Bob and i gave a talk last year at Microsoft's MIX conference to introduce our partnership on all things Silverlight, and in his introduction, we put together a few quick slides highlighting how MLB.TV has changed over the years. You can watch the video here. The slides are at ~2:50 in. It reminded me of how much we accomplished during the season last year, and over the course of the off-season thats now wrapped up. Between real time highlights, nexdef live streaming, the latest mosaic, video search, and the updated silverlight player, not to mention social media based tools as well, I'm still not sure how it all got done in the limited amount of time we have while baseball isnt going on. From my perspective, the first pitch thrown out to open a new season never gets old, and its an honor to be a part of the team that continues to strive to innovate in how we present the game to our fans.

enjoy.

The product itself is accessible just as you would access normal gameday. You'll be given a choice when you start up the app as to which version you'd like to watch.

Update: Good news - it looks like Skiing Magazine is going to run some of the images from our shoot in the September issue.

The funny (as in sleep depriving) part of this is that from a technology perspective the off season is our opportunity to work on new project and bolster our infrastructure for the next year. It's probably more appropriate for us to refer to it as the on-season. This past on-season, we had quite a bit going on - and as of just now I can tell you about one project I've been particularly excited about. www.mlblogs.com is now up and running - substantiating Om Malik's sleuthing reported just yesterday. Hal Stern was the first to mention to me in the midst of our work to get this up and running that it would be neat if baseball fans could blog @ mlb.com (and I've heard it a number of times from other colleagues since) - and while all i could say at the time was that I wholeheartedly agree - here we are. I can only imagine the content we'll be seeing soon courtesy of the Red Sox Nation and the rest of the always vocal and always opinionated baseball fans that can now call mlblogs.com their blogging home. (also vocal and opinionated - our unix systems team will be blogging here: root for the home team.

After a busy couple of weeks that feels as though they've passed in about 12 hours, I've finally found a bit of time to reflect on another opening day for the team at MLB.com. It's our first opening day in our new datacenter - soon to be one of two running actively in parallel - and was an excellent test for our also-new Sun hardware and redeployed MLB.com application. While we've been up and running and doing our best to kick the cobwebs out since early february, it's always refreshing to see everything perform as expected (not that we doubted that it would stand up to the test). Most inspiring was the dynamic of our team that shines through brightest under extreme pressure - and is one of the many reasons I feel honored every day that I have the opportunity to work with everyone at MLBAM.

One last brief mention and i'm off to work again. I received an email from Jared Jenson, a colleague via Sun, regarding an interesting project he's been working on that we first discussed at Sun's developer EAC back in march - dtrace for Java. I've been excited (who wouldn't be?) about the possibilities of dtrace for our application as a substitute for a majority of the cobbled together toolkit we all "carry" around - this extension furthers the cause for those of us that rarely get out of the virtual machine and is another great reason to upgrade to Solaris 10. We've gotten pretty good at scaling our app through internal review and modification versus brute force with hardware - and managed until just this year to realize all of our traffic growth on the same systems we started with in 2001. Dtrace presents the unique opportunity for us to gather the information we need and quantify where we need to make additional progress, and even more importantly - determine when it is in fact time to invest in additional hardware. While we could sort of do this in the past - dtrace makes it a heck of a lot easier, and makes far more data available! Stay tuned for the not quite as exciting news (to the non-geeks amongst us at least) as mlblogs.com following this season that we're upgrading to Solaris 10 in production for these reasons and more.

Apparently I'm not the only one that thinks Sun has the right idea - The Washington Post seems to agree - but I'll mention Jonathan Schwartz and the rest of Sun's prolific bloggers anyways as one notable inspiration of many for getting started with blogging as well. I've thoroughly enjoyed the entire organization's contributions in many forms: products, services, and now blogs. Here's to raising the bar and giving the entire team from top to bottom the opportunity to speak their minds and share their perspectives.

Now for an intro and a bit of self-promotion for those of you who don't already know me.

I'm currently working for the online arm of Major League Baseball (mlb.com), as the VP and Chief Architect for all of the technology work that we're doing. I'm a geek at heart from both a tech and business perspective, and have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the sports business with a strong tech slant over the past few years. In the midst of it, we've built products I'm proud of from many perspectives, and continue to challenge ourselves to keep up with the sometimes frenetic but always inspiring pace of our business - serving baseball fans worldwide.

I'm fortunate enough to work with a fantastic team, not many of whom are blogging today (that I'm aware of - those of you that are expounding on your interests in your own forum elsewhere on the web - if you would like a mention send a note and i'll link to you as well). Known as "root" for the home team, Ryan Nelson is one of my favorite partners in crime and frequent participant in our always engaging baseball/tech/political meme that circulates around the proverbial watercooler here at MLBAM. (He's also the kind host of the movable type instance I'm using).

When I'm not thinking about baseball, highly scalable web applications, or how to satisfy my overly aggressive metabolism, you can usually find me in the vicinity of a mountain either skiing or climbing - and more recently trying to combine the two for some real fun.

I hope you all enjoy my contributions to be as much as I've enjoyed yours. I'm available at justin dot shaffer at mlb dot com and always appreciate comments on our efforts at baseball or whatever else is on your mind.