HellaFrank

Now that I live in New York, I am much more exposed to the fiasco that is the New York Yankees on a regular basis and it has become very clear that Hank Steinbrenner is not smart or tactful.

The Yankees stink right now, they’ve had some key injuries this year and now star pitcher Chien Ming Wang is out for ten weeks because he hurt himself running the bases, something AL pitchers rarely do, during interleague play. So what does Hank Steinbrenner do? He blames interleague play, the national league, and the fact that major league baseball still uses a rule “from the 1800s.” As told to the Associated Press:

“My only message is simple. The National League needs to join the 21st century,” Steinbrenner said in Tampa, Fla. “They need to grow up and join the 21st century.

“Am I (mad) about it? Yes,” Steinbrenner added. “I’ve got my pitchers running the bases, and one of them gets hurt. He’s going to be out. I don’t like that, and it’s about time they address it. That was a rule from the 1800s.”

Wang is an elite professional athlete, a baseball player, and if he’s capable of making contact with a 90 mile per hour fastball (and throwing a ball that fast), then I hope he knows how to run correctly — apparently not. I see teams of 40-year-old obese smokers in Central Park playing softball on a weekly basis that can run the bases better than that.

And what’s this stuff about the 1800s? As far as I know, the DH wasn’t instituted until 1973. Maybe the rule was created in the 1800s, but then again, so was that rule about three strikes and you’re out. Maybe we should get rid of that one too Hank, then you’re players may actually have a chance to get a hit every now and then?

Alright, I’m done… HellaFrank promises to be in a better mood next time!

Steve Jobs is kind of a modern day Pablo Escobar for technology. Employing a huge workforce to work undercover on secretive projects, then smuggle the product to be sold to serious addicts at high prices. Everyone knows he’s doing it but no one can infiltrate or take him down.

But, despite all of this secrecy, these days we pretty much know the big announcements we’re going to hear at Steve Jobs’ keynotes before they hapen. It’s always nice to hear the confirmations, but it’s the little things, the unexpected news, that gets me excited.

This time around, for me, it wasn’t even a product from Apple, but from MLB.com who historically likes to tempt baseball fans with awesome sounding products that end up sucking because of poor technology (i.e. Windows Media Player) or lack of ridiculous amounts of bandwidth.

But at the Apple keynote, they announced MLB At Bat, an iPhone application that not only lets you track baseball games live with detailed updates, but delivers video to your iPhone of the game’s highlights minutes after they happen.

What did you say? Derrek Lee just went yard in the bottom of the ninth to beat the Cardinals? Let’s have a look-see.

And even though MLB.com does not have a great history with providing good video, this year’s overhaul of Gameday (see my earlier post) gives me hope that this will actually work. Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider is right-on when he says that video on mobile phones needs to be delivers in “snacks” not huge meals. Let’s be honest, not many people want to watch full feature programming on a tiny screen, especially something as slow as baseball. So MLB At Bat is definitely taking the right approach.

So yes, thank you Steve for the new and improved iPhone, I’ll be purchasing one soon, but thank you even more MLB.com for ensuring I will never miss a Cubs highlight on this year’s epic road to the World Series.

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.

Ok, maybe there’s a little. If poker can be considered a sport, it’s safe to say that getting bad cards over and over can be attributed to a stroke of “bad luck” but, for the most part, no matter how “lucky” a feat in sports seems, chalking it up to luck just isn’t right. I wrote about this a bit on the LaunchSquad blog, but had some more thoughts I wanted to add here.

I started thinking about this idea when I saw the Jumpman23 commercial that ran during the NCAA basketball tournament that claims: There Are No Cinderellas.

I concur.

The term “Cinderella team” refers to an underdog who was fortunate enough, lucky enough, to beat its rivals and win the ultimate prize. Though, in sports, it’s usually a trophy of some sort, not a prince.

This idea of being fortunate and lucky just doesn’t fly with me though. As the commercial accurately shows, all of these “Cinderella” teams worked damn hard and fully prepared to get themselves in a position to win and accomplish the unexpected. To attribute any accomplishment of these teams to luck gives no credit to what they did to get themselves where they are.

