Sports
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Baseball and DNA
The New York Times has a piece about MLB’s use of DNA testing to confirm identity, as fraud and falsifying documents have been common with prospects coming from Latin America.
The use of DNA for identity isn’t debated all-too-much, but there are major concerns over what else can be learned by DNA testing. What diseases a person may be genetically-disposed could affect who is signed (and for how long and how much).
It seems pretty obvious that a team would be hesitant to sign a player who may not stay healthy, until you think of this:
Mark Rothstein, a professor of bioethics at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, said: “The funny thing about this all is that the most famous baseball player with a genetic disorder was Lou Gehrig. Would they have signed him if they knew he was predisposed to A.L.S.?”
Who wants to be the scout to take a pass on the next Lou Gehrig?
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Bringing Wang’s ERA Down
After getting shelled the first three games of the season, Chien-Ming Wang has an ERA of 34.5 in just 6 innings. 23 earned runs will get you there.
Before the season started, Wang’s career ERA was 3.79. Now it’s 4.08. That’s over a 7% increase in 6 innings of work.
If Wang pitched at 3.79 the rest of the season, he’d wind up with an ERA of over 4.5.
Wang would need two complete game shutouts to average less than one run per inning, bringing his ERA below 9.
To bring his 2009 ERA down to his ERA going into the season Wang would need to pitch 48 2/3 innings of shutout ball. That’s 5 consecutive complete game shutouts and change.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Switch Hitter vs Switch Pitcher
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Semi-Private Eyes
Report: Clemens’ attorney hires private eyes to study McNamee
Roger Clemens’ lawyer has hired private investigators in an attempt to challenge the credibility of Brian McNamee, who has claimed to have injected Clemens with steroids, a lawyer familiar with the matter told The New York Times.
How effective can a private eye be if the whole world knows what they’re doing?
Thursday, October 11, 2007
So Confusing
The Boston… Yanks
I doubt they’d take that name today.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Sportsline Becomes CBS Sports
CBS Sportsline is now officially CBS Sports. The website had a mini-facelift to go along with the rebranding. It’s slightly more readable than before if nothing else.
CBS decided to rebrand in order to cross-brand between websites and television easier, at least that’s the explanation given on paidContent.org.
Normally it’s a smart move, and it may be here, but Sportsline is an established internet brand. It’s also been CBS Sportsline for a while. Recently, a friend of mine didn’t realize you could use “www.” and not “cbs.”. That says something about the strength of the name and the association between CBS and Sportsline.
However, CBS Sports makes it more of a big media company. Sportsline existed solely on the internet, despite being CBS Sportsline. CBS Sports is on tv. CBS Sports is the NFL, March Madness and the PGA, among other things.
What CBS Sports isn’t is its own channel. In that regard, it’s like NBC Sports on tv, but online CBS is clearly a top player, where NBC is not.
The appearance of having some form of independence was no doubt a plus. It’ll be interesting to see if the rename has any effect on the website’s reputation. paidContent.org cites SportsBusiness Daily (paid subscription required) mentioning that the company is concerned about the rebranding possibly harming fantasy sports operations.
Fox Sports is currently one of the sports website leaders, thanks in part to its contract with MSN, and also a network of local television channels. Fox also has its college stations, Fox Sports Español, Fox Soccer and the Speed Channel.
ABC Sports ceased to exist a few years ago. Instead, the network chose to brand its sports programming “ESPN on ABC”, capitalizing on the popularity of its cable channel’s brand.
The only non-television network sports website that rivals the top players in traffic is Yahoo! Sports. Yahoo! has cleaned up the site over the past year, as well as adding more original content. Yahoo!, like Sportsline, has leveraged its fantasy sports section to drive traffic to its content.
Friday, July 27, 2007
The Vanishing Vick
The allegations against Michael Vick aren’t just forcing him to miss out on football, but his name is being erased from all products baring his name. Nike suspended their contract (no pay) with Vick and Reebok stopped selling Vick jerseys.
Upper Deck also made an announcement that they were not going to include Vick cards in any future football card sets, and that they were stopping the sale of any Vick merchandise on their website, namely autographed memorabilia.
I wonder if any of this will actually put a premium on Vick products. He still has fans out there, and there are still those that will not condemn anyone until due process has taken place. Any new Vick product that gets pulled will be available in very limited supply, at least for now. Any possible demand could create an interesting market.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Best Fantasy Analysis You Can Get
Sportsline’s fantasy analysis update for Jorge Julio:
Julio is awful. Cut him in all leagues. He is no closer to being the Marlins’ closer than you or I.
Thanks to Mike for the tip.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Sports Sites Media Preferences
I took a visit to the NCAA site to watch some of today’s action live online.
