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.

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.

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.

Over the weekend, Google tossed up an oh-so-feeble FIFA World Cup coverage page. Their linked-directly-from-their-core-search-engine site consists of nothing more than custom graphic designs for one’s iGoogle account, game stats, info and video from FIFA.com, Google Maps links for local bars where you can go watch the games — like I need Google for that — and a Street View app, a la the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. You can click around the empty venues and streets and get a feel for the stadiums when nobody is around.

Honestly, Google needs to realize that sports are about exactly one thing: Games. And just like everybody else, they will have to line up and pay to have access to those games. The sooner this stumbling media company does that, the sooner they can get on with their sports ambitions.

All they’ve done is send  folks browser graphics and links to organizer content. Not even the most powerful Web brand on earth can add much value doing that.

This  isn’t any of that Web 2.0, free content nonsense, the service will cost you $25.  Bloomberg does not care about finding an audience or using content to build a brand. The company, after making a deal with MLB.com, has produced a leading sports data tool, and expect consumers  to pay for it.

Good for Micheal.

For sure MLB.com’s At Bat 2010 remains the gold standard for mobile sports. So Google is not critical to the company … yet. But it will be fascinating to see what opportunities MLB.com digs up using  new Google tools like Rave, Google Apps Marketplace and advances in Android.

If BAM continues it market dominance in sports technology, which they probably will, look for some styling new features for baseball apps, particularly for Google-based products. Yankees- Red Sox on Rave?! That’s an interesting idea

The Missourian is reporting that the University of Missouri football program is using a sophisticated computer program to track 414 racy, dangerous or otherwise unwanted terms on  Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms used by football players.

The service called UDiligence flags coaches when terms like doobie, cocaine, booze or similar words show up in the social sphere. The system, called reputation management for college athletes, accounts fo misspellings, grammatical mistakes and other potential syntactical oddities that hide the intent of the posts.

The story says Dan Hopkins, athletic director at the universitym gets say 10 messages a day alerting him of potential transgression online. There was no comment on whether players have been busted. UDiligence claims several dozen college clients. And to see the antics programs like these have to deal with, take quick test drive through the “What we find” page.

Ah to think this is where all those scholarships go.

Call me crazy, but there might just be a little bit o’ bettin’ goin’ on during this World Cup thang.

The BBC is reporting that food, booze and yes, betting is expected to flow like the Irish floods during this summer’s world wide soccer tourny.  Though Dan and I have no idea how one would actually place a bet online — since it is illegal here — it appears to us that the boost in gambling on soccer on the Web is set to break records not only in England but worldwide in June.

Already web gambling sites are setting up for the World Cup rush. Betinternet.com is hosting wagering on the 32 teams. There is the World Cup Spread Betting Blog. And garsh darn it, there are even traditional books on the topic: “The Essential World Cup Betting Guide for the 2010 World Cup” is one.

What are all these betting fools looking at? Probably the single largest pay day in gambling history. Figure a third of the world’s population, or something like 2.5 billion, will see these games. Let’s say maybe 10 percent of those place a $50 bet. That’s 250,000,000 (two hundred and fifty million) active wagerers who pony up $12,500,000 ,000 (12 billion 500 million) over the course of the month. That works out about the GDP of say, Ireland, Iceland or Jamaica. Figure 6 points go to bookies … You do the math.

In other words, a LOT of effin’ money. Stay tuned TSC, will be all over who’s up or down in this big fat story.

Last weekend, north of 32,000 bikers rode a bit more than 42 miles through New York’s five boroughs in the Five Borough Bike Tour. This annual rite of spring here in the Big Apple is a cyclist’s dream: The city closes everything from 6th Ave to the BQE to the Verrazono Bridge to car traffic so cyclists can take a leisurely ride through the city. And the event has never been more popular. The Tour sold out within 5 days from its Feb 1 on-sale date for the $50 registration fee. And the aftermarket for credentials was brisk: VIP passes were going for north of $200 online.

You got that right, there were Bike Tour scalpers.

But one area that was not hot for biking in New York was online. Despite having all the trappings of an instant sports network, a la Frisbee golf or Rollberderby, the Bike Tour was a nonevent in new media. Literally, nobody participated in various Bike Tour online events. And I mean NOBODY. The YouTube “Channel”  had no comments, 45 total subscribers, and get this, this year’s video clip was viewed all of 46 times! My niece’s Bat Mitzvah did better than that. Ouch.

The point here is, as any American hockey fans will tell you, a popular sport both in person and in the media is a delicate balance between the sport and the way it is covered. And the magic events that master that balance, like the NFL, are not found on trees.

The fact is, not matter how social, participatory, or popular some sports are, for some reasons they will never find a large audience either in old media or in new. And biking looks to be a perennial media loser.