of video game graphics to input fake crowds into stadiums on the screen is pretty terrible.

While I would still argue that even that promo video shows some of the problems with trying this, please don’t be fooled with how relatively good it looks. The Cubs played on Fox the other day and I was shocked at how bad it all looked. From the pitching angle camera, the crowds aren’t there. During wide cutaways, they suddenly were, but not in the seats along the foul walls or right behind home plate. Any view of the crowd that was closer than a wide shot looked childish.

Fox Sports felt like that without a crowd, the games would feel like practice, so it enlisted production company Silver Spoon, which does motion capture and character creation, to create the virtual fans.

“Our goal is to make sure that the view looks normal,” says Zager. Normal this ain’t, but neither is 2020.

Sorry, but it doesn’t. While I certainly appreciate the attempt to make us feel like we’re in normal times, there are limits to what technology can do and creating realistic and consistent fake crowds at MLB games is apparently one of those limits. We got the crowd noise, but I think we’re going to have to cede stadiums filled with fans to COVID-19.

Filed Under: baseball, covid, fake fans, fans, sports
Companies: fox sports

Tech And COVID-19: MLB Rolls Out Remote Cheering Function In Its MLB App

from the 3-cheers dept

As we continue navigating this new world full of COVID-19, mostly alone due to the laughably inept response from our national leadership, there’s a certain humor to the ongoing push for a “return to normalcy.” What makes it so funny is how completely clear it is that “normalcy” is going to be anything but normal. Go back to work, but wear a mask and stay the fuck away from your coworkers. Get your kids back to school, but maybe not, also masks, and remote learning, and they have to eat their lunch in their classrooms. Restaurants are open, but only outside, with less people, and there will be temperature checks.

And then there are the sports. Collegiate sports are shutting down with the quickness, but the professional sports leagues are opening. The NBA is back, but only in Orlando, which is basically coronavirus ground zero. The NHL is coming back, except a ton of players are testing positive.

And then there’s baseball. Yes, Major League Baseball is back, but masks make an appearance and, most importantly, there are no crowds. If you aren’t a baseball fan, I’ll forgive you for not understanding this, but crowds are a huge deal for baseball. Part of the ambiance of the game, be it in person or on television, is that low level din of crowd noise, vendors yelling out, and the like. Not to mention the roar or boos of crowds during peak excitement. With no crowds, the soundtrack of the summer is just the lead singer with no instruments backing him or her up.

MLB’s solution to this was to pipe in crowd music. With audio files at least in part from Sony’s MLB The Show video game series, teams were encouraged to add their own flavors to the audio files and then pipe them into stadiums. This helped, of course, but how was the crowd noise supposed to artificially change based on what occurs on the field?

Turns out that MLB actually has a solution for that. And it’s awesome.

Fans will have the opportunity to boo the Houston Astros during the 2020 Major League Baseball season after all.

As Darren Rovell of Action Network shared, the league will incorporate how many fans are using its app and cheering or booing a specific team into the piped in crowd noise it will use in empty stadiums amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

New innovation from Major League Baseball will allow fans to cheer or boo in their app, ballpark staff can then match that up with the volume in the stadium. pic.twitter.com/YxqKTR7lYt

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) July 20, 2020

Very cool. Essentially, MLB’s app will let users note which team they’re supporting and then allow them to “cheer” or “boo” via the app. Their choices will then be reflected in the crowd audio that is piped into the stadium and heard on television broadcasts. Staff at the stadium will reflect viewer choices in near real time.

“Ballpark staff uses the ‘real-time’ fan sentiment to control/vary noise variation/levels at the ballpark,” is how the league described how teams will use the feature.

It won’t exactly be the raucous environments of Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, but it is at least a way for fans to express their loyalties while they are watching from home instead of the bleachers.

I love this sort of thing. Still, one wonders if MLB is prepared for the potential of rival fuckery. After all, it might just be possible to setup an automated system that created a bunch of accounts for a rival team and then simply choose to boo all the time, ruining the broadcast. Hopefully the league has a method to guard against that sort of thing.

But if they don’t, this is me soliciting a guerrilla hacking group so we can go screw around with White Sox crowd levels.

Filed Under: baseball, covid-19, crowd noise, crowds, fans, pandemic, simulated noises
Companies: major league baseball, mlb

All Sports Are Esports Now: The MLB The Show, Players Tournament Edition

from the homeruns-at-home dept

For nearly a month now, since this coronavirus nightmare really began in America, we’ve been discussing how all sports have become esports, nearly overnight. Auto-racing kicked this trend off with some fairly great internet and television broadcasts of real racers driving digital cars. After that, the NFL and NBA made their own runs at some kind of esports events, with fairly mediocre results.

Now Major League Baseball is getting involved, having kicked off a 30 player tournament using the excellent MLB: The Show Playstation series. In announcing the series, MLB indicated it would be a tournament style event with one representative from 30 MLB teams playing their teams, with games being 3 inning affairs.

Starting Friday, 30 players are putting their virtual talents to the test in the first “MLB The Show” online league. Participants include 11 onetime All-Stars, five World Series champions and eight players age 25 or younger. The league will consist of 29 games for each player, one against each of the other participants, and will run for approximately three weeks. The top eight players will then advance to the “postseason.”

The “MLB The Show” players league will provide fans an opportunity to watch their favorite players play the video game, while also allowing them to interact with them through various streaming services.

Unlike the NFL and NBA attempts, there are several things that put this MLB event on solid footing. First, MLB: The Show is simply excellent and has nearly universally great reviews from games journalists and the public alike. Second, nobody does social media and internet marketing of its game in the professional sports world better than MLB. From MLBAM (Major League Baseball Advanced Media) to unleashing players on sites like Twitter and Facebook, MLB does it at least as well as everyone else. On top of that, the sport is almost perfectly suited to have a realistic video game substitute step in when you cannot experience the real thing. The motions, sights, and sounds of baseball translate well to a video game compared with more, ahem, highly athletic sports.

The results? They sure look like a lot of fun, with participation by MLB players, their families, and at least one good puppy named Rookie.

Honestly, when it comes to what MLB and NASCAR are doing in esports right now to fill in the gaps left by a global pandemic, one of the very real questions is quickly becoming why in the world these esports versions of leagues shouldn’t continue when the real games come back.

Filed Under: baseball, covid-19, esports, mlb: the show, sports, video games
Companies: mlb

Techdirt Podcast Episode 236: Talkin' Jomboy, New Media & Copyright

from the three-strikes dept

If you’re a baseball fan, you’ve probably heard of Jomboy (aka Jim O’Brien) by now. And if you’re not, you still might have — because he’s been getting attention by building a successful new media network online with his baseball explainer videos. And of course, that includes facing some familiar copyright and ContentID obstacles along the way. This week, Jomboy himself joins us on the podcast to discuss the experience, the challenges, and yes, the baseball.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: baseball, copyright, jomboy, new media, podcast, sports
Companies: mlb