So, I say let’s be done with the term Cinderella in sports. While I haven’t thought of a good replacement yet, I think in the interim the word BADASS should be used instead. Imagine Bob Costas or Jim Nantz saying something like:

“And now taking the floor is number 10 seeded Davidson Wildcats, the 2008 NCAA basketball tournament’s BADASS team.”

Much better than Cinderella. I like it

I missed you guys. Seriously, I did.

Today was the first real day of regular season major league baseball and whether the Cubs won or lost, opening day has always been a pretty exciting and hopeful day for me. Why? Well, this time of year the Cubs generally aren’t out of the playoffs yet, this year it’s a sign that warm weather is almost upon us (in my younger years, it meant school was coming to an end… Definitely no warm weather in San Francisco though), and somewhere in the April/May timeframe you can start a golf round at 4:00pm and still get 18 holes in.

So I figured that today would be most appropriate to officially announce that HellaFrank is back and excited to bring you some new and improved regular programming.

The initial idea behind HellaFrank was to document my move out to New York. It was fun and from what readers told me, entertaining to at least three of you (not including my parents, of course!).

Now, I’m shifting the focus to things I like writing about and feel are topics with which I have some level of expertise and passion. I love sports, but so do 100,000 other bloggers. I like technology, but so do a million other bloggers. I also love New York and plenty of people write about this amazing city on a regular basis.

What I’m getting at is HellaFrank will sit at the center of all three of these passions of mine. HellaFrank is the intersection of sports, technology and New York life… I will write about each of these topics and the convergence of them when possible. I’m excited to get rolling again and I hope that all of you will continue to read and comment and tell your friends!

So, what do you need to do to stay up to date on HellaFrank? Tattoo it on your arm, bookmark this page or subscribe to the RSS feed (the big red button on the right), but whatever you do, visit early and visit often — you won’t want to miss a post………

Wow, October 12 was my last blogpost, terrible. My apologies to those loyal HellaFrank readers. I spent this last weekend in Madison for a party a client was having. I went to a Badgers football game against Michigan — unbelievable football fans who know their football. They were getting upset about the backfield formations and offensive linemen forgetting to shift on an end-around… WHAT?!?! I thought I knew a lot about football, but this humbled me. Look at all the red, it’s insane! Literally every person wore red, it was awesome. Yet another experience that made we wish I went to a real college. Go UCSD surf team!

Some very important people came to New York this weekend… the 49ers, my friend Jared from San Francisco and my cousin Marc. I thought we should all get together at some point, so we decided to go to the 49ers game against the New York Giants.

It was fun to go to a new stadium and see New York sports fans at their finest. There was a guy in front of me that was literally pulling up the leg on his shorts, stomping his foot and squealing like a pig when the Giants returned a fumble for 72 yards. I wish I had video, because nothing I can write can do this guy justice.

Here’s a picture of me and Jared. If you look really closely in the background you can see the embarrassing score. As you may be able to tell, we may have had a drink or two too many last night:

Before I get into this post, I need to state my opinion (or is it now fact) that Matt Holliday did not touch home plate last night. If I were a Padres fan, I would be so angry, like this guy. And, I’m calling ‘roids on Matt Holliday’s forearms. Are you kidding me? They are as big as Barry Bonds’ human-growth-hormone-enlarged head!

Now the real story here, is that the game ended at 12:30 a.m. I keep finding myself awake well after midnight watching sporting events here — Monday Night Football, West Coast baseball. If you want to catch the beginning of Monday Night Football on the West Coast after work, you better leave early and hustle home. Here? You can leave late, have a nice dinner, take a little nap, feed the cat and then flip on the TV in time to catch Tony Kornheiser say his first annoying comment.

Everyone talks about the winter, the intense people and the traffic here, but to be honest, this whole latenight sports thing is gonna be the toughest one to get used to (unless I was a Yankees fan, which I’m not).

Wednesday and Thursday are the first Cubs games at 10 pm ET… So if you need to get in touch either day, please believe I’ll be up till at least 1 am!