I was in New York last week, and got to make a call on MLBAM, a really smart customer of AWS, where I work. The first three letters in MLBAM mean baseball, of which I’m a devotee; and also a happy five-year subscribing customer of MLB.tv. So I was feeling sort of multi-level fannish. It was super-fun, and I got a cute picture.
MLB’s in a nice corner of SoHo and the offices are drop-dead cool, although I suspect the bobblehead-and-memorabilia density might be a bit much for some.
Anyhow, while you’re waiting in the lobby you can admire their fine selection of trophies, a lot of them tech-geek stuff. But there’s at least one Emmy, and then have a close look at the one in the middle.
The little plaque says:
NYC Metro Sports
2008 Co-Ed Softball
Division 3 Metro Champions
MLB.COM
There were at least two of those NYC-city championship trophies, and I suspect that’s pretty elite amateur-ball territory. What I’d call walking the talk.
A footnote, by the way: I’ve had MLB as a customer before, at Sun, pre-cloud. Sometime around the time they won that NYC trophy they took me out to an Oakland game. I got to sit in the press-box and it stands out in my memory because the visiting team was Seattle, and also in that box were the cheery and deranged Japanese press gaggle who followed Ichiro around to all his games, back then.
Anyhow, if you like baseball at all, I totally recommend subscribing to their service. It Just Works, and on just about every conceivable device with a screen or a speaker, with lots of polish and attention to detail.
It makes me happy that they’re using software that I helped write, and it’s a signal of their sophistication that they’re well into adopting stuff I was still coding late last year.
They’re generally just damn smart in the way they use the cloud, to the extent that they’re now doing Internet for a growing list of other sports.
In particular, I got a briefing on the machinery they’ve put together to get all that Statcast raw data out of the parks and into the Internet. It included a couple of jaw-droppers, and there might be a chance to pitch in with some stuff we’re just coding up right now.
Anyhow, thanks to ’em for hosting us, and I wish we’d scheduled another hour or two.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Tim (but not THE Tim) (May 01 2017, at 21:51)
MLB also gets kudos from me for using the iCalendar standard (RFC 5545) for team schedules _and_ for updating said files with the scores from completed games, in the SUBJECT: component so you don't always have to open the item to see the score. You can find the URL for a "downloadable" (their term) calendar for each team, subscribe to it in your calendar tool of choice, and keep up with your favorite team.
[link]