Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
scott@scottlongonline.com
I'm a man of certain skills. There are a lot of things I want, but have no idea how to do them, so I'm just tossing 'em out there. If you know of something that does this, let me (and everyone know). If you start a business and make a million bucks, buy me dinner. Here's my list:
1. MAILBLOGGING
Not everyone wants to make their email stream public, but I'd like to take a lot of the questions I get and make them public. It would cut down on the repeat questions (hopefully) and maybe get people answers more quickly. It would need to be dead simple, opt-in, and have a clear path to making my private emails private since obviously not everything would go into the Mailstream.
2. AMERICAN IDOLECTION
Someone with some YouTube skillz needs to make a mashup of McCain and Obama speaking, then being praised or skewered by Randy, Paula, and Simon. Look, we know Randy would be telling Obama he's his dawg and that Paula would tell Palin that she looked great, but a Simon-McCain staredown? Please, please, please.
3. MLB AT BAT ON DESKTOP
I love MLB.tv, but I love the simplicity of MLB's iPhone program more. Give me a desktop version of the iPhone program on my desktop!
4. SOMEONE TO EXPLAIN THOSE MICROSOFT ADS
Seriously, didn't anyone realize Bill Gates doing the robot was a bad idea?
5. VOINTS
It's easy to explain WARP. It's wins, plain and simple. VORP is harder ... saying someone is 10 points of VORP better sounds like something you'd hear at Comicon, but not at the funny Kevin Smith session. How about voints? It sounds like points, but it's VORP points. What, you got something better?
6. A SNIPER. JEFFREY ROSS.
Seriously, I don't have to explain this, do I?
7. A SPONSOR TO TAKE OVER FROM AIG.
Oh wait, it's Manchester United that needs to replace the $15 million a year they'll lose now that AIG has been nationalized, not me. My mistake. Man U sucks,
8. CLOUDPOD
I need a way to store my songs in one place and listen to them in another place. Why should I be limited by the few gigabytes in my iPod if I can access them from the cloud? MobileMe has been a MobileMess so far, but if they make this a new feature, I'll consider my subscription worth it.
9. ALTERNATE BROADCAST
It's going to take a gutsy broadcaster to do it. MLB and TBS tried a little bit of this last year with their online coverage of the playoffs, but the web opens up bandwidth constraints. They're doing a great job with the video on NFL Sunday Night Football, but how about you let me hear what the crew in New York is saying while watching the game? How about you let Simmons and Schatz talk us through a game?
10. CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE TO GET HIS DUE
I don't feel bad that Buddy Guy is getting recognition, but Charlie Musselwhite is just as good, just as bad, and just as unique a talent. If John Mayer would bring him up on stage a couple times, people would remember him as the coolest white man on the planet and maybe the best blues harpist ever.
8 -- Mark Cuban on making this happen for TV/video. As I recall, there used to be dozens of comments here explaining why it couldn't work as Cuban describes.
http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save-internet-video/
9 -- I'm completely unconvinced random people, no matter how intelligent, could put together quality broadcasts. It's still best left to people who work their way through the current filtering processes. Expand the pool of potential color commentators beyond ex-jocks, sure. But in the immediate term, it'd be better to have an ambient sound only option, no voice audio at all, just the onscreen graphics. I think there is/was a British service that let fans do their own broadcasts of sporting events. Awful awful stuff ensued.
1) I'm asking more for a "click to blog" button on my mail application and then a side, RSS-like "mailstream" where it's like an infinite mailbag column.
8) Video's an order of magnitude tougher merely because of size. I think a lower quality song stream could work. iTunes can give me 30 second previews this way. I'm just saying check to see if I bought it, then allow it to play the whole song.
9) Not random people, just a choice. A second audio stream that's notably different than the first and not necessarily play by play. Some people like Greenberg and Golic, so why not (besides cost) have them do a secondary broadcast. Simmons and Schatz. Sciambi and Sheehan. Etc.
It's a shame too, because I'd love to see them have to sell some players to make up for the lost income.
5. It's runs, Will. Just...runs.
9. David's right that when non-pros try to do play-by-play, the results usually suck. The cool thing about the alternate broadcast is that you're not stuck with the typical p-b-p/color man dynamic--it can be more of a conversation, or an MST3K-type running commentary. Maybe it would get just as rote and tiresome as a standard broadcast can be over the long run, but given that I watch most games with the sound off, anyway, it'd be nice to have some choices.
At the bare minimum, I would hope for a broadcast for the children and boo yaas, and another for people who want in-depth talk of the game they're watching.
500 channels, and not a thing to watch!
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