Dear MLB.com,

As evidenced by your almost immediate response to the release of the iPhone on your mobile updates page for real-time info, stats and pitch-by-bitch play, some non-trivial number of your customers must have iPhones by now. Anyone who reads this site with any regularity would know that I waited in line to get an iPhone on the day it was released, and was pleased by your response. Even though most of the places I watch or check baseball have some sort of Wi-Fi, I still prefer the low-bandwidth version a large part of the time. However recently you have decided to put a banner ad across the top of most of these pages. This means that on any of the real-time game stat and pitch-by-bitch windows, the most important stats are now obfuscated as there is no longer enough real estate on the iPhone screen, and no real way to scale the image. This is pretty much me just whining however it has resulted in me not using that page very much anymore. If it is necessary to use ads at all, I am sure there is a more logical way to place that ad so the content doesn’t suffer.

Thank you,
acosta

Pretty much every news media outlet from paper to TV station to blogger to the president of these United States has had something to say about Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record recently (on the same day that the A-Rod hit into the 500-club no less). Time Magazine recently had an extremely poorly organized feature taking the reader through Bonds’s stats year-by-year from his rookie season in 1986 until 2007. Unfortunately you had to click 22 times to get from 1986 to 2007, which made it nearly possible to view the data in any meaningful way. Not only that, they had a very curious statistic up there called “Runs per at bat” and listed numbers from the 10s to the 20s. Now, as someone who watches baseball religiously, I would be absolutely impressed if Bonds had managed to score an average of 10s of runs per at bat. That would be quite remarkable, albeit impossible. Instead what they meant to have up there was “At bats per home run”. I have compiled their statistics into 3 graph’s that I think without question seal his fate as a complete and utter disgrace to the game. (Note that his batting average didn’t really correlate with weight or at bats per HR, which means he didn’t connect with the ball any better than he ever had. All it means is that when he did connect, it went further.) (more…)