Next week the TechGraphs team is kicking off the opening week of Major League Baseball with content devoted to the grand old game. We’ll feature apps, websites and all tech that will soak you in all that is baseball. There is some interesting stuff in store, so be sure to check back with us next week.

In the meantime, here’s a little something for you to enjoy as you count down the hours until your team’s first pitch.

Baseball Reference is offering its holy grail of baseball statistics, Play Index, free through April 15. Sign up here and enter the coupon code “analytics”. An active Baseball Reference account is needed to sign up.

Play Index features five main search functions: Season Finder, Game Finder, Split Finder, Streak Finder and Event Finder. There’s also a tool that spits out a list of batter versus pitcher results. Almost anything you ever wanted to know can be found at Play Index, if you know where to look.

Need some examples of the power of Play Index? Check out @AceballStats on Twitter.

#Dodgers Pedro Guerrero batted .310/.383/.520 (151 OPS+) in 947 games from 1980-87. Those are some damn good numbers.

— Ace of MLB Stats (@AceballStats) March 31, 2015

More Pedro Guerrero, please.

Baseball Reference also put together 34 searches you need to know that you can check out.

Let’s walk through a search together, you know, to get acquainted. Before I read the comments on the free trial page, I never knew I wanted to know the career leader in walk-off home runs. But now I’m obsessed. Commenter Richard Chester responded to the original inquiry from the comments with steps to reach the results.

1. Go to Event Finder -> Batting by Team.
2. The Search Form will have 2014 in the drop down, All Teams and Home Runs. Click on Get Report.
3. Here are some fun results. But this is only 2014 and home runs in general. Let’s specify this further. Click walk-off, which is in the middle, above the results. In the Search Form in the upper left, change the year to 1938, click the to? button and set the range up to 2014. Get the report.

As you can see, Jim Thome has the most career walk-off home runs in MLB history with 13. Frank Robinson and Mickey Mantle are right behind him with 12. Albert Pujols and David Ortiz lead active players with 11.

Roy Face, who pitched 16 seasons from 1953 to 1969 and went 18-1 in ’59 despite never starting a game, has allowed the most walk-off homers with 16.

I can litter this page with nuggets of data. Yankee Stadium has hosted the most walk-off dingers (145). May is the most common month that walk-off taters occur. And the Cleveland Indians lead all teams with 178 walk-off homers. The Los Angeles Dodgers are second with 170. Scroll down a little further on the page and every walk-off homer recorded from 1940 is chronicled, in order. Was there a walk-off in your honor on the day you were born?

Play Index subscriptions are $36 for one year.

This journey begins with the Soylent Athlete, an article in which I muse about the possibilities of an athlete benefitting from a liquid-meal diet. Specifically, we ask: Can an athlete better meet his or her fitness goals by using powder meal replacements?

After months of waiting, my first shipment of Soylent finally arrived. I have already reviewed 100% Food, which proved rather tasty. In fact, I continued to purchase it well after my review published.

Will Soylent fare as well? I’m guessing you’re one of those “headline reader” types, so I doubt this is a spoiler, but the answer is probably no.

Grades

Taste: 5
Texture: 6
Nutrients: 10
Packaging: 5
Ego Depletion: 5
Price: 7 ($3.06 per meal)

Rating: 6.3

Taste

Woof. I did not like Soylent. Imagine that dusty box on your back porch, the one holding your fake Christmas tree. Imagine ripping that weirdly crispy, tired cardboard into little pieces, adding water, and then blending it into a smooth, pleasing-looking but oddly tacky liquid. Now eat it.

While I complained about 100% Food’s lack of spicy options, I realize now that having great sweet options is a huge accomplishment. In order to eat Soylent — not necessarily enjoy, but just simply eat it — I had to add cocoa powder and sweeteners. Sometimes I just poured a hearty dose of chocolate sauce into the blend. All of this, obviously, eats away at the nutritional value of Soylent — y’know, the core reason for wanting to go on Soylent.

I do think the neutral, cardboardy taste might lend itself to spicy creations, but I was so worried about making a nasty batch, that I never tempted fate and added hot sauce. Why was I worried? Because I already had to throw out one big batch.

