Home MLBBST Game Guides Opening day highlights

Opening day highlights

by Matt Smith

There is always a winner and a loser in MLB games, so not all fans can be happy after opening day, but it was a great day of baseball action.

A few of my personal highlights from watching MLB.tv yesterday:

  • Switching on to the Royals-Tigers game just in time to see Miguel Cabrera hit his first home run in a Detroit uniform.
  • Watching K.C.’s Alex Gordon hit back with a thunderous home run to right field.
  • Following Cleveland’s big inning against the White Sox and grimacing when Victor Martinez suffered what looked to be a serious leg injury (I could hear the cries of disconsolate Fantasy owners – thankfully it doesn’t appear to be a major injury after all).
  • Seeing Jim Thome launch his second home run of the game against the Tribe, proving that there’s still plenty of life in the veterans’ bat.
  • Enjoying the Marlin’s team of generally less-than household names being introduced in Miami, clearly delighted to be on a big league roster on Opening Day (the fighter plane flyover was a unusually late though).  Of course, then along came Johan Santana to ruin it for them thanks to his typical brilliance.
  • Finally, waking up to find lots of players on my FBUK fantasy team had a good opening day.  I’ll enjoy it now because it won’t last!

I’m sure you have your own favourite moments.  The Pirates win over the Braves looks like it was a stunner, as were the victories by the Brewers and the Nationals (the latter hitting five runs in the ninth inning against the Phillies to make it a 2-0 start to the season).  Surprise of the day was probably the Royals’ win over the much-fancied Tigers.  Non-surprise of the day was the Giants being shutout: they have virtually no offense on that roster and poor old Zito isn’t living up to his contract.

Sadly there are no early games in the U.S. today, meaning no evening games for us Brits to watch.  Still, there are plenty of highlights from yesterday to enjoy.

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4 comments

Mark Rowe April 1, 2008 - 11:18 pm

Hi Matt,

I enjoyed following the games on mlb tv but found a few frustrating problems. The picture was a little flaky at times on the Cubs game (my first choice game). It crashed completely just before Fukodome hit that amazing home run in the 9th (I just about caught it on the radio link!). I also found the total lack of graphics on the feed a big problem. I didn’t realise how much I relied on the pitch count in particular on screen until it was missing. I tried gameday but that was a couple of pitches in front of the tv pictures (even worse) and there seems no sign of the widget last night. I tried the yahoo gameday option but that was in front of the TV picture too. Anything I’m missing?

Cheers,
Mark.

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Matt Smith April 2, 2008 - 5:19 pm

Hi Mark

It’s been a frustrating start to the MLB.tv season, hasn’t it?!

One of the supposed positives of moving to Silverlight were the widgets, which have now disappeared. Over the past few seasons, you would occasionally get a game like the one you described, where there are no graphics. Silverlight was supposed to take care of that problem with the scorebar, but it rarely worked during Spring Training and at the moment it is gone completely.

Hopefully they can get these problems fixed fairly soon. It’s annoying that, in several respects, the service has seemingly gone backwards compared to last year.

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Tim April 2, 2008 - 11:53 pm

Hi Matt,

I tried out the new silverlight player on an archive game tonight (on normal MLBtv rather than Premium). I didn’t notice a whole lot of beneficial difference in the picture or the streaming and actually found it less user-friendly than the normal version, in that you couldn’t click on a half-inning in the line score to go to that section of the game (as you could last season). Using the counter button along the bottom to do this was not easy either as a slight move of it takes you further than you think it should in terms of moving you through the game.

Also, halfway through, the player just seemed to cut off the feed and leave a black screen saying ‘Loading’… and that was that.

As you say, there have been glitches and it could have just been a one-off. All-in-all MLBtv’s coverage has come a long way in the last few years and offers a lot when it works – both the free stuff on the main site and the good value (for the Brit anyway) game-viewing packages. I don’t follow other US sports so i don’t know if they do a similar thing but it seems to me MLB has led the way in online sports programming. It sometimes feels, though, that they are moving too fast with this – upgrading it each season but perhaps not having ironed out glitches first, rather than cementing the existing, working product and perfecting a new one behind-the-scenes.

MLBtv Mosaic (where you can watch a number of games in preview boxes on one screen and I think have a side bar following your chosen players’ live stats) is also a pretty adventurous idea but the few times I tried it early in its life, the player couldn’t handle all the info. I was using a low-spec laptop though which may have had something to do with it!

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Matt Smith April 3, 2008 - 7:10 am

Hi Tim

Thanks a lot for your comments, which I completely agree with. The basic product (allowing people to watch lots of games over the Internet) is what sells it for me: I don’t need 1.2MB footage that buffers a lot etc.

I think the issue is that MLB.com feels it needs to make these sort of changes to attract more U.S. fans who a) can already watch lots of games on HD TVs, and b) who are blacked out from a fair proportion of the 2,400+ games that are on offer to us.

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