Comments on No Longer Will I Be the Only Grown Man at Safeco with a DS

At one of the few games I attended last year, I actually brought my DS along to explore this functionality. Unfortunately(?), all of the kiosks I would presumably have purchased this service from were padlocked and pushed aside under the stairwells. I figured the demand must not have been there. I guess I'll try again this year at the requisite corporate game day.

The video is much improved this year. They upgraded the codec or something.

Can you get beaned in the stomach? I thought it always referred to getting struck in the face or head.

Are there any real baseball fans in Seattle? The game here seems to all about video hydroplane races and hat tricks, dancing grounds crews, endless trips for food, idiots trying to start the goddamn wave, asshats talking on their cellphones to their friends in another section -- and now wi-fi entertainment. It's damned embarrassing to be a Mariners fan.

I love the goddamn wave.

pro sports. yay.

Professor Layton > Mariners info

I used this at the one Safeco game I've ever been to, which was last year (when my hometown Sox kicked the M's asses). I couldn't figure out how to get an instant replay, it seemed like I was just getting a 5-second delayed feed of the same camera they use on the jumbotron.

There were lots of people playing the crappy online games, though. The theory in my group was that this service is mostly used by people who don't really care for baseball, but went with someone else who really wanted to go.

I love the wave too, and I've been a baseball fan for forty years. It's a GAME, people, not a war like football. You're supposed to have FUN. If you're not laughing at least part of the time you're doing it wrong.

I don't know that I saw a game last season, but I did notice people using their DSes this way at a game a week ago. Here I was thinking it was a great sort of underground PR thing that Nintendo was doing to promote their DS wireless and also their baseball team for kids, and I had no idea that previously, you had to pay to get this feature. Good for Nintendo to make this a free cool extra.

As for @4, the distracting stuff isn't unique to Seattle and though this clever use of wireless networking on the ubiquitous game systems seems totally in keeping with the region's love of technology and games (not to mention that Nintendo owns our team and it's a nice way for them to give back a bit for all we pay for Safeco).

@8, I hope you're talking about the White Sox there.

Tomcat - I hate all the distraction shit, too. Excepting highlights, I skip all the other crap. The players warming up between innings is entertainment enough. I pay attention the whole game, even though I have no chance of getting hit by a line-drive foul in my seats.

If you want to minimize the crap and maximize the fandom, go to weeknight games against non-marquee teams. Smaller crowds are inevitably more fan dense.