I added some fruit as per a suggestion in the neat-looking instruction manual. I took a helping of frozen mixed berries, blended them with some water, and then used the water fruit mix as the base for the Soylent powder. They blended well — which is to say, they chemically combined well — but tasted so awful and turned so ominously gray after 12 hours in the fridge that I couldn’t stomach a second meal of the now-gritty and still-not-sweet-enough Soylent/fruit mix.

I cannot imagine many standard customers, much less food-craving college athletes, satisfying themselves on a batch of Soylent. And that’s just with regards to the taste.

NOTE: Someone on the Soylent reddit page suggested adding powdered fruits to Soylent to help with the flavoring. Because new flavoring ideas are constantly appearing, and because I certainly didn’t try all possibilities, I completely reserve the right to at any time change my opinion and pretend like I always held this new opinion.

Texture

So if 100% Food was like a milkshake in its thickness, Soylent is like chocolate milk. It’s not totally watery, but it’s smooth and thick. Problem is: It’s very tacky. And maybe I’m not using that word correctly, but it’s the closest description I can find for something that feels kind of like how I imagine paint would feel in my mouth.

It’s dry, yet somehow still a liquid. It’s sticks to my mouth, but not in a good way. It’s really not great, but it’s not horrible either.

Nutrients

Fellow redditor Alex Clifford has been on Soylent for some time now. I suggest reading through his Soylent experiences at his beautifully designed blog, Red Dog Tales. He shared some of his data with me, and the results — while much more comprehensive — mirror what I was seeing from my top-down analysis of 100% Food. Basically this: The liquid diet resulted in better health.

Here’s the gist of his changes:

So the only two categories that changed significantly for Alex while on Soylent were Alanine Aminotransferase and Triglyceride, both of which moved from unhealthy to healthy ranges. His Lipemia Index went from 11 to 4, but anything in the 0 to 50 range is okay.

I personally never had any GI issues with soylent, and I hear this latest edition has improved that kind of stuff. So I can’t but give Soylent perfect marks on the nutrition side of things.

Packaging

At first, I thought the big plastic pouring container doodad was pretty awesome. It warned me to not over-tighten it, and I did my best to gently turn it shut. But sure enough, Soylent is everywhere. I got Soylent on my car seats. I go Soylent on my clothes. There’s a Soylent ring on the fridge shelf. I got Soylent all over my hands. I tried tightening the lid more, and I got more Soylent everywhere. And that doesn’t even include the powder form.

Basically, this is how the Powder Problem works: You fill the canister half with water, then add the powder (and good lord, add something with flavor). Shake. Then add more water (to fill the canister), and then shake again. By then of this process, the raw Soylent powder should have arrived at every level location in your immediate area. And no matter how carefully I poured the powder into the canister … poof!, powder everywhere.

I’m betting I’m just super spoiled having started with 100% Food, with its neat, self-contained single meal packaging. By just the process of making Soylent — the whole five minutes necessary to make all three of my day’s meals — felt like a drag.

It’s also worth mentioning here that Soylent took almost a half year to reach me. I believe they are getting more staff and upping production paces, but basically it’s not feasible if you’re looking for an immediate, short-term order.

Ego Depletion

It was very hard to eat Soylent for every meal. But that is almost certainly because the texture was unpleasant and, more importantly, I couldn’t find a flavor (or flavors) that I really liked. Because of it’s neutral base, though, the possibility for more flavor combos exist than with, say, 100% Food. So I’m totally open to changing this section.

Price

Since 100% Food raised its price, Soylent remains among the cheapest tiers. It’s around $3. That’s pretty dang close to grocery prices. A nice midpoint, perhaps, between McDonald’s and homemade — but sans the time cost for either those two alternatives.

Conclusions

Here’s what I think I’ve decided:

1. It’s not bad enough for me to say no to Soylent forever. I’ll keep trying Soylent.
2. Generally, I don’t like Soylent.
3. And I cannot imagine this being the liquid meal that enables healthier, easier student-athlete diets.

Until the next one, eat well, my friends!

