MLB.TV on the Roku

Three and one-half and four. That is what I am going with as the record of the Pirates since I purchased a subscription to MLB.TV last Sunday afternoon. I am generously counting the Sunday game against the Royals as the one-half part of the win total since I had everything up and configured and running in time to watch the last couple of innings of that game. While it remains to be seen whether I will once again have tragically bought into the Pirates at their “52-week high” like last year, I am feeling much better after the weekend games against the Tribe and last night’s Twin’s game. How about El Toro?

When last seen, I was off to research and eventually buy a streaming digital video player to supplant the streaming capabilities of my Sony BDP-N460 (which doesn’t support MLB.TV). There are a ton of players in this space, but going in, my preconception was that this was a two-horse race between Apple TV and Roku. That preconception was validated by my research.  I won’t go into the boring details on the feeds and speeds - there are about a gazillion articles comparing the two product lines. The nutshell that I was able to ferret out was that:

Decisions

Saturday afternoon I was really jonesing for some Pirate’s baseball and came this close to an impulse buy of the MLB Extra Innings baseball package from my cable company, TWC. What can I say – it’s in the blood. My team is playing well, winning close games with pitching, defense, and a sprinkling of speed to offset the anemic sticks. The bullpen looks incredibly strong this year and the starting rotation a good bit deeper. Anything can happen, but I just don’t see a complete collapse occurring this year. The division is considerably weaker than last year’s edition – and the schedule, really front-loaded this year with strong teams, thins out a bit over the next couple of months.