Next time you’re in a bookstore or the supermarket, take a look at the magazine rack. If you like football, you won’t be disappointed.

As the Washington Post pointed out in a piece last week, the market for annual football preview magazines seems to be defying the notion that print is dead. The Post story counted more than 20 different football magazines – everything from general preview mags to those that specialize in fantasy football information.

It’s the fantasy football titles that really keep this thing going. For whatever reason (and I’ve got a few ideas) those of us who play fantasy sports still want to have something in print when it comes time to sit down for hours on end and pick the players who we’ll spend the next few months obsessing over. It makes all the sense in the world, and it makes no sense all at the same time. To wit:

• You want more than just a list of rankings when you’re picking your team. You want some analysis, and the more the better. Even if you’re doing your draft online, where you can sit and scan whatever Web sites you want the whole time, you still want that printed form to refer to. There’s something about it that lends credence to what’s written there.
• The publisher makes a difference. I usually stick with somebody I know when it comes time to buy a fantasy preview mag: Sporting News is one I like. Nice layout, easy to use. There are other big-name publishers like ESPN and Yahoo and many others that play here too. You go with the one you know and like, and you feel good about it. It gives you peace of mind.
• It’s a lot easier to find what you’re looking for when you’ve got a magazine. If you’re on the clock and running out of time, what do you trust more, waiting for a Web page to load, or being able to grab a mag and flip right to the section you’re looking for? I’ve got Verizon Fios, which is lightning fast, but I still want that magazine by my side.

Of course, this whole preview magazine business is also total nonsense. In order to be on the newsstands in late June – which is when some of these things start hitting the street, believe it or not – these mags go to press in early June. I bought the Fantasy Football Index mag, which included a confusing set of instructions about how to get updated information from their Web site — something about a place on their Web site that tells you a word on a certain page to enter. I felt like Ralphie with his Little Orphan Annie Secret Society decoder pin in A Christmas Story. I took a cursory look at their site and didn’t see how I’m supposed to access this fresher info. At least they didn’t try to sell me Ovaltine.

So these mags can’t help you when it comes to knowing who is injured, or which free agents haven’t yet signed with anyone. And that always leads to some levity during the draft when some schmuck who isn’t paying attention picks a guy who’s hurt or out of the league.

Be that as it may, publishers are still falling all over themselves to put these things out. And it stands to reason. An estimated 27 million mostly affluent people are playing fantasy sports. Some of us are in multiple leagues.

It’s a wonder any work gets done at all.

The Novarra Buzz ($999) For way less than you should expect to spend for technology this good, small maker bike Novarra packs a whole lot of tech into a small package. Sure pure road riders will sneer at the aluminum frame, toe baskets and thickish tires. But for bashing and crashing ’round town, it’s tough to beat the Buzz. Relatively forgiving geometry, full disc brakes and the comfy saddle will make road time a breeze.

GTR Series 3 ($999) For roughly the same dough as the Buzz, you can step up into and entry level legit road ride with the GTR. You get a hydroformed aluminum frame with a carbon fork, some nice shifters and gears, and  high-speed frame that can take you places fast. You will miss all the niceties of the Buzz, and a real road bike will be faster, but a thousand bucks you can get some serious riding done. Great bike for the money.

Kona WorldBike ($370) Ok I’m busted. No question, I am getting in touch with my inner tree hugger by going with Kona and their WorldBike. But for about what you would spend for a crap Wal-Mart bike, you get a legit riding machine that can take you, and a ton of junk, anyplace. You won’t mistake the WorldBike for something Contador would ride. But you’ll be surprised the performance of this 3 speed.

Now go have yourself some fun.

Here are a couple big sticks I dig for that “big-fly” feel.

Combat Virus Plague: ($300) If you can’t hit a monster slow-pitch home run with this sucker, it’s time to pick up another sport.

With a simply ridiculously large sweet spot, monster head and composite thin-wall construction, the fully balanced 30-ounce Virus Plague will give you that major league, fast bat head feel in a bat any amateur can swing. The graphics are over the top for this sports geek, but still for those looking for some  Sunday afternoon slow-pitch softball power, the Combat is the Virus to get.