Check out the Soylent subreddit for some great resources on liquid meal-replacements.

Some media companies seemingly redesign their site every year to keep up with the latest technology and best practices in the web content world. But ESPN is an anomaly in this regard, with ESPN’s product SVP Ryan Spoon telling VentureBeat, “Nothing says we need to redesign the site.” ESPN.com is one the highest trafficked websites in the history of the Internet, getting 2.3 million visitors per hour, yet somehow hasn’t redesigned their website for six years!

Again, ESPN.com is a behemoth. The site gets more traffic than CNN, Huffington Post, and BuzzFeed, with 22 million users per day. The staying power of the previous design should be lauded if only for surviving that long, or perhaps it simply shows the power of a media company like ESPN: “You like us so much you’d stare at this ugly site for eternity.”

The roll out of their redesign actually started months ago with the redesign of their mobile app, switching from the curiously named “SportsCenter” to simply “ESPN”. The basic navigation for the website, mobile app and iPad app is about the same now that they are responsively designed.

All three versions come with your favorite teams’ news on the left column (which you can set when you sign in), a news stream in the center, and an “ESPN Now” column on the right, which is a curated Twitter-like feed showing a mix of news, videos, and and Tweets from ESPN personalities that can be easily shared on social media.

So instead  of having a two different versions of the site, one for mobile and one for the web, every version scales to the size of each device providing a pretty uniform experience.

Sixty-one percent of ESPN’s 94 million users in the US view ESPN exclusively on mobile devices, with a good percentage of those users viewing the mobile web version. From Spoon’s piece about the redesign on Medium, it seems ESPN is hoping the new responsive design will be pull those mobile web users to their newly redesigned ESPN app.

ESPN seems to be doubling down on mobile content cards, which appear in the ” ESPN Now” column and can be distributed to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites with one click. This is the latest evolution in mobile content, with creators having less qualms about keeping people on their actual website and instead getting views on whatever platforms are getting eyeballs.

For example, we covered the launch of Snapchat Discover, which ESPN exclusively partnered with to provide content. The partnership has gone better than either side could have imagined, and while neither party would disclose numbers, a recent Winter X Games post logged close to 30 million views. Another new feature with ESPN’s redesign is infinite scroll, with unlimited stories popping up as you scroll down the page — another signal of the shift from the pageview economy mindset.

It is yet to be seen if the new redesign will drive users to ESPN’s new mobile app, but any redesign is welcome at this point, even if it merely draws a “meh” from sports fans. ESPN.com is finally in the 21st century with a responsively designed site, hopefully they won’t wait another six years to update this one.

The fact that you have to spend money to make money is true for all business models, including esports. South Korea, arguably the world leader in esports, is seeking to build on their strong history of supporting video gaming professionals at the player and developer level. According to The Korea Times, President Park Geun-hye promised 100 billion won — around $90 million — from the government for startup companies in the gaming community, the internet of things and financial technology.

According to Esports Earnings, South Korea has been particularly dominant in StarCraft: Brood War and StarCraft II. Players hailing from South Korea have collected over $5.9 million in tournament winnings from SC:BW compared to China’s second place of almost $87,000.

The gap in SCII is Korea dominating the scene to the tune of over $11 million versus Sweden’s coming in at a tick above $530,000.

In addition to being the top earnings in both iterations of StarCraft — so much so the gaming community calls it the “Korean scene” versus the “foreign scene” with foreign meaning every single country that isn’t South Korea — League of Legends has also been largely dominated by Koreans. China is relatively close in winnings, though it is still barely half of what Korean teams and players have raked in.

With so much money coming in and going out in Korean esports, it should come as no surprise there is a governing body, the Korean e-Sports Association, better known as KeSPA. From proposing a minimum salary for players, ensuring travel for Korean citizens to foreign events and vice versa, as well as partnering with game developers for feedback, KeSPA’s is an organization looking out for sponsors and players alike. While not perfect, KeSPA — and South Korea as a whole — has inarguably played a major role in bringing esports to its current level of popularity.

