HellaFrank

MLB.com, you have officially dealt a blow to my productivity this baseball season, and I thank you for that.

For those of you not familiar with Gameday, it’s a play-by-play and pitch-by-pitch interface to follow baseball games. Included are a bunch of different stats and information about the game, and it’s always been my go-to place for game updates. My colleague and former sports reporter Corey Lewis tells me that the plays and pitches are updated manually by a person at every major league baseball game… I thought there would be robots or monkeys involved, but I guess not.

This year, Gameday received a huge overhaul and was improved drastically over last year. First, it’s in your main browser window and doesn’t require the opening of a separate new applet… Good start. Second, and my favorite, is the addition of video to the Gameday interface for the highlights — home runs, great defensive plays, etc. About 20-30 minutes after the play happened, a little play-button shows up next to the item in the play-by-play, you click it and it immediately shows you the highlight video without leaving Gameday. Pretty sweet.

Let’s just say if you don’t see too many play-buttons for your team, they’re probably not doing too well.

On the flip side, I also use Yahoo’s StatTracker to track — here goes — live fantasy baseball stats for my Yahoo league which includes a similar service to Gameday. We PAY for this service. For the past three years I’ve played fantasy baseball, not one change has been made to this boring and slow interface.

Seems to be a bit of a trend with Yahoo. I hear about new services they launch and companies they buy, but the never seem to innovate on their existing offerings or generate much mainstream usership for many of them. Aside from Yahoo Mail, Fantasy sports and Flickr, I can’t say there are a ton of Yahoo services that I use. Getting bought by Microsoft should help solve that lack of forward thinking and innovation…. Errr, maybe not.