Well, that's just sad

My baseball team (the one I support in the ABL, not one I play for) has recently put this in a news post:

"In the last series of the year, the Bandits are up against Canberra in the hopes of eliminating the Cavalry from the playoff race over the final weekend of the regular season."

We're at the bottom of the ladder, and so resigned to being there that our greatest hope is to make life miserable for some other team.

Not:  "hey, let's see if we can end with a win!" but rather: "hey, let's see if we can spoil Canberra's chances of making the playoffs!"

Which is something I find particularly depressing, as Canberra is the team I'm likely to be barracking for in the post season.

Do we even have a post season in Australia?

Anyway, buck up Brisbane Bandits.  And show a touch of sportsmanship.

Pitched

Those of you who have been regularly keeping up with my various online outpourings may have noticed I've become mildly obsessed with baseball in the last few months.

Having managed to get myself hooked by watching several games in a row while home during the day and in a state of mild delirium, I spent the rest of the regular season and the post season following the fortunes of my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates* and trying to understand what everyone was doing.

I'm still largely confused by most things.  I only recently discovered that, when two teams play each other for four games in a row, those games each count as individual games.  I thought the whole series of consecutive games was tied together somehow, but I could never work out how it worked.

However, I'm currently in a state of mild annoyance.  The MLB has wrapped up for the year, but I've discovered there's an Australian league I can follow.  It's called, funnily enough, the Australian Baseball League.

I've nominally opted to follow the Brisbane Bandits (they're the team for my state, and they have "Bandits" in their name - which is almost like "Pirates")...  but I haven't been able to watch a single second of game time.

The American games were screened live on free-to-air Australian TV, but the Australian league (actually co-owned by the MLB, so I don't know why they haven't finagled some sort of TV coverage) can't even manage a "replay" at 2am.  They have some sort of weird "live" screening happening on the internet - which is about as useful as a cheeseburger to a drowning elephant if you can't (or would rather not) arrange to be sitting at a computer for those exact two hours.

Computer viewing is for snippets of things and things you can pause.  It is for watching a five minute recap (which you stop halfway through for some random thing and then eventually remember to come back to later).  It is not for live sports coverage.

Live sports coverage is for TVs located somewhere in the vicinity of comfy furniture (like your lounge) or replenish-able beverages (like a bar/pub).

Why don't they have clips from the games, so that you can watch them later in a suitably asynchronous manner?  Why don't they convince Ten or SBS or something to screen the games on the TV (so that we could watch the live games in an appropriate manner, or tape them and watch them at a convenient time)?

It's 2013!  Surely they know that we a) don't have an attention span longer than 30 seconds when we sit at a computer and b) have no sense of real time?

Oh, well.  At least they have play-by-play recaps, so I can read the games.

Yes, I read baseball games.

That's not weird, is it?


*I've seen them play at least three times, and they have the word "Pirates" in their name.  That's good enough to make them my team, so I've been reading their games on a semi-regular basis.