(Header image via Blizzard)

When Brady Aiken announced last week that he underwent Tommy John surgery to repair the torn UCL in his left arm, he didn’t Tweet it, he didn’t Instagram it and his agent didn’t issue a press release. Rather, the 2014 first overall pick in baseball’s first-year player draft used The Players’ Tribune to publish a column in his voice and to get in front of the story. A strange story filled with little facts, a lot of conjecture and an ending which seemingly screams “I told you so.” It’s the ending that Aiken and his agent want to change. So they did, with the help of Derek Jeter’s digital baby.

Jeter created The Players’ Tribune as a platform for “athletes and newsmakers to share information” as he’s quoted in the About section. On Thursday, David Ortiz used the outlet to complain that he’s the most tested player in baseball for substance abuse. It created enough of a buzz that the New York Times printed an article about the inner workings of the website and how the Ortiz story came about. Read the story if you want to know the details, as it’s a great article. Spoiler alert – the athletes don’t write the story themselves. Also, Santa Claus is your parents.

My interest in this “digital venture” of Jeter’s, as the Times called it, is the idea of controlling the narrative. Michael Wolff succinctly summed up this idea for USA Today:

Among the most prevalent and up-to-date phrases in business, politics and savvy American life is “controlling the narrative.”

That is, telling it your way, before someone else gets to tell it — and possibly tell it better — their way. And getting the public to relate to you on a more intimate level: In a social-media world, being impersonal is being out of it.

And when it comes to the Tribune, an athlete can do all these things with the cleanest image of any super star athlete of any time standing behind him or her. For those athletes with questionable credibility, the hope is Jeter’s iconic integrity can muffle the distractions one brings to a story and allow the reader to really hear the athlete’s voice.

Richard Sandomir’s Times piece echoes the sentiment:

The roster of athletes (and former players) featured on the site is lengthy and has included Jason Collins, Danica Patrick, Billie Jean King, Paul Pierce, Larry Sanders, Tyson Chandler, Eric LeGrand, Elena Delle Donne, Chris Long, Andrew McCutchen and Sue Bird. The accumulated message is that athletes, with help from a website overseen by an image-conscious superstar, can freely tell their stories and share their views as if they were credentialed writers. If they ultimately cannot bypass the ravenous news media in locker rooms or the digital hordes of social media, at least they can better set their own agenda.

When I first read that Aiken posted the news at the Tribune I rolled my eyes. Well, first, my story-idea radar perked up, but then I rolled my eyes.

Maybe I’m just being cynical. But how could this in any way keep the media and fans from slapping Jeff Luhnow and the Houston Astros on the back after Aiken and the Astros couldn’t agree to terms because the Astros feared the risk of Aiken’s almost UCL-less (or almost) elbow? Ludnow was crucified and the Astros public perception trampled after the general manager fumbled negotiations and ultimately lost fifth-round pick Jacob Nix as well. As Houston Chronicle reporter Evan Drellich, who has superbly covered the saga, tweeted last week “what Brady Aiken wrote should be taken as a press release.”

To my surprise, it’s kind of worked.

Know this – Aiken’s agent is Casey Close, the same as Jeter’s. Close constantly used the media to try and gain leverage over the Astros during negotiations last summer. Close voicerfously banged the “My client isn’t injured” drum, painted Ludnow as the villain and once the signing deadline expired, appeared to have won the public relations war.

Close recognized that any elbow injury to Aiken would erase everything. Ludnow and the Astros would come out as smart, right and justified. And Close would take the blame as to why Aiken didn’t sign a $5 million offer on the final day of negotiations (down from the $6.5 million initial offer, but up from the $3.1 million low-ball offer), missed a year of pitching development and a probable first-round slide in June’s 2015 draft.

So Close reaches out to his best client ever, Jeter, secures space for Aiken to break the news, and does it his way. Frank Sinatra surely would be proud.

Since last summer, a lot of people have wondered how I could have turned down a multi-million-dollar signing bonus after being picked first in the Draft. Now, I know they’ll probably be wondering about it again. I can honestly say I don’t regret not signing. It was a very difficult decision, but it also was an informed decision based on circumstances only a few people know the truth about. My family and I planned for all the possible outcomes. We weighed the pros and cons, talked with friends and mentors and doctors whose opinions we value and discussed it over a number of family dinners. This wasn’t a decision we made lightly.