To stream today’s games, they’re using Windows Media.
I was a bit confused as I remembered Sportsline using Real Media. I visited, and there it was.
However, I do remember there being another option, perhaps flash. So I checked Sportsline out on a computer without Real installed and there was nothing but a blank space.
Then I checked in Internet Explorer (I was using Firefox in both of my previous visits). There was the same video, this time in Windows Media format. Interesting.
Sportsline’s video help page has links to both players.
Perhaps a deal was cut with both Real and Microsoft, or perhaps they were using one format and have a limited deal with another.
ESPN uses Flash.
Fox Sports’ current partnership with Microsoft points me to something interesting. On the front of foxsports.com, they use Flash to deliver video. If you click “video home” below it you’ll see Fox Sports video player is “powered by MSN Video”. In Firefox MSN Video uses Flash and is labeled “beta” (oooh, must be 2.0), but is skinned to look like a common Windows Media Player skin. In IE there’s a Flash intro, but the player itself loses the “beta” label and uses Windows Media.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
ESPN Gets a Mini-Facelift
ESPN.com has restyled the top portion of the home page. I figured I’d give my initial (disclaimer: late-night) thoughts.
There’s a new double menu, with some 2.0-y offerings on top, and the standard leagues/sports menu on the bottom.
The area up top: logo, ad, search box, tv schedule have also been redone.
The gradient behind the top looks more subtle (even if it’s not, this is just my impression of it), and both menus are text on flat colors.
The old-style menus, which you can still see on the inner-pages, had the leagues/sports on a gradient and the submenus on a flat color with a bevel/border highlight on rollover.
The new yellow background for the submenus is a drastic change, but easy to read and the rollover has a nicer look than before.
The top is nice and neat. I have to admit I laughed a bit when I’m shown these are the “hottest searches”: Bracketology | Sports Guy | NFL Draft | TMQ | NBA rankings | NHL rankings
An interesting thing to note is the change in order for the leagues/sports.
Old: NFL, MLB, NBA, NASCAR, Autos, NHL, College, Golf, Soccer, Tennis
New: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, ESPNU, College FB, Men’s BB, Women’s BB, NASCAR, Autos, Golf, Soccer, Tennis, Boxing, Olympics
Fantasy has made a shift from far-right to far-left, in between ESPN (home) and NFL.
Consideration: the new menu stretches across the home page, designed for a 1024x768 resolution. The old menu, that I’m comparing from the inner pages, is designed for 800x600 resolution. The inner pages do have more conent to the right of it, but the menu is cut off there, so there is room for more menu choices on this new homepage design.
Some sports sites do change menu order depending on season, but the positioning is curious as the NHL is given better position than before and NASCAR, maing its return to ESPN, is pushed towards the right. Most menus are generally left to right in order of importance (at least for English pages). Sometimes important items are broken up, to give the items in between a better chance of being seen, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what ESPN is trying to do here or the NFL and MLB would be the goalposts of this menu.
ESPNU is the only ESPN brand that gets a prime menu position (most are under the home submenu). February is probably the best time for them to push the brand with fans anticipating March Madness. Yesterday was “Signing Day” for college football, something I didn’t know before. The lines between pro and college continue to blur.
Back to the new double menu, with the 2.0-y offerings. It starts off with MyESPN, something I’ve heard little of since the first release. Is anyone using this out there? The only plus for me right now would be to not have ESPN Motion autoplay.
Insider, the ESPN.com offerings behind a paywall is the second option.
ESPN 360 wants to launch a video player. It does. Out of curiousity, I hit “Video” and I get the same player, and it starts the same content. I realize ESPN wants people to bug their ISPs to sign deals for 360 content (as that’s how you get access to it), but I’m not sure if it’s really worth two menu options that lead to the same place.
Page 2 and SportsNation have become ESPN.com standards, and then after that is Blogs. But, they’re all “Insider Blogs”. You need to subscribe to Insider to read any of them. I’m guessing that’s making ESPN some nice coin, because they’re certainly not popular to link to on any of the blogs I read, large or small. I know revenue, not traffic, is the name of the game for ESPN, but I still wonder what the numbers would be if ESPN’s top reporters would have open blogs.
Podcenter is just what you’d think it would be.
After that is Video Games, a partnership between ESPN and 1UP. There’s a good amount of reviews, but not a lot of fresh content. It seems like it’s there as more of a promotional area, which is a good lead-in for the last few options: Travel, Contests, Shop.
The last link is actually to ESPN Deportes, which I haven’t visited in quite a while. It has a look very similar to the one ESPN.com had before this slight makeover.
The change does strike me as a “clean up”, and I think it works well. I hope ESPN takes this approach soon with all their pages.