Something Harry Caray once said comes to mind after a couple of days of trying out the new Microsoft Complete Baseball CD-ROM.
Holy cow.
This sucker should go down with peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jacks, Mom and apple pie as an essential component of every red-blooded American baseball fan’s life.
Microsoft’s brilliant chief executive Bill Gates may look like the kind of guy that Pete Rose used to kick sand at on the beach but Gates’ software specialists have brought a new dimension to the domain of sports. The Microsofties have produced the definitive portrait of major league baseball on a silver plastic disk a mere 4 3/4 inches wide.
The CD contains the entire text of the humongous “Total Baseball” encyclopedia, along with dozens of movie clips, hundreds of sound bites and a vast assortment of photographs including portraits of 2,500 players and many gripping news shots.
Further, the CD-ROM includes a modem program that lets users download each day’s closing statistics in the American and National Leagues under a deal Microsoft cut with Major League Baseball.
That allows users of this amazing reference work to go online daily and update its contents to reflect the latest day’s games and thus acquire up-to-date statistics that date back to 1901 and right up to the present moment.
Microsoft officials noted that the baseball title marks the first time the company has included telecommunications in one of its informational CD-ROM titles, a development with enormous implications for interactive multimedia applications in the future.
For example, future titles by Microsoft or by its legions of competitors could include things like historical information about stock market performance that could be updated daily by modem links.
Similarly, a newspaper or a magazine might put the complete text of past issues on a CD-ROM and then allow users to update information from the most recent issues online.
But, for now, the fact that Microsoft is pioneering the online link is far less significant than what the CD-ROM/online synergy creates for baseball fans or for anybody who wants to study the sport for any other reason.
The online link brings into your personal computer a stack of statistics far too large for any daily newspaper to incorporate and those statistics dovetail with the historical data held on the disc giving the user a virtually omniscent view of the game.
Of course Gates didn’t get to be rich by giving things away and Complete Baseball can be a costly dalliance, particularly because of the modem link.
The suggested retail is $80 but users also are charged $1.25 each time they call the online service to update the data.
You don’t have to call every day, but the temptation to do so is great.
As Microsoft notes in its press release for the product each day’s download brings “updated player and team statistics, detailed box scores of every 1994 major-league game, the latest standings and league-leader updates-the same official statistics the teams use.
Meanwhile, the disc is a joy to behold even if you can muster the restraint not to call for daily updates.
Just about every time you click a mouse you find a new treasure with this one, thanks largely to the enormous offerings from “Total Baseball,” which, in its printed form, stands as the baseball fan’s Bible.
This encyclopedia contains the blemishes along with the glories and, when augmented with color photos of players and events along with movie clips, sounds, etc., it comes alive at a level no print-alone book can reach.
But there’s a lot of joy in just the words. Consider this opening paragraph in an article about baseball scandals of the past:
“From its earliest days, baseball has indulged gamblers, fixers, drunkards, brawlers, disreputable moguls, bad actors, felons, homicidal maniacs, crooked umpires, vindictive owners, pyromaniacal fans and at least one ax murderer.”
The ax murderer, one learns later one, was Boston’s Marty Bergen, who in 1900 killed his wife and two children in North Brookfield, Mass., before committing suicide.
Bergen, by the way, had a career batting average of .265 with 339 hits and 180 runs during 1,278 times at the plate. The record doesn’t show whether he swung right or left.
Maybe the biggest treat is that the CD-ROM functions much like the world’s largest baseball trading card for the roughly 2,500 players featured. For example, the one for the Chicago Cubs’ legendary first baseman and shortstop Ernie Banks, includes a half-dozen color and black and white photographs of Banks at key moments in his career along with a lengthy biography.
Like all other articles on the disc, Banks’ biography is loaded with hypertext references in which key words appear in red allowing you to jump to related material.
For example, you start with Banks and jump to the Negro League where he got his start, then on to the Miracle Mets, who dashed the Cubs’ pennant hopes in 1969 and on to the names of Banks teammates.
It ends with a quote from Ferguson Jenkins, “I don’t think those people at Wrigley Field ever saw but two players they liked, Billy Williams and Ernie Banks.
“Billy never said anything and Ernie always said the right thing.”
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Tribune computer writer James Coates can be reached via the Internet at jcoates1@aol.com or at the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan, 4th Floor, Chicago, Ill. 60611. While he cannot respond individually, he will answer questions of general interest in his column.