Brady Aiken, The Players’ Tribune, March 26, 2015

Close and Aikens attempt to tackle the pending issues head on. First, they spell out why they don’t regret the decision not to sign. And in doing so, they jab the Astros with a quick left to the jaw. “The money wasn’t the only factor to consider,” Aiken wrote. “I wanted to play somewhere I felt comfortable, with a support system I felt would lay the groundwork for a successful and long career. Making sure I had that in place was worth the frustration of not being able to get on with my career sooner.”

Second, the Aiken camp has solely focused on preparing for the 2015 draft. Aiken said he was throwing harder and better, his workouts were his best and he was looking towards the future. The message is that Aiken was ready to be another top five pick in the draft. In fact, he may be a better pitcher than a year ago, despite not playing competitively.

And his final point, he’s just a human being. Just like the fans. He’s hit an obstacle, he’s going to work hard, and God willing, he’ll come out on top.

I already have a plan in place to rehab my arm, and I plan to come back better than ever. I also know God has a plan for me. Injuries are part of the job, but so is coming back. I can’t wait to get back on the mound. I can’t wait to compete again.

And to my surprise, this whole thing kind of worked. Unless I missed it, Houston hasn’t thrown the Astros and Luhnow a parade (which I would’ve done if I was in the GM’s seat). Astros blog The Crawfish Boxes chronicled tweets from media following the news. Drellich wrote the most pro-Astros tweet when he said there wasn’t any doubt that this validates the Astros concern. But then a day later he penned this lede: “If you think Brady Aiken’s Tommy John surgery proves the Astros right about the unsigned draft pick, you’re wrong.” Jim Callis of mlb.com took a more even, rational approach. This does add some credibility back to Luhnow, but no one “won” this.

To each side’s credit, since the Aiken story was published, Close and Luhnow have remained quiet. It’s the smart thing to do, to avoid us hating either one of them more. In the end, this is a story about a gifted teenager caught up in the middle of finances and an ugly negotiation played in the media who has suffered a setback and can’t fulfill his dream of pitching professionally for 16 more months. Aiken isn’t an asset, he’s a young man with a family, dreams and a face – not just a high-priced arm. And had Drellich or Ken Rosenthal or any other baseball reporter broke this story, I think this aspect of the story would’ve been lost.

Players and agents can’t control the media. How boring would that be? SO MANY CLICHES! And just because a player gets in front of their story, doesn’t mean everything is peaches. The media digs, it follows up and it talks to other people in the story, whereas the athlete is giving his or her view. And a good reporter can crush a poorly-handled article “written” by a player, thrashing the credibility they were hoping to gain.

But in this instance, it’s helped. The Players’ Tribune allowed us all to listen to Aiken’s voice first. He set the tone. And unless Close or Luhnow speak up to add to it, this is what the story is. While it may not be the exact ending Aiken and Close hoped for, it’s certainly far better than the one I envisioned — the one where Luhnow wakes up the next morning in a Houston mansion naked in a bath of champagne, monkeys smoking cigars and a “I told you so” tattoo on his bum.

I’ve worked in technology pretty much all my life, but my first job was on the support desk of a software company. It was consumer software, too, so anybody and everybody called in — professionals, novices, little kids, people who wanted to learn, people who wanted us to do their work for them, and people who didn’t understand how computer mice worked. It was challenging. But I think the hardest part was that our department didn’t have remote software. This meant that every time a person had a problem, they had to just explain it to us. We couldn’t see what was happening, so we had to trust what the person was saying was accurate. Everybody sees a computer screen differently. Very rarely did a customer see it in the same fashion I was used to seeing it.

When I published the first two parts of this Retrosheet series (Part 1 | Part 2), I did not monitor the comments well enough. I apologize for that. Some people had legitimate questions and I wasn’t there to answer them. I also learned that I was making all of you trust my explanations of things. I was making you see everything through my eyes, and some people got a little confused. This stuff happens. I’m hoping to fix that here.

