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Following your team from afar

by Matt Smith

Now you have picked your team, how do you follow them?

You could decide to quit your job, sell your house, pack your bags and go and live in your chosen city.

This is ever so slightly impractical for most of us though! We have to make do with following from a far. However, this is no barrier once you find your way.

As you are reading this blog, you won’t need any encouragement to use the Internet. God knows how British baseball fans survived before the advent of the cyberweb. Reading the results of games a couple of days old in tiny print at the back of the sports section in a paper doesn’t really cut it. We have the joys of MLB.com to provide all the information we need, and much more besides. Official sites for every team. Real time scoreboards. Endless supplies of stats. All the latest news stories. MLB Fastcasts. BaseballChannelTV. And of course the bundle of Gameday goodness that is MLB.TV, Gameday Audio and the actual Gameday service itself (more on these in a moment).

The other main MLB site is the MLB section at ESPN.com which is still a decent resource for results and match reports, but gradually more and more of the content is being given “Insider” status. I thought this just meant that you had to pay a subscription fee to see the online content. But checking through it for this post, the subscription is actually for the ESPN Insider magazine. Only by buying these magazines can you gain access to the “exclusive online content”. From a business point of view, this makes perfect sense. One of the big challenges all print media are beginning to face up to is how they can embrace the Internet whilst providing products which can make them money. So I understand the decision, but it is annoying not to be able to read the likes of Peter Gammons and Rob Neyer. As with anything, the choice is down to you. If you want it badly enough, then pay the money ($40, which is about £24, but you then have to pay extra for international delivery). If not, then you just have to accept it.

Anyway, these two sites cover most of the bases for general up-to-date baseball knowledge. From here, you need to find more information about your own team. First things first, bookmark your team’s official site on the MLB site. Then have a trawl via Google and discover some unofficial sites run by supporters of your side. There are several good sites for my team, the Oakland A’s, not least the indispensable Athletics Nation blogsite, Elephants in Oakland, and the A’s Future site for news of the minor league prospects. Sites like these allow you to feel like you are part of the community (or the Nation as they like to say in the U.S.). It sounds silly, but finding out things like the players’ nicknames brings you a bit closer to the team and makes you feel more like a genuine fan, rather than some outsider looking in from afar.

Once you’ve got all the background information in place, it’s time to focus on the games. Firstly, hoping that Five will show lots of your team’s games is being a tad optimistic (unless you support the Yankees or Boston). So, except for a few games here and there, you will have to turn to other avenues to keep a check on your team’s progress. You could subscribe to NASN if you have SKY or Cable. Again, whilst this increases the amount of games you can watch, you will still only get patchy coverage of your team. And for £14 a month (on top of the initial costs of having SKY or Cable), I think you need to enjoy most of the other sports they show to make it worth your while.

For complete coverage of your team, you need to head back to MLB.com. The best thing about MLB.com is that whatever your situation, they have something to suit your needs. If you don’t have Broadband and don’t want to spend any money, you can use their fantastic Gameday feature which allows you to track every single game, pitch by pitch, via constantly updating text and graphics. If you only want to spend a few pounds, you can subscribe to the Gameday Audio package. This will cost you about £9 for the entire season and you can listen to the home or away radio commentary for every single game. If you have Broadband and have £50 to spare then MLB.TV is for you. Quite simply, you get live coverage of over 2,400 games! If you can stretch to it, buying the All Access package for £60 gives you even better value for money as you get the TV and Radio feeds, plus condensed game footage. With all of these packages, you can also pay by month, or even buy individual games on MLB.TV.

The service they provide is fantastic, if not completely faultless. Regardless of your Broadband connection, the visual footage can break up at times. It’s pot luck really. Sometimes you have no problems whatsoever. Sometimes the picture breaks up a lot and you switch to the radio feed. Sometimes it has five minute fits here and there, but is generally fine. Apart from the odd occasion, the quality is good and you can enjoy watching every single game your team plays if you wish.

Having said that, watching every single game is often not really possible. The time zone difference gets in the way during the week for most teams. When games begin at 19:00 pacific time, first pitch is 3 o’clock in the morning in GB! This is the benefit of getting the All Access package so that you can watch highlights everyday. Generally, a lot of teams play at around 20:00 or 21:00 our time at the weekend, and many play early games on Thursday (often a 19:00 start GMT). So, even without forsaking sleep, you can normally catch 3 live games for your team every week (as well as enjoying many other games).

What really hits you when you start following a team though is how demanding the 162 game schedule really is. And that’s just for us fans! Teams will normally get one day off a week (Monday in most cases) but sometimes they can play for 15 days straight or more. Combine this schedule with the amount of travelling they do, and you end up taking the moans of footballers with an even bigger pinch of salt (more of a handful in fact).

One of the pleasures of this schedule is that there are very few days between the start of April and the start of October when you don’t have a game to think about. I think one of the common experiences shared by all British fans is the “first thing in the morning” score check. Waiting for your PC to boot up, and then hoping that the scoreline will be green rather than red, denoting a win for your team on their website (for the A’s at least).

Anyway, that gives you a brief idea of what life is like as a British fan. Despite the time zone difference, you can still enjoy every up and down over the course of the season, just like anyone else. And of course, throughout all of this you can start saving some money to go towards a trip to the States to really be part of the experience.

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