Major League Baseball on The Internet

I write about baseball a lot on here. And you know what? I don't even really like it all that much. It's such a long hard slough of a season that it's hard to get excited about it.

But there is something to the sport that arouses the nerds. The sport spawned rotisserie leagues, Bill James and Moneyball.

Some lunatics even go to games and keep track of what is happening. They keep score, which entails writing down what is happening in front of them. But they don't write it in English. They fill in miniature versions of the field and code each position to a number.

And when I ask people why they do this, I usually get an answer like, "So I stay interested in the game."

Huh? So, you engage in a tedious task to keep yourself interested in a slow moving spectacle? Alright.

I still have a small town high school quarterback from 1996's attitude towards the internet and computers. Which is to say, I assume people that are interested in the web and computers are nerds.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that baseball is amongst the most progressive of the big sports in transmitting their sport through the internet. And it seems to have developed a strong web following.

Recently it switched it's internet content provider. Unfortunately, when baseball switched the online player it used to broadcast games, it made all the old downloads fans purchased obsolete. Baseball, apparently thought it could get away with this. It was wrong, you don't shake the big nerdy dog's cage.

One of the customers alerted Boing Boing, who posted a summary of the way the nerds were being jobbed by Major League Baseball.

"MLB no longer supports the DDS system" that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them "are no good. They will not work with the current system."

Great. Just effing great. ... As I told the supervisor, this is right in line with how wrong-headed and stupid and {inappropriate!} backwards MLB does everything.

I was told there is absolutely nothing MLB can do about these lost games. Plus, they said my purchases were all "one-time sales" and thus "there are no refunds."

Don't worry, the internet eventually fixed everything. The New York Times had this on their site, though it's branded through PaidContent.org.

But it turns out that MLBAM can something after all. I just got off the phone with MLBAM spokesman Matthew Gould, who said fans who purchased games with the now-broken licenses will be able to get every game replaced free of charge by versions with the right license.

So what's the moral? The internet is making it easier for the customer to be right-always. I'd say that's a good thing for both businesses and consumers. More television will be moving on to the web and it's nice that we'll have infrastructure in place to protect ourselves.

The other moral-- there is a baseball fan somewhere creating a c.d. library of every game he downloads on the internet.

I told you these people are nerds.