I also promised a way for Mac people to have access to this, so I’m doing that as well. This article/video is for:

1. Mac (and Linux) users

2. Windows users who had trouble with the first two parts

Some caveats for Windows users looking to use this method:

1. The whole point of the first two parts was to show how the SQL files can get made using Chadwick. The idea being that you could grab the 2015 (and all subsequent season) data when that became available. The method mentioned in this article involves installing one flat file. That means that you’ll need to delete all the data and reload it for 2015 next season. I have no problem making this file for you folks, and will continue to do so as long as TechGraphs and I are around. It’s not a big deal, it’s just a different approach and I wanted to be transparent about that. Mac users basically have to do this method since the Chadwick tools aren’t available for OSX.

2. The video walks Mac users through installing and setting up a MySQL database. Your method differs, and it was explained in parts one and two linked above. I try to make it clear about when I’m dealing only with Mac users, but I wanted to give you a heads up on that.

Everyone using this method will need to download this file. Just save it to the desktop. The video will walk you through the rest.

You will also need these two lines of code. The video will tell you how to do it.

cd /usr/local/mysql/bin

./mysqladmin -u root password ‘password’

I will be monitoring the comments more closely, so let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, and good luck.

Soccer is a massive business. Not just club level play, but international events such as Euro events, Gold Cup, and of course, the World Cup are massively popular and thus massive money makers. Despite the popularity of soccer itself, FIFA has a deservedly wretched standing with many fans. It seems as though the governing body of international soccer has recognized this, and is making veiled attempts to reconcile with fans.

From the outcry of fans regarding Russia’s anti-gay laws while they prepare to host the 2018 World Cup to the thousands of migrant workers who have died building Qatar’s 2022 stadiums, let alone the various corruption charges, FIFA had some serious bridges to rebuild. Perhaps it was the FBI’s investigation to countries bidding for the 2022 World Cup or the drop of major sponsors in Emirates, Sony, Castrol Oil, Johnson and Johnson or Continental, but it appears as though FIFA is attempting to re-brand their image.

On January 29 of this year, Major League Soccer announced their sale of the popular KICKTV YouTube channel to London based Copa90. Last week Copa90 then sent out a press released regarding a joint partnership as they joined forced with Pitch International, just three days after Pitch International sent out a press release saying they partnered with FIFA. The FIFA/Pitch International pairing will consist of PI airing the new show FIFA Football. The show will launch in May and according to Niclas Ericson, FIFA director of television, the show is about all aspects of the game.

FIFA Football is about giving fans a real insight into the game, on and off the pitch. Football is a truly global game and there are so many great moments to celebrate and fascinating stories to share from around the world. We hope this show will help to inspire the next generation to play, engage in and enjoy the world’s most popular sport.

Aiming at the younger generations — not just as players but also fans — by acquiring and partnering with YouTube channels seems to be a savvy move by FIFA. The NFL catered to fans in January by putting sanctioned game clips and highlights on YouTube. Given the amount of heat put on the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell in the wake of several poorly-handled decisions, throwing service to fans, possibly in a bit of a distraction ploy, was an interesting tactic. Similarly for FIFA, their new partnerships do nothing to apologize for past (and present) missteps by soccer’s most influential organization, however reaching out to fans is at least a positive step for a company not well known for positive press.

(Header image via Facebook)

As incredible as GIF(V)s and HTML5 videos are at capturing highlights, sometimes video alone does not do a moment justice. When an occasion calls for audio and video, Vine has filled that niche very well. Until today all Vines were recorded in 480p, however now iOS devices are able to record in 720p. The blog states an Android app update will follow shortly, however no word on Windows devices just yet.

After partnering and covering the NBA so successfully — the NBA Vine account has over 381 million loops — with both regular season and All-Star game coverage, at least one league is embracing the technology. On the other hand, arguably the best soccer league in the world, the Premier League seems set against sharing goals and highlights. In an interview prior to the season, Dan Johnson, director of communications for the Premier League was quoted

“You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law. It’s a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we’re developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity. I know it sounds as if we’re killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property.”

