Baseballhead:
Do Not Pass Go

Michael Cox

Welcome again to Baseballhead, where we continue our valiant efforts to make the world safe from boy-bands. We're not saying a word, but don't be surprised if O-Town is forced to cancel its tour due to broken kneecaps, alright?

First, I'd like to apologize for the bouncing e-mails you may have experienced recently. We're trying to have Rivals.com get our e-mail back on line, so bear with us until we can. Look on the bright side: at least we're not affiliated with Snowball.com...

The big news for baseball this week came from the Walt Disney Corp., who announced they would be sticking a fork in their Go.com portal and laying off everyone involved, ironically including the Pets.com sock puppet, who was just starting a new career working customer service phone bank.

Why is this important to Major League Baseball? Because at the exact same time that one of the largest, richest media conglomerates in the world is declaring that they can't make money with a portal, Bud Selig is poised to complete his dream of amalgamating all of the current team Web sites into a single entity. With dollar signs in his eyes, Selig is gambling that the traffic that has made the Yankee, Dodger and Mariner sites so popular will take mlb.com over the top and bring the Brewers fans other than those who want to hear Bob Uecker on RealAudio.

Of course, this is the same genius who thinks the players' union will finally go for that salary cap. This will not be pretty.

In fact, you can have a look at the carnage right now by going to the Twins or Pirates site - in fact, compare them! They look the same! Gone are those messy individual team personalities! Away with interesting features created on a whim by young, excited web gurus! Now each team home page contains a countdown until either Spring Training or Opening Day, a news headline, and a segmented column of boxes with other information.

I'm the first to say that since moving to Rivals.com our page design has left a lot to be desired, but MLB makes us look good.

Next I looked at the stat pages. For being entirely text-based and not incredibly detailed, these pages sure take a long time to load. In fact, checking the page code, a 25-man roster stat page is around 116k, and that's without adding in graphics! Even on my home DSL connection, I had time to grab a handful of Chocolate Nilla Wafers and scarf them down before I had a page to work with.

That's because they use a ton of Javascript for underlying functions: a counter that tells you how many players you've selected for comparison, another that underlines links when you roll over them, and possibly another that find out your name, SSN, and current bank balances. All that to show me as much as I can get from Yahoo Sports on a 12k page.

Now, there are a couple of cool features on the mlb.com stat pages. First, they're sortable. However, I'm not sure whether the sorting works correctly, because when I attempted to sort the Giants' roster by games played, the stats all disappeared. My guess is that they're still beta testing, like Netscape 6.

You can also compare up to five players side-by-side. This could come in handy when, for example, you want to make sure just one more time that Rey Ordonez really may not be that great a hitter. However, the stats are sortable only on a team-by-team basis - no direct comparisons of A-Rod vs. Jeter vs. Nomar - firmly placing this feature into the category of "Gimmicks Less Useful than the Random Shakespearian Insult Generator."

Attempting to sort the full-league stats off the MLB home page is no better - clicking a column header only sorts the 50 players on the current page. The blurb accompanying the new stats section declares that it's "not your parents' stat section. Perhaps that's because your parents' stats sorted correctly?

Going to the League Leaders page, I clicked on John Olerud's name and found that he's still a Met - and since the page itself claims it was updated on Friday, February 02, 2001 03:55 PM EST, it must be correct.

Player bio pages lean heavily on batting averages, including a gigantic "Current Average" number that would be almost humorous if it wasn't so sad. To their credit, though, you can get OBP and SLG numbers from the small text line below.

One of the best things MLB did in the past year is wean themselves off the TicketMaster teat and sign up with Tickets.com. However, a search for Giants tickets tells us only that there are "other ways to buy," but not exactly what those other ways might be (Lenny on the street corner by Pac Bell Park, perhaps?)

Finally, the team "shop," as expected, is not really up to 2001 shopping standards. Compare Amazon or CDNow and they way they make it easy to get more product info or put something in your cart, and you'll see that despite being around since 1995, MLB is still using the training wheels. Of course, you'll be paying ballpark prices for this stuff as well, and there's no "Sale" section.

Ironically, the team shop pages are the fastest-loading on the site.

Because I don't want to end on a down note, I saved the best feature of MLB's amalgamated team sites for last - because they're all the same, I only have to issue one letter grade this year. That grade is a big fat C-.

MLB, come back when you let your teams have their personalities. You're not the NFL, and up until now I've been glad for that. If you keep this kind of thing up, however, I might start looking into XFL season tickets.

about the author

Michael Cox is still working on his personal web site at http://www.cafemichael.com. He promises that his "innovations" will not include the <blink> tag, but you should perhaps make him promise that at mc@strikethree.com.