The Best Show On TV Is The Glitchy 3D Graphics On The MLB App

I love baseball. I love watching baseball. I love reading about baseball. As a much younger and more able-bodied man, I loved playing baseball. One time, when I was pitching in a high school game, I beaned the same kid twice in one inning, and I love bringing that up every time I talk about baseball, which I do a lot because, again, I love baseball.

You would think, given this lifelong love of the sport, that I might be starting to run out of new ways to enjoy it. I was worried about that, too, at one point, that maybe it was starting to get stale for me and I was entering the stage of fandom where I become a cranky old man who yells at the TV about players who retired a decade ago. Luckily, as I was beginning to get concerned about all of this, I discovered the 3D graphics on the official MLB app.

The MLB app is great. You can check in on any game and follow along live through the Gameday feature. When you open it up and select a game in progress, the standard view is the 2D option from behind home plate, which looks like this…

Sometimes I'll watch a whole game like this, especially late at night, when I’m supposed to be sleeping but I’m looking at my phone. Whenever a batter makes contact, the view switches to overhead and a bunch of little dots representing the players chase the ball around. It’s weirdly mesmerizing.

Earlier this season, though, I noticed the little button up there in the top-right corner that says “3D.” Hmm, I said, I wonder what that does. And then I clicked on it and was immediately whisked into a fantastical land of whimsy and disappearing catchers.

I recorded segments of two different games I watched over the last week or so. Below, I have broken those segments up into short GIFs to highlight specific things in each. I can’t wait to show you the breakdancing pitcher.

But first, here’s one from a recent Phillies-Mets game.

Okay, a few things are going on here, and I think we should get them out of the way from the jump:

• The catcher is not shown during regular game play because, from this angle, he would block most of the on-field action, which is a fair decision
• There are plays during the game where the catcher steps out from behind home plate and becomes part of the action in a way that would need to be shown
• The app handles this by having him SUDDENLY EMERGE FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL AS THOUGH HE IS BEING LEVITATED BY SATAN HIMSELF
• This is funny to me every single time

But, again, fair, just because you need to do something with the catcher to bring him into and out of the action. I get it.

That said…

… there’s really not a reason the umpire and the shortstop need to briefly dip underground as the first batter of the inning makes his way to the plate.

Sometimes the home plate umpire pops out from the same hellhole the catcher emerges from and he squats over the plate to brush it off. This is always very funny to me, in part because the graphics do not handle sudden and abrupt motion well, so sometimes it looks like he’s just repeatedly throwing his brush on the ground in anger, and in part because the graphics also have trouble with multiple people doing multiple things at once in one location.

It’s how you end up with things like, well, this...

Right, so both of those guys are actually the same batter. What happened is the whole thing glitched out as he was getting ready to step up to the plate, so now it looks like there are two of them, and the guy behind home plate realized it wasn’t actually his turn to bat and saw the other batter emerge from the portal and was like “whoops, my bad” and dipped out. I like that none of this distracted the pitcher.

Not everything goes that smoothly for the pitchers, though. The second video I have is from a Dodgers-Padres game, and it picks up during a meeting on the mound where the entire infield huddles to discuss something. Remember how I said the graphics don’t handle multiple people in one location well?

Yeah…

That‘s the breakdancing pitcher I mentioned earlier. I don’t even know if “breakdancing” is the right word. It looks more like when a kid has way too much sugar and walks up to you and says, “hey wanna see my cool new moves?” and he just kinda flails his arms and legs for a while until he gets tired. But that doesn’t have the same ring to it as “breakdancing pitcher.” It’ll do.

Anyway, after he did that for a while, because this is how the graphics handle any malfunctioning player, he too descended to the underworld as the mound meeting continued. Everyone went back to their positions, including the catcher, who, yes, also went back down to the underworld, this time by taking the spiral staircase, apparently...

The batter stepped into the box and awaited the pitch.

But there was still no pitcher.

Hmm.

Hmmmmmm.

A few notes in conclusion:

• I like this one a lot because it looks like the Dodgers runner on second base popped down there and was like “hey, you gotta get back up here, we're ready to go” and the pitcher was like “oh shit, right, coming”
• Another time when I was watching a meeting on the mound, the graphics got the jumble of players mixed up when it ended and showed the pitcher walking back behind home plate while the catcher took the mound in his full protective gear, which, if it happened in real life, would immediately become the best thing I've ever seen in a baseball game
• I have yet to see how the graphics handle, say, an argument between a player and an umpire, or an argument between a coach and an umpire, but the possibilities there are really almost limitless

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STUFF I CLICKED ON

— my S3E2 House of the Dragon Scorecard for Vulture, which contains a lot of yelling

— good chat about Widow’s Bay with director Hiro Murai

— terrific Jackass blog at IndieWire 

— I am very intrigued by NIMRODS

— Adam McKay is still talking about his falling out with Will Ferrell

— John Cena loves doing comedy

— Tom Hanks loves narrating documentaries about America 

— Walton Goggins saved Olivia Wilde’s life

— good blog about the WNBA and Caitlin Clark

— I will post anything about Kate O’Flynn, the breakout star of Widow’s Bay

— Keanu is gonna be in a Lego movie

— lol John Oliver is gonna be on General Hospital

— missing giraffe found

— I demand justice for Merlin the Duck

— incredible headline: “Michael J. Fox and Creator of Nickelodeon Green Slime Recognized in Order of Canada List”

— another incredible headline: “Woman Thought Date Was a 'Jerk' for Not Calling, but He Was Actually in a Coma After Being Attacked by a Bear (Exclusive)”

— look at my little man learning how to be a predator

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