Last night:

The lanes broke down the last game, and I just couldn't string strikes together. Still a nice series. The one non-strike in the second game was a 7-pin a little light in the pocket. The first two shots had been high, and the 4-7 fell late, so I moved in a board. Moved back half a board for the rest of the game. Dammit. So close.

There's no good reason for this. I have MLBEI (free preview), MLB.TV, and the game is on Fox. And I can't watch it.

Mets/Braves is only on Fox for the eastern half of the country. The west coast gets Dodgers/Giants. That makes sense, but there's no good reason the other game shouldn't be accessible to the other part of the country somehow. Fox fucking sucks. They have national games today, so EVERY game that might be on at the same time is on national blackout on MLB.TV, and not on MLBEI.

I just want to watch my damn Mets games, I don't care what channel it's on or about protecting local markets. I want to watch my team.

They need to fix this shit already.

The Mets started the season off right: with a three game sweep of the Cardinals. They outscored them 20-2 over the three games. Last night, John Maine allowed 1 hit through 7, the bullpen 1 hit through 2, Reyes homered, and Beltran homered twice for a 10-0 win. 159 games to go. Their next game is tomorrow at Atlanta, Oliver Perez against Mark Redman.

As far as fantasy baseball goes, my two teams are already in the cellar, as expected.

MLB.TV is working out nicely, and I upgraded to the premium service for a higher quality stream, and the MLB Mosaic application which I can't get to work in Linux. I'll have to figure out what to do with that. Also, it seems I will be able to get MLBEI on cable after all, but don't know if I will:

NEW YORK -- After negotiations that went into extra innings, baseball struck a deal to keep its "Extra Innings" package of out-of-market games on cable television.

Under pressure from Sen. John Kerry, baseball and iN Demand reached an agreement in principle Wednesday on a seven-year contract, a deal that likely will allow the sport's new TV network to be available in at least 40 million homes when it launches in 2009.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2826280

Go Mets!

I'm in Tucson, and we were out at dinner with the family, so I didn't get to watch all of opening day. The restaurant had a bar with a TV, and the game was on, so I watched parts of it, and followed the game from the dinner table on my Pearl otherwise. Glavine and the Mets took the opener from Carpenter and the Cardinals, 6-1. They have the best record in the majors, 1-0, but will be tied with a lot of teams for that record tomorrow. Glavine needs 9 more wins for 300.

Here's me and Evan watching the game. The situation: Bases loaded, 1 out, Rolen up for the Cards. Heilman relieves Joe Smith.

He induced a 4-6-3 doubleplay groundball.