Technology's Advancement

As I've already established before, I'm a big baseball fan. I've been following baseball since before we had a computer growing up. However, when we did get our first computer, complete with Internet accessibility, I realized the potential of following baseball online.

At first, the best you could do was look up box scores online, as well as the AP recap of the game. Though that was valuable, the best it did was give me the same exact information I could find in the paper the next morning. However, I was still thrilled that I could look back and forth for different days of box score information, when the paper only had the one day's box score. With the Internet, I didn't have to save a stack of newspapers to look back at how a player did a few days ago. I could just click and go.

Over time, that technology has evolved, and now sports is on the cutting edge of technology for the real-time sports fan. Here's what I can do now to follow baseball online as a Texas Rangers fan living in Atlanta:

-I can follow the GameTracker for today's game. That GameTracker is complete with pitch-by-pitch coverage in real time, with box scores and more. The most impressive part of GameTracker is the ability to use what Major League Baseball calls PitchFX. They have technology that can track the velocity of each pitch thrown, along with its vertical and horizontal movement, then the technology can tell which pitch was thrown, whether it be a fastball, curveball, slider, etc. You can interact with a PitchFX database, looking at the average velocity for pitches, how much pitches break, etc., then compare that information across different pitchers. All online. Sites such as FanGraphs make good money doing an excellent job interpreting these numbers.
-I can listen to the game while using GameTracker, all in synchronized real-time. For only $20 a year, I can listen to every single game for the entire season across the entire league, including archives of the games. If I missed a game earlier today, I can log in to the MLB.com Multimedia site, then listen to the game.
-Even better, I can watch every single game for the entire year using MLB.TV. For $100 a year, I can watch every single game of every single team if I wanted to, giving me the capability to go beyond simply watching SportsCenter, which is what I did as a kid to catch glimpses of other teams. I was a subscriber to MLB.TV Premium for the past few years, and though there are occasional glitches, the quality is constantly improving, and the capabilities of current media are simply amazing.

This is in addition to added coverage of minor leagues, blogs, and more baseball sites than ever before. The amount of information is amazing.

I use baseball as an example, only because it's the specific subject in which I use online media the most. It's a great example of how far things have come.

I'll be interested to see where technology goes from here for the home user, as it's hard to top what you can do with technology now in terms of a sports viewer from home.