DeMarini 2011 CF4: ($325) If you want to try to hit a baseball, this composite uber bat is the one to get.

DeMarini has pushed the boundaries of what a bat is with this sucker. With a mixed construction handle and head, it brings both unparalleled stick stiffness and head flexibility to maximize power and drive through each swing. The key with these bats is to keep it light to get the best bat speed. The models that may feel a little too light will get you the best swings.  For pure baseball power, DeMarini is setting the bar the CF4.

But our recent discussion about sports packages and interactive content has me doing some wishful thinking. MLB Extra Innings needs to add a player tracker function, just like the one DirecTV has for the NFL Sunday Ticket package. That’s really the frustrating part — they’ve got it for Sunday Ticket, so why not for baseball?

Of course, if I weren’t so addicted to following my fantasy teams, I wouldn’t need either the player tracker or the out-of-market packages. But I am addicted. And so are a lot of other people, which makes it such a no-brainer for the cable and satellite providers to add something like this.

The Sunday Ticket player tracker works well. It lets you input up to two fantasy starting lineups worth of players, and you get an on-screen message telling you every time one of your guys did something. The only problem is that by the time the message pops up, whatever your guy did has already happened and you missed it. The great thing about a baseball player tracker is that it could prompt you when your players come to bat, so you could switch the channel and watch them.

Some of the fantasy sports Web sites, like Yahoo and CBSSports.com have similar functionality built into their live scoring mechanisms. So if you keep an eye on your computer, you’ll know when your guys are hitting. Now, I’m all for the two-screen experience, but it would be cool to be able to follow my fantasy team without having to sit on the couch with the laptop or stare into a tiny cell phone screen.

So that is the Sports Tech Nihilist’s request: Give me more stat tracker.

Now, obviously this product is mostly just PR spin, since really all the code does is create a single frequency filter to remove the sound from the broadcasts. Still, Elgato, which makes video tools for Macs and PCs, should get some credit for coming with a simple way to de-Vuvuzela a broadcast.

I’m withholding judgement until we see if the thing works. Audio filtering can be tricky. But it probably does cut  the noise out a bit. The audio filter that fits into their software links from Elgato’s Web site, although, this link is not downloading quite right at this minute. Probably getting overloaded.

I thought it was a pretty cool idea, but one of the concerns I voiced turned out to be well-founded.

Over the weekend, Major League Baseball ran a free preview of its MLB.tv package via the PlayStation 3. It was the first chance I’ve had to check out live streaming content over a gaming console, and while I still think this method of content delivery has some promise, there are definite drawbacks to it as well.

The MLB.tv package definitely delivers an HD picture, but something about the image quality wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, but it just didn’t look as good as a true HD TV feed. Blum tells me that what I was noticing was the difference in the amount of signal compression between the feed delivered via the Web and the one delivered through my DirecTV dish. It was still a nice, bright image, and definitely watchable, but just not at the full clarity I’m used to.

On another note, I do think the package had better interactive features than Blum gave it credit for. You can rewind a game to any point, and as you’re rewinding, the line score pops up on the screen and it highlights what inning it is. So on Sunday, I missed the Pirates’ two-run rally in the eighth inning that led to their 5-3 win against Cleveland. I rewound the game until the bottom of the eighth was lit up in the line score and was able to stop it right there and watch what I wanted. There’s also an archive, so you can go back and watch games you missed, which is a nice perk. And that rewind function lets you sift through all those games and quickly find the action you’re looking for. One thing I didn’t see was a box score/stats display. That would be extremely useful.

Overall, I was fairly impressed, though I think the compression issue is something these packages will need to solve in order for them to really gain traction.

I sat down and watched a 3D TV demonstration — they had some soccer footage playing on a nice big flat panel set — and all I can tell you is I thought it sucked. For right now, 3D TV is a lot of hype over nothing.

First of all, you’re sitting there with those stupid-ass goggles on, and the fact is that while the effect is noticeable and is somewhat cool, you get over it in a hurry. What I saw didn’t look like an HD picture. It seemed like it was in significantly lower resolution than the typical HD picture I get on my TV at home. I’d much rather watch a pristine HD picture in 2D than the crapfest I watched in 3D in the demo.

