Herts Baseball Club will be notching up another first this evening.  They will become the first British baseball team to start their own online TV channel.

The Herts Baseball Channel launches at 20.00 BST today with live coverage of the organization’s 2010 Hunlock Series draft. 

The Hunlock Series is the club’s end-of-season event where players from all of their teams are drafted for an intra-club competition.  Two years ago, an audio version of the draft was broadcast online and now they are moving up to a TV stream instead.

The idea that people will be able to listen to live broadcasts of British baseball club drafts is exciting enough, but it’s clear that this is only the beginning of Herts’ plans, as Club president Aspi Dimitrov explains:

“We now have the ability to televise live or on-demand talk shows, fan phone-ins, player interviews, game highlights, pre-game build up and post-game analysis, and this will have a very positive effect on all Herts Baseball operations.’ He added: ‘We can even stream live games from our own ballpark and this can be done by adopting the same methods used by ESPN and FOX when they show live MLB games.  For example, we can televise a Herts Falcons game live with 10 or more different cameras located in different parts of the ballpark and the various video feeds can be mixed to deliver coverage of the highest quality”

You certainly cannot fault Herts for a lack of ambition. 

For the foreseeable future, nothing will beat the traditional methods of local promotion for making people aware of baseball in this country and whether there is a team nearby.  However, the Internet does open up a whole world of opportunities that British baseball can take advantage of. 

Even a simple club website and Facebook entry can be helpful in recruiting new players.  Interactive features like the recent live scoring of the National Baseball Championships then serve a double purpose, firstly in providing another way for current fans to take an active interest in the domestic game regardless of their location, and secondly in giving out a professional, well-organized image to newcomers or potential new recruits.

The idea of streaming British baseball games live online might seem a bit fanciful, and I’m sure it is likely to be some way off in practice, but it shows what is possible.  There’s certainly nothing wrong in setting high goals and the possibility of action from a future NBC being streamed live online is surely something to get behind. 

If you know of any other innovative ideas being taken forward in British baseball, please let us know.

With the National Baseball Championships settled more than a week ago, there’s not a great deal of news to report from the British Baseball scene. 

In fact, last week’s column will probably be the last weekly full-length edition for 2010, but I’m sure I’ll do a round-up column or two later in the year, while adding in shorter posts to cover any news about offseason changes and 2011 plans.

Youth Baseball Championships

The main newsworthy event of the last seven days has been the youth championship qualifiers that were played over the 11-12 September weekend. 

As reported on the BBF website, London Mets Bronco and Herts All Stars qualified in the Bronco section, while Cobham Cougars and London Mets Pony made it through to the Pony section.  Full details of the games involving the Herts All Star team can be found on the Herts Baseball website.

Those four teams will compete alongside Cartmel Valley, Manchester Saints, Polecats Bronco and Polecats Pony in the National Youth Baseball Championships at the John Mills Ballpark in Halton ballpark this coming weekend.  The BBF will be using the GameChanger live scoring service, so the action can be followed as it happens or you can read all the stats once the games have been completed.

Good luck to all involved.

Hit the Pitch

Reading about the efforts to get youngsters playing baseball has reminded me to promote the developing ‘Hit the Pitch’ website produced by BaseballSoftballUK. 

The ‘Hit the Pitch’ programme is designed to offer an accessible and easy way to introduce people to baseball and softball:

“At the core of this project are easy to access, flexible pick-up sessions where new participants and those eager to get back into the game can pitch up and start playing – no strings attached.Although there are opportunities to play in clubs and leagues across the country, Hit the Pitch programmes have been set up to be flexible and easy to access. There are no club committees, no heavy membership fees and no long trips to away games, ideal for you and a group of friends or colleagues eager to have fun, get fit and try something new”.

The website as a whole will be a hub for the baseball/softball community and provide resources and information for anyone who wants to get involved in either sport.

BBB Update

One of my pre-Xmas offseason projects is to collect all this year’s BBB columns together in one volume, most likely a pdf (thanks to Joe for the idea).  I’ll be adding in some of the comments that many of you kindly contributed, where they gave updates and a bit more information about the topics covered in each column.  Hopefully I’ll be able to include some photos and additional commentary along the way as well.

It should make for quite a neat record of the 2010 season and I’ll post more details about it later in the year.