Why baseball should not be played in a circus tent

I went and bought myself a slick little screen recorder (iShowU) and so I can make little video clips once again. I just had to clip this lovely snippet of Josh Beckett trying to shag fly balls during BP. Luckily, the Twins will have a new ballpark next year and will be moving out of the trash bag lined circus tent.


video courtesy of nesn

Rock bottom..aka "Screaming at the customer service agent does not help."

Last week, I thought I had hit rock bottom with mlb.tv. The video was crap the whole game. It would play for 10-30 seconds and stall for 30 seconds. I tried every video setting. Whenever I changed the video settings, I got an error. Either the DVR controls were currently unavailable or the game itself was temporarily unavailable. I reset, restarted, and cycled. No change. It was annoying but I did get to watch it. Until the 3rd inning, when the video crashed and started me over at the beginning. Again and again and again. After I spent 3 hours watching 3 innings, I called customer service. I spent a few minutes on the line during which the problem cleared up. I got off the phone and was able to watch about 15 minutes before the problem came back. I got back on the phone and spent the better part of an hour politely changing my settings. Quick sidenote: the fellow knew NOTHING about macs. If he told me to right click one more time, I thought my head might explode. You'd think that the customer service folks would be trained on both systems or would put someone on the line who was versed in mine, but alas, I digress....When none of the troubleshooting 101 suggestions worked, the customer service did the unthinkable. He actually tried to watch the game!!! Shockingly enough he had the same problems. Sorry, it looks like it's just a bad feed. There is nothing you can do. That's about when I lost it and started yelling. I know it's uncool and it doesn't solve anything. I know it's not this fellow's fault that mlb.tv sucks so badly. That said, I can hardly blame myself. Fellow waited almost an hour to try the video himself. When he noticed it didn't work, he just said sorry, not I'll call over to to tech and make sure they are working on this. ERRRRRR...

Since then, I've had pretty much the same problem when watching the archived games. I can usually get a few innings in and then I have to switch browsers and/or reboot to get to the next inning. It's pretty uncool. Last night, the uncoolness was multiplied by the fact that the game started without HD, fullscreen, or audio. I mean, seriously, could you f#$# it up more? I guess I should be grateful for the tiny out of focus video in the middle of the screen. I mean it's not like the promised me anything. OH WAIT! They did promise me HD quality when I paid the extra money for the premium membership. Regardless, it wasn't long (an inning maybe?) before I was blessed with sound. Unfortunately, it was RKO's sound and it was about 30 seconds ahead of the game. Nothing like hearing "Swing and a miss" before the ball leaves the pitcher's hand. Nice. Eventually the NESN audio did come on. And then it disappeared again. And came back and disappeared. It was never on at the beginning of an inning and most innings it did reappear at some point. Most.

Of course, I had to reboot twice to make it through the game. The overall video quality was pretty choppy, like silverlight. Obviously the game should be in HD since I pay for that. However, in the circumstances that it isn't, full screen should be full screen. Last night's game had the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen to make the player widescreen. However, the game wasn't widescreen. So they put grey bars on the left and right sides of the screen, making the screen teeny tiny. Well maybe the teeny tiny-ness was supposed to distract me from the crappy quality.