Killjoys indeed. It is worth noting while the Vine official blog post does have a Premier League goal in it, Chelsea versus Crystal Palace, it is from the 2013 season and takes place before Johnson’s remarks.

Despite 720p not being particularly earth shattering on mobile devices these days, seeing Vine working to improve their overall user experience, is good for everyone, particularly sports and esports fans.

(Header image via Facebook)

Periscope and Meerkat are both apps that do pretty much the same thing. They allow a smartphone user to broadcast live video. People can already do that, but these two apps tap into the power of social media, mainly Twitter. Periscope was actually bought by Twitter before it even launched. These apps provide users a way to instantly share immediate video. Think Vine, but without time limits and in the moment. This can be used for frivolous things like people broadcasting themselves eating breakfast, or serious things like streaming video of an explosion in New York City. These apps are only a few days old, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them branch into sports very soon.

Meerkat and Periscope might be that perfect bridge between live and televised sports. At home, you get all the camera angles and slick replays and a comfy seat and cheaper beer. But there’s obviously something about the game that draws people to see it live. Nobody goes just to overpay for hotdogs. There’s an electricity at live games — there’s a feeling of being part of a shared experience. Teams sell expensive box seats to try and bring the feeling of the living room to the game. Meerkat and Periscope might be able to bring the feeling of the game to the living room — for free.

Say you have some kind of brain damage so you’re watching the Houston Astros on purpose. You’ve been watching the whole game on TV, and now the Astros have managed to mount a comeback in the ninth inning. George Springer is up to bat. You lean in a little closer to the TV when you get an alert on your phone. An Astros fan you follow on Twitter is at the game and is streaming the at-bat from the stands. You click. On TV, you can see the pitcher sweat. On your phone, you can hear the crowd roaring. On TV, you see Springer take a monster swing. On your phone, you see everyone in the stands rise to their feet, jumping and giving high fives. On TV, you see Springer round the bases. You can hear fireworks from both.

Meerkat and Periscope will not replace the feeling of being somewhere. But nothing will, so that’s not the point. These apps are trying to digitize shared experiences. I’m still not sure how or if it will work. But sports seem like the perfect arena. Baseball season is starting. NHL playoffs are around the corner. The Sweet Sixteen is in full swing. The testing space is there, Periscope and Meerkat just need the lab rats.

For tablets with data plans — and thus excluding Wi-Fi only variants — Compass Intelligence released numbers for the five largest wireless carriers from last year. More than 19 million tablets were sold with wireless activations in 2014 according to the information. For overall tablet numbers it should come as no surprise to see Verizon and AT&T lead the way, with 35.1% and 30.4% of the activations respectively. Sprint and T-Mobile are nearly tied, with U.S. Cellular and other companies rounding out the chart.

Tablets have certainly found more than just a niche fan base over the years and their sales as well as usage numbers have climbed. Sports leagues and networks have taken notice, particularly as the second screening experience grows more popular. Statista released a survey conducted about second screening in June of last year. A reported 44% of sports fans utilized another screen last year for live scores of other games currently being played, and 1-in-5 fans watched clips or highlights or was talking with a friend about the games. Somewhat surprisingly fewer than 1-in-7 claimed they utilized their screens for social networking or watching a separate live game.

Currently in the midst of March Madness, four games are slated today, however two games will overlap each other. Tip off times for 7:15 and 7:45 eastern as well as 9:45 and 10:17, thus ensuring those without multiple TV’s will be forced to either swap between channels or utilize a second screen. With baseball season just around the corner, games happen concurrently every day, though MLB.TV does allow watching four games at once with their picture-in-picture feature. Similarly, NFL Sunday Ticket allows the user to view eight games simultaneously

Presuming the tablet market continues to grow, something the trends suggest would be a safe assumption, count on seeing even more sports fans make the jump to second screening. Already broadcasts are inundated with suggested hashtags, plugs for apps and commercials displaying the best features of online subscriptions. Eventually sports broadcasts may reach the point where second screening is the norm.

(Header image via Digital Trends)