It’s a cool idea. We all live for the day when everyone has a holodeck in their house and can interact with characters like they do on Star Trek. But from what I saw, this 3D TV thing adds no value. And the fact that the average consumer has no idea what it’s supposed to look like doesn’t help either.

For now, it just seems like a way for the TV makers to drive up prices on their sets by a few hundred dollars. I pass.

Late last week, word leaked out that last October, on the heels of a 99-loss season, the Pirates secretly gave one-year contract extensions to their manager and general manager. The manager and GM were instructed not disclose this news publicly, but this is the world. Nothing stays secret forever. FoxSports.com reported it, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the Pirates were in the midst of a 12-game losing streak, which they finally snapped over the weekend. The concealment of this info for so long created a firestorm in sports-crazy Pittsburgh.

Here’s the tech angle to this story: A 24-year old kid who dons a pierogi suit to run in the between-innings pierogi races at PNC Park in Pittsburgh posted a snide remark about this on his Facebook page. He dared question the practices of an organization that has become the laughingstock of pro sports. But his boss — the guy in charge of mascots and in-game entertainment for the Pirates — apparently didn’t see the humor in it. So the pierogi kid got canned — from a job that pays $25 a night.

We’ve seen athletes get in trouble for things posted on their Twitter or Facebook pages, but now it seems big brother is watching the mascots and perogi racing guys, too. And just like that, we now live in an America where a pierogi can’t speak his mind.

My heavens, some actual news out of a trade show. Shocker!

Yesterday, sports powerhouse ESPN announced, at the E3 video game confab in LA, that it will enter into a two-year, exclusive deal with Microsoft to stream ESPN3 — formerly ESPN360 — over the Xbox 360 via its premium subscription service. The move answers Sony’s similar hookup with Major League Baseball that streams its live Web  service via the PlayStation 3.

Let us step back and behold the stories here:

• We see, yet again, the raw power for sports to command premium subscription dollars in the otherwise barren content wasteland that is the Web. Sports deals, even bad ones (more on that in a sec) now force the hand of even the world’s bad-ass video game box makers. I can’t wait for, say, the NFL to take its content to Apple with an iTunes deal. The fact is that as the great Web 3.0 shakeout  continues, sports will clearly not only be a survivor, it will be a winner.
• How crappy a deal is this Microsoft? I will have to double check it when I actually see the service, but from here, all Microsoft is getting is the ESPN3 streaming service that’s already available via the Web. The only plus is that it’ll be on Microsoft’s platform and not a on a competitor’s. Think about that: Microsoft is paying for the mere right to reshow ESPN content on a gaming platform. It is getting nothing unique. Whooa!
• Can Microsoft make good on its promise of adding unique interactive experiences to sports? The real shocker in sports tech is how lame Sony’s efforts have been to add content to the MLB material available on the PS3. Sure it’s cool to get games on a gaming box, but I’ve been underwhelmed at what those games are like, given that the PS3 is one of the most advanced pieces of computer hardware on the market.  Can Microsoft bring down the digital Berlin Wall that separates traditional linear sports and its interactive cousins? Or will the two domains remain as separated as ever?

However this breaks, the next 18 months on the Xbox and PS3 will be some of the most interesting in sports technology. In many ways, we are getting a critical early glimpse at what the next era in sports will actually be.

Stay tuned. Or rather stay plugged in.

Contestants certainly won’t be facing any vuvuzelas in the audience. (For the uninitiated, those are those loud, annoying horns they sell at all the stadiums that make watching World Cup games sound like you’ve got a beehive in your living room).

Robot soccer is  played with 5-inch cylinders that are lucky to move at a walking pace. And the fan base is, how shall we say, limited. But still the CMDragons are adopting a “hate the game, not the playa’” vibe. Team management was quoted as saying there is no reason why CMDragons team should not flat out win. And the operation is relying on a secret algorithm that will give their bots the edge in scoring.  But all is not as it seems in the CMDragons camp: Last year, their bots went blind when a program pulled a Bill Buckner and crashed.

So plenty of work remains.