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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

Billy Mitchell Lets His Site Lapse, With A Critic Of His High Score Claims Swooping In To Take It Over

from the whoops dept

It’s been a minute since we last discussed Billy Mitchell, the man with the self-propelled reputation as an immense gamer with many high scores on record. He has also demonstrated a willingness to be quite litigious towards anyone who disagrees with this assessment of his gaming prowess. A couple of years back, he threatened to sue the Guinness Book of World Records for — checks notes — , huh, defamation. This defamation appeared to amount to the GBoWR rescinding his “record” for a high and perfect Pacman score, noting that there were evidenced claims that Mitchell had not earned the videotaped score on an official arcade cabinet, but rather using an emulator. These records were later reinstated, with GBoWR indicating it didn’t have enough evidence to refuse the record. Mitchell also sued Twin Galaxies, an organization that acts as something of an arbiter for gaming records like this. That case failed to get dismissed on anti-SLAPP grounds and appears to still be active.

As does the website Mitchell setup to proclaim his own glory, it seems, though it appears that Mitchell let his registration for the site lapse and now it is under decidedly new ownership.

If nothing else, you’ve gotta respect the bit. Billy Mitchell, the so-called “video game player of the century,” appears to have let ownership over his old website, perfectpacman.com, lapse some years ago. Now someone else has commandeered the domain, and is using it to publish a multipart investigation into the oft-questioned legitimacy of Mitchell’s world-record Pac-Man scores.

“Welcome to our new blog, www.perfectpacman.com. This blog will be dedicated to gaming related topics of interest to us. If you like what you see, just give us a whistle! Disclaimer: The new site administration has no affiliation with any liars and/or cheaters and/or narcissistic frauds who may have owned this web domain in the past. But we appreciate the free advertising lol.”

The author of the posts has kept their identity hidden, but each subsequent post is part of a currently six-part series that is entirely dedicated to the claim that Mitchell’s Pac-Man record is illegitimate. Many of those posts are also mirrored in a way on the Twin Galaxies website, which is sure to cause a great deal of ruckus within the ongoing litigation, though those Twin Galaxy posts appear to be user-generated, rather than official posts on the site. The posts on either site are incredibly detailed.

Since it’s still a work in progress and covers a very contentious subject, the veracity of many aspects is up for debate. But while it’s hard to miss that Walter C. has an axe to grind with the famous Pac-Man / Donkey Kong player, it’s not like controversy surrounding some of Mitchell’s claimed achievements hasn’t been piling up over the last decade, either. If you’ve time to kill, you can read the series here—parts one, two, three, four, five, and six are currently up—and judge for yourself. Fair warning: Each section is looong.

Now, none of this is to say that these posts by whoever took over Mitchell’s own site prove that Mitchell did anything untoward. But it sure does make one wonder why someone so obsessed with the world believing his claims about video game records couldn’t also ensure that his website making those claims was maintained in his name.

And, frankly, if this lawsuit can ever make it to the point where discovery is fully conducted and the public gets to see evidence presented on both sides… well, grab a bucket of popcorn.

Filed Under: billy mitchell, criticism, domain name, video games, website

FCC Search Page Goes Five Full Years Without An Update

from the nice-work dept

Congrats to the FCC — supposedly the most tech savvy of gov’t agencies, for going a full five years without updating its website search. Jerry Brito, who has been watching the FCC’s website for quite some time, and noting how awful it is for a tech-related agency, points out that the search page was last updated on December 11, 2003. Of course, that’s not the biggest problem. As Brito notes, the docketing system has tremendous problems for an agency that needs to be more transparent: “there is no full-text search, there are no data feeds, and their robots.txt file is set to exclude search crawlers.” Of course, when the agency is run by a guy famous for secrecy and purposely hiding information to get his way, perhaps it’s no surprise that the search function has gone neglected.

Filed Under: fcc, transparency, website
Companies: fcc

When You're The President-Elect, People Watch Your Website Closely

from the you-can't-just-rewrite-history dept

There’s been plenty of coverage about President-Elect Obama’s change.gov website, which we recently mentioned as well. However, there’s already some controversy brewing, as some folks have noticed that when the site launched, it had full versions of various policy initiatives. Over the weekend, though, many of those initiatives disappeared completely. Of course, it wasn’t that completely, since plenty of folks were able to dig up copied versions of them and repost them.

Chances are that this is nothing more than a similar flare up a couple months ago, when Obama’s campaign moved some of the content on his campaign website around, pushing more of the policy details into PDFs rather than in the main HTML. In fact, the campaign has suggested just that, by saying that the policy section is being “retooled.” However, it should be a clear reminder to folks working on the website that people are watching every move extremely closely, and they’re not going to be able to make changes and hope no one notices.

Filed Under: barack obama, policy, website