After the rain out tonight, I decided to surf MLB.TV and see what’s going on around the Majors. It got me to thinking how things have advanced since I was a kid. Every Major League game is readily available now of days. For 110 bucks, I can get any Major League baseball game on TV, and radio through the Internet and the quality is getting better and better. In fact there are multiple radio broadcasts for each game, the home and away broadcast including the Spanish broadcasts if available. The telecasts are usually from the home team unless there is no home telecast then you will see the away team’s transmission. Plus with the MLB.COM package you have the ability to replay any game from the last two seasons. There are also game highlights and other features with the package. I have the full blown package but there are cheaper ones including a 14.95 radio package. There is an 80 dollar TV package that only includes a 400k data stream. The picture is okay but not as good as the 800k or new 1.2MB high definition stream you get with the top of the line package.

There is other ways to get your baseball fix as well. Major League Extra Innings is a TV package that gives you 60 out of market games a week. This deal is available through Direct TV and many cable companies. If you have XM radio, you will receive the home team’s broadcast of every game. Even if you only have cable with no extras you will receive games on ESPN and ESPN2 a few nights a week including Sunday night, the Fox Saturday game of the week and this year, TBS has a Sunday game of the week too. Chicago super station WGN still shows up on a lot of cable lineups televising the Cubs and White Sox. Even without spending huge sums of money, there are more games available today than ever.  Yes in deed, how things have changed.

When I grew up, the Mets televised about 100 games which was a lot compared to most teams at the time. The Yankees televised about 90 games. In the New York area, we were lucky because both the Yankees and Mets televised home games as well as road games. Many teams during the 1960s, such as the Dodgers, did not put their home games on TV to drive up ticket sales. Even though many games were not televised, all games were on the radio. For those games, we would tune into the evening news. There you would see film highlights of the games that were shot from the press box. Video clips from the TV broadcast came much later. I wonder where all those films are now?

Back then, there was only one out of market game on TV a week, the NBC Game of the Week with Curt Gowdy, Joe Garagiola, and Tony Kubek. It was on every Saturday afternoon. Kubek ran around the stands much like today’s Kevin Burkhardt does for the Mets. Tony wore these huge headphones that had a big antenna and the NBC logo on the side. Those games were the only way we baseball fanatics got a chance to see competition between teams not involving New York clubs plus we got to see some of the big stars of the game. The less exposure was also why the All Star game was so much more popular then. It was another chance to see the greats of the game. Of course we got to see them when they played the Mets or the Yankees but it certainly wasn’t like today where you can see a game at the click of a mouse. By the way, Carlos Gomez just scored the winning run for the Twins off of Jonathan Papelbon who blew his second game in three tries for the Red Sox. Man, these Twins announcers are such homers.

Stats were another thing that was hard to come by. Again, there was no Internet to simply look up your favorite player’s numbers. You had to wait for the Sunday papers to see the list of player’s stats. And they were always a couple of days behind. There were baseball cards but of course the stats on the back were from previous seasons. In those days, baseball cards were purchased for the statistics and the pictures, not for some future investment.

Anyway, sometimes I take this technology today for granted. We would have lost our minds as kids if we could get our hands on such magic. Today’s kids are so use to instant access that what’s available today means nothing to them. It’s just amazing to me when I stop and think about it. Got to go, time to check out the west coast games.