Tonight I was looking at the Rangers official site, and noticed some Japanese lettering in the far upper left hand corner I don’t recall being there before. I went to the page, even though I knew I couldn’t read any of it. The picture on that page shouldn’t have surprised me, I guess. :)
I’ve been a fan of baseball videogames going all the way back to the Atari 2600 in 1977 when I played “Home Run” there. I’ve written about baseball videogames a few times over the years on this blog. I’ve been a fan of the MLB 2K baseball series for awhile now, going back to the original Xbox, and it’s previous nomenclature as “World Series Baseball”. While I enjoy the series, some of the minor nitpicks bother me. Like the screen grab I just took from the new trailer released today. They have the old Rangers Ballpark scoreboard in it. The thing has been live for all of last season – and they can’t update that? Sigh.
Still, the game looks good, and it’s not about a ballpark’s scoreboard as how a game rates, but I wish they’d pay a little closer attention to stuff like that.
A lot has been made about the center field position this year. It’s historically been an unstable one for the team, there’s not been many players in the last 20 years that have grabbed a hold of it, and kept it. Oh, good people have played there, but never one guy who was “THE MAN” out there.
The Rangers don’t want Josh Hamilton out there, they want him in left. Julio Borbon looked like he had a lead on it at the start of last season, but got hurt, and that fell apart. He’ll have a chance again this year, but he’s probably on his last chance here. There’s really no dominant guy out there at the moment – there’s a bunch of names that can be used out there. Craig Gentry, Leonys Martin, Josh Hamilton, and David Murphy just to name a few.
But I wonder if this is the last hurrah for Julio Borbon. There was some noise about trading him to the Nationals not too long ago, I guess that isn’t happening.
Nolan Ryan spoke on this yesterday during spring training, here’s some video of him talking.
mlb.com has become the destination for online baseball. I remember years ago when it started, mlb.com was originally owned by someone else, and the “Major League Baseball” site was at majorleaguebaseball.com. It was not very good. But that changed when MLBam came onboard, and they’ve been doing it for a few years now. it’s been refined into a video powerhouse. While the blackout rules still stink like my baby’s diaper genie, it is a great place to watch baseball video.
As the years have gone by, their archive of old video and clips and whatnot is huge. But they had one epic level fail. You couldn’t embed the video on other sites. It was like that for years and years. Today I happened to notice an “embed” option on video clips there. I was quite stunned. I tried it, and it worked great. It’s not just new video either – they’ve apparently allowed you to embed video from the past.
My test is of an old video segment that Gar Ryness, the Batting Stance Guy did at MLB Network HQ back in 2009 when Victor Rojas was still there. His impression of Andre Dawson gets me every time. While I’ve seen Gar do Hawk a few times, the one from this clip is still my favorite version of it. The interaction between Gar and the three MLB guys (Mitch Williams, Victor Rojas, & Harold Reynolds) was brilliant. So I present this clip below. Watch it, it’s funny! To MLB? What took you so long?
Apparently not all video works. While that video I mentioned has an embed code, you can’t actually embed it. This one below however, does work, and it’s Bud Selig talking about the game. Apparently older videos aren’t working. Whether that’s temporary or permanent, I don’t know.
When I was in Round Rock last March to see the Rangers play, one of my favorite memories was chanting “Douggy Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” whenever he’d be up. Turns out I won’t get to use that AC/DC joke in the majors anymore, as I just noticed he signed a minor league deal with the Angels earlier this month. Bummer.
