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Let’s hit it!

 

But first, a word from our sponsors:

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Tickets. Phillies ticket prices are ridiculously low on Crossing Broad Tickets. Check the Red Sox series opening week. It’s amazing how far these have fallen in just a few years. In 2011, Red Sox opening week would’ve been around $120 for an average seat. Now? $40. Your win, I guess.

 

The roundup:

Nick Piccone caps a fantastic WrestleMania at The Philly Voice. Ronda Rousey takes down Triple H.

The Eagles’ ostensible quarterback almost quit football:

The kid had torn his left ACL for the second time in nine months. The kid was thinking about quitting football. The kid needed to remember who he was.

So Heupel, who had been Bradford’s quarterback coach at Oklahoma, delivered a pep talk that made this wild Eagles offseason possible. As Bradford had confessed to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in December, that second ACL tear had done more than wipe out his fifth season with the Rams. After winning the Heisman in 2008, after the Rams had selected him with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 draft, Bradford had begun doubting his future in the NFL.

If you’re keeping score at home, the Eagles now have two quarterbacks who wanted to quit the sport at times over the past 15 months. Awesome?

Periscope and Meerkat are really boring, so far:

What is it about us that makes us do weird things on new apps? Just two days into the launch of the new live streaming app Periscope and showing off the contents of our fridge to thousands of strangers around the Internet is a thing. The hashtags #fridgeview and #showusyourfridge regularly pop up during live streaming events on Periscope.

This is a phenomenon that does not seem to exist on Periscope’s live streaming rival Meerkat, but the two share another common theme – streams of the mundane. I watched a guy show off his pineapple in the early days of Meerkat (meaning a couple of weeks ago). Over 700 people tuned in as this guy described a pineapple on his counter for several minutes. I have no idea why that many people were on the stream. Perhaps they were like me – they were waiting for there to be more to it than that.

I wouldn’t worry about it. Twitter started off the same way, with users posting status updates throughout the day. Facebook started as a people listing. Snapchat was dick pics. Pinterest was still is women posting pictures of food. People will figure out how to use Periscope and Meerkat before long, and during a breaking news events, it’s going to be invaluable. Both need to default to videos being saved though– you don’t want people having to decide between streaming or recording a video. It should be both. And just last night Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was live-streaming from ringside at WrestleMania. My idea? Seth Rollins should’ve periscoped his run to the ring for the title belt. It would’ve been the most San Francisco thing ever and one of the most unique possible uses of Periscope.

How ESPN is delving into the world of streaming.

A-Rod’s acting like a real person, but he still trots the bases like a jackass:

Showalter moved on to other topics but then circled back a few minutes later to Rodriguez, whom he managed for a season in Texas, 2003, when Rodriguez won the first of his three American League Most Valuable Player awards.

“You know what’s slowed down?” Showalter asked. “The way he runs around the bases.”

With opening day a week away, it was an example of how Rodriguez, as he returns from a one-year suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs, figures to maintain his ability to get under the skin of others, this time with a home run trot that Showalter thought had carried even more preening than usual.

Tim Cook goes after Indiana with an op-ed in the Washington Post.

Jon Stewart’s successor will be.

Aaron Rodgers and Olivia Munn are the new power couple.

Tom Brady is having a great vacation: cliff-diving, basketball with Michael Jordan.

Ref staring at reporter butt.

The hell, Keith?

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Waiting until voting closed in PSMFO64… nice.

Expect a steady drumbeat of press for BOB in the coming weeks. Here’s a Delco Times article on Rob Ellis:

“We’re looking to be interactive. Social media will be a big part of our format. We won’t be taking telephone calls, but we will be looking at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other sources and reporting what people are communicating. No specific time has been set per hour to go to social media, but we will set time aside for a digest of viewer and fan comments.

“In addition to giving our opinions, we will delve into subjects besides sports. We’ll talk about popular culture and what is going on in people’s minds. If the world is immersed in arguing whether a dress is white and gold or blue and black, we’ll be on it. We’ll also interview guests from movies and TV. I look forward to that.

“One of the greats about broadcasting from the Wells Fargo Center is the number of people, including sports figures, who walk in here on a daily basis. We’ll have access to many of them. We’ll also have the resources of NBC going for us.”

Few thoughts, to each of those grafs:

1) All for the social media thing. But I have this feeling they’re going to use social media the way so many other mainstream programs use social media: the wrong way. Airing viewer comments and feedback, or worse, buzz, dumbs down social media to a simple sounding board that provides easy, anecdotal quotes. That’s a part of it, sure, but there’s actual reporting and stories that can come from it. It’s just a part of the world now, not some newfangled thing only good for pictures of cats and snow.

2) Talking about memes on a show geared toward sports fans sounds awful.

3) NBC is all about morning shows. Like sports, but to a lesser degree, they’re still watched live and provide room for ample sponsorships. No doubt we’ll be hearing buzz for BOB with in-game spots during Phils season.

It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out. Haven’t seen a sports thing like this since Cold Pizza… which became First Take.

 

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