Take Me Out to the Ballgame

As an expatriate St. Louisan living in Chicago, I usually have to get my Cards games through methods other than television. I am an mlb.tv subscriber, but sometimes it's not feasible for me to watch a video stream of the game, so I turn to one of the surprisingly detailed web game-casting applications. Seeing the play-by-play and stats updated live is great for my baseball side, but my interaction designer side is fascinated by how these applications create an engaging user experience. Let's talk about ESPN's GameCast first (MLB.com's Gameday to follow in a later post).

Right off the bat (pun intended), these applications have one huge obstacle to overcome -- there's a lot of downtime in a baseball game, and watching what is basically a real-time summary of results can get boring fast. GameCast tries to address this in a few ways, including what is one of my favorite design touches in recent history: whenever a ball is hit in play, the "field" graphic displays an animation of the ball flying to its landing point before announcing the result of the play. This helps create some tension similar to watching a real game, because the outcome of the play is unknown at first... if the play-by-play window just popped up "A Pujols doubled to left," that wouldn't be as fun!

Another way GameCast helps fill the pauses is by presenting a lot of contextual statistics. This interests me as a sabermetrically-inclined fan because even when a game's on TV, I'd love to see more information about the players than just average and home runs (OPS+, please!). In the web context, not only do these stats enrich my baseball experience, but they provide something to look at between pitches.

The stats-rich environment can be a bit busy, though, so the system uses animation to make changes to important areas of the screen more salient. Play-by-play results, player changes, and score changes are all accompanied by smooth sliding transitions and fade-ins, which help the user track what is happening on screen.

One area where I think GameCast falls a bit short, though, is in its strikezone display. It shows a grid for the strike zone and plots incoming pitches in different colors for strikes, balls, fouls, or "in play," but there isn't any information about the type of pitch that was thrown. To me, not knowing if a player swung through a 98-mph laser or a 70-mph hook takes away an important element of the battle between hitter and pitcher. Also, a quarrel I have with the simple square grid is that it's hard for me to visualize the handedness of the hitter. Even though a little label is shown in the left hand or right hand corner, I still have to think about it a lot, since it's not clear whether the user is looking from the pitcher's viewpoint or the catcher's.

Overall, I'm impressed with how engaging it can be to follow a game on GameCast. If you're a baseball fan that hasn't tried this (or Gameday) out yet, I'd definitely recommend it, especially if you're stuck in a computer lab, classroom, library, or any other place where watching a live video stream (and screaming "Cubs suck!") might get you disciplined.