Posted 1:52 PM by Sean
As long as yesterday was a rainout, I'll take this opportunity to vent a little about one of my least favorite "improvements" in sports broadcasting of the past fifteen years: ever-present status indicators. You know what I mean - those little diamond replicas that everyone sticks in the corner of the screen to constantly display the balls, strikes, out, and men on base.

Now, don't get me wrong: I do think that these are occasionally useful. I'm not going to pretend that I don't sometimes get distracted and need to see what the count is. But having a giant corner of the screen snipped out of your view from first pitch to last is a huge waste of resources. I don't think it would be much of a hardship on people to have the icon flashed for a few seconds before every pitch, rather than keeping it there permanently.

For that matter, in this age of digital and HD TV, why couldn't information like that exist on a supplemental video channel? We already use supplemental audio channels for things like parallel broadcasts in Spanish, so what about a video layer that's accessible with a touch of the remote? Ideally, it would even be customizable - I rarely lose track of how many outs there are, for example, but I'd love to be able to keep track of a pitcher's pitch count.

If there are any engineers out there, get crackin' on that.