Sports

Multimedia multiplies viewing options in sports

In print | March 26, 2009

I usually use my column to complain about the sports media. This week, I’d like to integrate a little bit of my amazement with sports multimedia.

The ongoing march of Internet technology is yielding some incredible benefits for sports fans.
Take, for example, March Madness. In the days when you could only watch the tournament on a television, you were at the mercy of your local CBS affiliate regarding which games you would be able to see.

If you lived in the Philadelphia area, for instance, and Villanova was playing, your only choice was to watch their game, even if you had no interest in Villanova and there was a better game on elsewhere.
Not anymore. Now, you simply go to www.cbssportsline.com and pick which game you want to watch. There’s a bit of lag, but the video is extremely high quality, and you have the luxury of jumping around and watching only the tight games or the ones that affect your bracket most.
On a campus where most students don’t have ready access to a television, this online option may not just be a great way to follow the tournament — it may be the only way.

Oh, and it’s free. (And legal.)

Another fantastic sports multimedia option is MLB.com’s Gameday application. This allows you to keep careful track of any baseball game even if someone’s hogging the television or if you need to study. Gameday tracks every at-bat and every pitch in close-to-real time. It shows who’s on base, who’s pitching and who’s in the field, in addition to providing an up-to-date box score.

And when I say it “tracks” every pitch, I mean it. It doesn’t merely tell you if it was a ball or a strike, nor does it just show you where the pitch ended up. It shows you how it got there. Gameday is hooked up to camera systems that have been installed in every Major League park that track the ball from the pitcher’s hand to home plate. You can thus see how fast the pitch was moving and how much it was curving at any point during its flight.

This feature makes Gameday a boon even when you are watching the game on TV — when there’s a close pitch, rather than depending on the eyeball judgment of some extremely biased commentator, you can consult the precise measurements of these cameras.

The last great feature of Gameday is in-game highlights. While Gameday does not allow you to actually watch the game, it posts video of any big hits or defensive gems minutes after they happen, so you don’t even have to wait to see a highlight reel.

Again, free and legal.

These are just two shining examples of the great sports multimedia that we are able to access; highlight reels and player interviews are mere mouse clicks away. While all of that is great, it seems that these fantastic sports multimedia are part of the reason that traditional sports media are now so unsatisfying.

For instance, consider the role of newspapers’ game recaps, which give an account of key plays and quotes from key players. These recaps have basically become obsolete, since anyone with an Internet connection can see all the highlights (and many interviews) long before the newspaper is ever delivered.

Why wait until morning to read an article about a game when you can see more about it right now than 800 words and a box score could ever convey? Even SportsCenter, ESPN’s highlight show, has been pushed to the side, because these web sites (including ESPN.com, ironically) allow you to see highlights whenever you want, not based around some programming schedule.

This proliferation of information has placed a lot more pressure on sports sections’ commentary elements, since fewer and fewer people are relying on them for game coverage. And it’s this pressure, I believe, that is responsible for much of the simplistic columns filled with false anger that currently pollute so many sports pages.

Who’s going to open up a sports section nowadays if there’s no spitting diatribe about Alex Rodriguez or Pacman Jones?

There’s no place for nuance or sophistication because if your tagline doesn’t draw in readers (or viewers), they have no other reason to read your paper (or watch your channel), since highlights and interviews are available online and opinions can be found on dime-a-dozen sports blogs.

This is why ESPN devotes much of its television schedule to “experts” yelling at players and each other, and why sports columns are filled with overly harsh criticisms and underdeveloped arguments.
Traditional sports media outlets are being backed up against the wall, having lost much of their purpose to these newer, more powerful media.

Their fight for relevance now depends on their ability to be controversial and polarizing, since their ability to cover sports has been outstripped by ever-improving multimedia sources.

Josh is a sophomore. You can reach him at jabel1@swarthmore.edu.