Internet Venture Putting Squeeze Play on Baseball

Major League Baseball and RealNetworks Inc. said Tuesday that they are teaming up to deliver condensed online replays of baseball games, adapting the deliberate pace of the national pastime to the short attention spans of the Internet.

The 20-minute digital videos provide less than a complete game but more than a highlights package, enabling viewers to see all the plays but none of the buildup.

No price has been set for the games, which will be available only to subscribers of premium online services from Major League Baseball or RealNetworks. The condensed versions will debut on opening day and will be available about 90 minutes after the last pitch is thrown in each game on the field.

The new offering is the latest attempt by a major sports organization to wring more revenue out of the Net. Baseball, the NBA and NASCAR all have joined forces with Real to charge fans for access to audio or video feeds online, replacing free services with subscription-based offerings.

Major League Baseball and RealNetworks struck their first deal last year, a three-year pact that was to deliver $20million in cash and services to baseball. Any revenue generated by the condensed games would be split between the two and would come on top of the $20million, said RealNetworks spokeswoman Lisa Amore.

Baseball officials charged $9.95 last year to listen to a season’s worth of games online, and RealNetworks included the games in its $9.95 monthly package of online audio-visual services. The condensed games are expected to command an additional fee.

The condensed games take to an extreme efforts by Major League Baseball to speed the game. Although total attendance at ballparks has risen, the audience for televised games has declined significantly, and the league has been under pressure from some quarters to increase the pace of the contests.

Bob Bowman, who runs the league’s interactive media arm, said the condensed games should coexist peacefully with their live counterparts simply because there are far more games than the typical fan can attend or watch on TV.

“I feel that this is merely a morsel, an appetizer, and the fans will come to appreciate even more the beauty, the elegance, the sheer pageantry of the game of baseball,” he said.

Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks and a minority owner of the Seattle Mariners, said baseball was responding to a need.

“There’s been a long-term trend where people have been saying, [despite] our hyper-fast-paced lifestyle, baseball games have gotten longer over the past 20 years, not shorter,” Glaser said. “So a lot of people say, ‘That’s not the direction that I either want to go in or I can afford to take the time to go in given my busy life.’ So we’re providing another choice.”

He added: “There are going to be all these baseball traditionalists who will liken this to the designated hitter ... or whatever is your favorite act of blasphemy. But to me, one of the beauties of this is we haven’t touched the product on the field. The sanctity of the church has not been disturbed in any way, shape or form.

“We’re just giving people the ability to gain access to that and make it more accessible. We’ll find out whether this is something that appeals to kids, because they like things more fast-paced, or it appeals to busy businesspeople or busy parents. I think it will find an audience.”

Ken Hirdt, a researcher with the Elias Sports Bureau, said the condensed games pose no threat to baseball. “People will still want to watch a whole game,” he said, although they might turn to the online versions to catch up quickly on a game they missed.

Still, Bob Gorman, a baseball historian who is the top reference librarian at Winthrop University in South Carolina, was troubled by aspects of the condensed games.

The online versions will show only action that produces outs or moves baserunners, eliminating much of the context for those events. Gorman said a viewer would see a batter whiffing on a fastball but not the pitch before it that set him up for the strikeout.

“This goes along with how we’re presented with the news,” he said. “People no longer have the patience for the analysis. That just plays into the whole ‘I want it fast and I want it now’ kind of attitude we have in this country.”