Second Best

I shall not refer directly to the Pedro the Lion song, but please know that it's a great song on a truly amazing album.

No today I am second best because I am lazy and didn't bother to write down or talk about a thought I had the other day.

During this years post season baseball games on Fox I noticed something that I had never really thought about before. Fox has been showing the speed at which the ball leaves the pitchers hand the speed at which it crosses the plate. Now, without every thinking about this I knew that there was no way the ball was the same velocity out of the hand as it crossed the plate.* However, I never went to the next logical point. Which pitchers lose the least velocity on their pitches when they leave their hand? Which pitchers lose the most velocity when the pitch leaves the pitchers hand.

I think we can all agree that a fastball that stays as close to it's peak speed as possible when coming out of the hand is the better fast ball.** However, what about breaking ball that loses a ton of speed? Is that why Knuckle ball can be so hard to hit? Is that why a really good 12-6 curve will make you look silly?

What I would love to see is a list of pitchers who's fastballs hold their velocity best from release to home plate, and the start and end speeds of all their breaking pitches. Maybe we could learn something here. Sure I could do this research myself and become a baseball research rock star, but frankly I am to lazy to do such a thing. Someone please get on this.



* In case anyone didn't know the velocity of a pitcher is judged by how fast the ball is moving when it leaves his hand. Not when it crosses the plate.

**provided the fastball isn't to true

An Open Letter to Cycling.TV and Roku

Dear Roku and Cycling.tv if I have been monitoring your product for the last few months, and I have come to the conclusion that what your offering is exactly what people have been wanting forever. In short you have the ability to offer ala carte TV viewing. This is brilliant. Why clutter your house with tons of movies, most of which you will only watch once or twice, when you can simply stream them on demand from the internet. This is truly brilliant. You then went a step further and offered your services to MLB. I have been an MLB.tv subscriber for the past 4 years. I love the product and I think it gets better ever year. My only complaint has been that I am stuck watching the game on my computer instead of my TV. You came along and fixed that problem.

Now here is what I think you need to do next. You need to go after Cycling.tv. and possible hockey (I leave the hockey to someone else). See bicycle racing is a wildly popular sport, but has terrible coverage here in a America. If you want to see anything other then the Tour De France or perhaps a thirty minute recap of a race you have to get Cycling.tv. Now Cycling.tv is a great product, but it suffers the same problem as MLB.tv. Unless I am willing to get a TV tuner card, or do some other such gyrations, I am forced to watch on my computer.

The merger of your two products makes far to much since. The cycling community is generally speaking a somewhat affluent group of individuals with disposable income. This is your exact demographic.

You could even partner with Cycling.tv to create interactive content that goes with the races. People could have their training regime become part of the race watching experience. There are endless possibilities here.

thanks for your time