Last week I almost created a post slamming MLB for crappy Gameday audio service. Some of my games weren’t coming up- some streams only allowed one station (one of the things I like about GDA is the option to listen to the home or away radio station). A visit to the support forums revealed that this was a widespread problem. MLB debuted a different media player this year. It had more Flash. Whether or not this had something to do with the problem is unknown. Folks were pissed- as was I, at the gaps in service that I had paid for from the mega-MLB empire. At this time it seems MLB has repaired the problem. I’ve been jockeying stations and games all week and all day with no glitching (I’m archiving minidiscs with one ear, and listening to games with the other today- ha ha), so let me get back to the fun stuff.

I mentioned in my last post about Gameday Audio that I’d eventually like to rate the streams. Different streams have vastly different volume levels, and different stations do different things between innings. One thing I tried and succeeded with was listening to 2 games at once. I couldn’t do this on one browser. I had to open up Safari and Firefox on my Mac, and was able to stream 2 games at once (while chewing gum, doing my archiving work, and blogging). Fox Sports Radio super-host JT The Brick picked the California Angels vs. The Chicago Cubs for this year’s World Series, and coincidentally WGN (Cubs) and KLAA (Angels) are so far the only stations I’ve logged that let nothing but ballpark crowd noise (no ads) play between innings. That will get you higher on my rating system for sure. Hearing the crowd and even hearing the stadium PA announcements uninterrupted is closest to the ‘real’ ballpark experience, and represents a true stream where the ads (although faraway locale ads can be a tad interesting) break the stream and complete silence (lowest on my rating system- I’m talking to you WTAM and WTMJ) makes you wonder if the stream has been lost ! (If you’re going to run silence between innings, why not just stream crowd noise?). All my fellow audio aesthetes are sure to agree.

And all you Mac-heads who use Dashboard widgets would do well with the Sports Fan Widget (the blue one) for scores, schedules and game progress. It’s way better than the ESPN one (which I observed was slow to update way too often), which I still do keep on my dashboard for NBA (haven’t figured out how to get 2 of the same widget up yet). I have a lot to learn about many things for sure- but I’m having fun doing it. Thanks for reading. – Your boy HANDCANCEL