When you can't get to the ballpark

Trin here. Char's off at the Diamondbacks game, so I've been forced to take over blogging duties. Not a whole lot going on. The Sox are losing to the Yankees, the Orioles are tied with Tampa Bay. I just recently discovered that Nick Markakis is really hot. Not that he's a threat to Josh Beckett's position as Baseball Boyfriend. He's just nice to look at. Really nice.

Anyway. If you're like me, you get a little irritated that you don't live in New England and can't watch Red Sox games on television, and you're on the world's worst satellite internet connection and couldn't watch MLB.tv even if you could afford it. So you do the next best thing - those gamecast things that a couple different sites offer. They're absolutely nothing like watching a ballgame, but at least you can kind of get an idea what's going on. I know of two - one on Yahoo! and one on ESPN. After following most of the game on the Yahoo! thing, then getting frustrated because it was so freaking slow and switching to the ESPN one, it's clear that the ESPN Gamecast is far superior. For a while I had them both going, and Yahoo!'s Gameday was at least a pitch behind ESPN. It was a couple pitches behind real time, too, when compared with the Orioles game on my TV. The ESPN Gamecast is a little crowded; in addition to the play by play and the graphic of the field and players, it's got a chart of the strike zone, scrolling information about the batter at the bottom of the screen, and larger pictures. It's just more...graphic. And with animation! You can watch the ball being pitched and in play, and a little box pops up to show you the result of the play. I really don't need all that; reading the play by play text is enough for me. I gues maybe it's meant to make you feel a little more like you're at a ballgame? At any rate, I think it's slightly strange that even with all that extra stuff, ESPN still runs faster than Yahoo.

Anyway, long story short is that if you can't watch the game, check out ESPN Gamecast. It's like being at the ballpark...only not.