It's the Future

I don't know about you but when I used to think about the year 2010, I imagined flying cars, space exploration of mars and of course, the ability to watch baseball on my mobile phone. While technology works on the first two, watching baseball has never been easier or more convenient. The unveiling of the new Apple iPad today was met with much fan fare. While the overall specs of the device reveal it to be merely an over sized iPhone, it falls short in comparison to the netbooks that have dominated sales in the recent months.

One application that will benefit greatly from the iPad is Major League Baseball's MLB.TV service. I've been subscribing to MLB.TV for three years now. Living in the Philadelphia market and being a Cleveland Indians fan leaves me without the ability to catch my Tribe more than a few times per season. With MLB.TV, I can watch every game live or on demand. I can choose between the home or away team broadcast, giving me the ability to choose between Cleveland's dynamic duo of broadcasters or catch the legendary voices of the opposing team, say the legendary Vin Scully when they happen to play the Dodgers. Being a college student leaves me away from my television and computer frequently, yet my desire to be watching live baseball never fails.

For a meager $100, I can watch all 162 games of my beloved Indians as well as several of their Spring Training match-ups. The service does not require you to choose one team exclusively either, so say there's the odd chance that a Yankees/Red Sox game isn't on a national broadcast, I just click on the NY and viola, baseball. While the iPhone gives you the convenience of baseball anytime, the size of the picture is quite limiting. Enter iPad. The 10'' screen is now more than adequate for watching a game. Granted the increased size poses transportation limits, it's nothing a small briefcase or shoulder bag won't eliminate. I can only imagine how the commute to work on buses and trains everywhere will become tremendously less excruciating.

As a baseball purist, I never want to be more than a click away from live game action. Today might not be remembered as monumental a day in baseball history as the day Lou Gehrig delivered his famous speech or the day Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier or the day Kerry Wood struck out 20 batters. But for baseball fans everywhere today has forever changed the way we'll remember those moments.