Spring Training has begun! Episode 3 of our A’s UK podcast looks at the A’s first Cactus League game and previews the upcoming schedule.
The ‘Bring Your A’s Game’ feature in this edition looks back at the first game played by the Oakland A’s, from 10 April 1968.
You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify and TuneIn or can listen directly using the media player below.
In Episode 2 of our new A’s UK podcast, I take a look at the latest news as the A’s pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training camp.
We’re now up and available on Apple, Spotify and TuneIn. If you use another podcast service, please let us know and we will look at adding a link to that service too. Alternatively, you can listen to the latest episode below:
This time of year is always exciting for baseball fans. Pitchers and catchers started to report to MLB Spring Training camps yesterday and British baseball teams are stepping up their pre-season training ahead of their 2020 campaigns.
We have even more reason to be excited this year, though, as Great Britain will be competing in a World Baseball Classic qualifier in Arizona at the end of March.
The only problem is, there still isn’t a huge amount of detail about the event barely a month before it is due to begin.
Although rumours of the qualifiers had been out there for a while, the event was only announced officially on 28 January. The published details confirmed that 12 teams would compete across two six-team tournaments to determine the final two qualifiers for the full 2021 WBC event. Both tournaments will be staged at the Kino Sports Complex in Tucson, Arizona.
Pool 1 takes place between 12-17 March and will consist of the following teams:
Pool 2, the important one for us, follows this up between 20-25 March:
Predicting international tournaments is always a challenge due to the fluid shape of the rosters from event to event and that’s especially the case for the WBC, where some Minor League prospects are released by their parent MLB team to compete.
The Great Britain programme has done an impressive job in recent years of creating an environment in which MLB teams trust them to provide a level of professionalism in how they will take care of the players. Liam Carroll’s team has benefited from some quality additions to the roster as a result in recent WBC qualifiers, not least shortstop Jazz Chisholm who was ranked by MLB Pipeline recently as the 66th best prospect in baseball.
Work will be going on behind the scenes to piece together the strongest group of Lions possible, mixing some MLB-affiliated talent with stalwarts of the Great Britain and domestic British baseball scene.
The full tournament format details can be found on MLB.com. Each pool will be comprised of a nine-game double elimination competition.
Great Britain’s first game, against the winner of Spain vs. New Zealand, will be on Saturday 21 March, although it is an evening game in Arizona and will actually start at 3.30 am for us. That’s 3.30 am on a Sunday though, which is supposed to be a day of rest and in this case can serve as a day of rest following an early start! The rest of the schedule will be determined by whether GB win that game or not.
The last two WBC qualifiers that Great Britain have been involved with have been streamed live for free on MLB.com, so hopefully that will be the same for these two events as they should provide some great action to liven up the Spring Training period.
Frustratingly, the official website still states that ticket details “will be available soon”. I’ve been contacted by several people over the past week or so, people in Arizona or those heading out there, eager to know more and having failed to receive information from other official sources. You do get the sense that this is all a bit ‘last minute’, which is a real shame considering how much these events mean to the baseball communities of the countries involved.
Fingers crossed that clarification will be forthcoming soon and, whether from Arizona or the UK, we can start planning how we can follow Great Britain’s progress.
Not content with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts, I’ve started a podcast for our Oakland A’s UK community. Episode 1 is now available, either from the podcast website at http://www.buzzsprout.com/865651 or using the nifty media player below ….
This article has been an annual tradition for many years, rounding up the MLB.TV offerings for UK-based fans. Yesterday’s announcement of the 2020 MLB.TV packages meant I needed to write up this year’s edition; however in truth, the excitement in doing so is not what it once was.
That’s not to suggest any reduction in my love for the service, or for baseball more widely. As I’ve written many times before, there are a lot of things I would give up if money was very tight before I even gave a thought to maybe cancelling my auto-renewal.
No, the issue here is that MLB.TV is so good that there is little scope for improvement.
Ten years ago this part of the pre-season was eagerly anticipated because we were waiting to find out what new features would be introduced. From promise of a potential HD-type quality, to Mosaic allowing you to watch multiple games at the same time, there was always something to get excited about. There were a few mis-steps along the way, such as the switch from Adobe Flash player to Microsoft Silverlight that soon gave way to HTML5, but generally the changes worked out for the better.
MLB Advanced Media were so successful in their development of their streaming capabilities that they become a lucrative world leader in the technology. For MLB.TV, they aced their refinement of the service over the first 10 years or so (2005 was the first year I bought it) so that, beyond technical tweaks behind the scenes and support for new connected devices, there isn’t much that they can add.
What do you want for your money? The ability to watch MLB games live or on-demand at a good video quality for a fair price. That’s exactly what we’ve had for years and that’s what we’re going to get in 2020. (And, just to be very clear, this is not a complaint!)
I’m sure there will be extras that could be introduced in the years ahead, especially in regard to incorporating StatCast data and graphics; however there’s nothing that the service really lacks. The biggest issue is the black-out rules in North America that block access to games depending on your location, often to a ridiculous extent. That situation has evolved slightly in recent years with some Regional Sports Networks allowing streaming access to the games if you are paying for their TV package, yet there is still plenty of way to go in knocking down what feels like an arcane policy.
It’s not a policy that applies to us, though, so we’ve always been able to access the full list of games, and that’s the case again in 2020.
This year, the US price has increased by $3 to $122. We have to add 20% VAT on to that so it works out at approximately £112.70 GBP, just a couple of pounds more expensive than last year.
It’s not yet entirely clear if the single-team package ($94, so approximately £86-£87) will be a North America-only product, but that’s been the (annoying) situation in recent years so I would assume so unless and until MLB officially confirms otherwise.
No great fanfare, no amazing new features, no complaints.
Just Spring Training games, every one of the 2,430 regular season games and all of the play-offs too live and on-demand for approximately £113.