Building a Top-50 Priority List for MLB.TV Game Changer

Last week, Ben Lindbergh wrote a piece titled “Baseball Has a ‘RedZone’ Channel” over at The Ringer. It was all about a script that Dan Hirsch wrote at The Baseball Gauge called MLB.TV Game Changer. Basically, if you’re watching MLB.TV in a web browser, this script will allow you to program your MLB.TV experience to skip to the action that you most want to see, and you can customize it in many different ways. Put succinctly, this blew my mind. So I spent the better part of a night playing with the script’s priority list.

When I talk about how MLB needs to improve the marketing of its players, this is exactly the sort of thing about which I’m talking. If you go to the comments of that piece I wrote last week in fact, you’ll see that one of the comments that got the most up votes directly addressed how hard it is for MLB to market its players. Commenter Ryan wrote:

MLB is such a local based product that I don’t think its ever going to be able to market players nationally like the other sports. Since the schedule is so long a fan is very likely going to cheer for a certain team and not watch other games for certain players outside of when their team has an off day.

If I am a Blue Jays or Red Sox fan I’m not going to go out of my way to watch a Dodgers game to see 4 Corey Seager ABs. Baseball will never be able to match sports like Basketball or Football where the star athletes have a much bigger influence on the game.

A valid issue, until this Game Changer script well, um, changed the game. Now you can watch your normal game, and cut in for four Corey Seager at-bats, or Jose Altuve at-bats, or to see Billy Hamilton steal a base, or whatever your preference is. It’s a beautiful thing.

So beautiful that I had to build my own priority list — and I thought I would walk through my process with you. First, the elephant-sized caveat: if you’re familiar with me, you probably know that I live in the Boston area, and as such am not able to watch the Red Sox on MLB.TV. If I could, there’d be entries here for several Red Sox players, or just the Red Sox as a team. But I can’t, so they were the one team that I clicked to ignore.

You might be thinking to yourself, that’s the only team you chose to ignore? To which I would reply, “Oh, indeed.” Since you can load in as many as 50 priorities onto the list, I thought I would challenge myself to find at least one player from each team to prioritize.

Those were really the only conditions I created. Before we get to the list, though, let’s run through some honorable mentions. These are listed in alphabetical order for simplicity’s sake.

• Injured Players Who Would Otherwise Be Included: Clayton Kershaw, Giancarlo Stanton
• Honorable Mention Teams: Baltimore Orioles, Oakland Athletics, San Diego Padres
• Honorable Mention Players: Yoenis Cespedes, Brian Dozier, Dexter Fowler, Jonathan Lucroy, J.D. Martinez, Aaron Nola, Marcell Ozuna, Kyle Seager, Christian Yelich, lots of closers.

Fowler and the Padres were probably the closest here. Fowler has long been one of my favorite players, but I used the Cubs as one of my teams, and I figure some of the time he’ll be featured there. The Padres TV broadcast features Don Orsillo, but the Padres are so bad and Orsillo isn’t on every broadcast this year, as this year represents Dick Enberg’s farewell tour. As for closers, I think they’ll be accounted for by the catch-all priorities you’ll see later.

Let’s look at the bottom of the list:

As you can probably see, the bottom of the top 50 is filled with players on suboptimal teams that I’d like to watch more, but not as much as other players I’ve liked for some time or, otherwise, just legit superstars. The one player I should probably have placed higher is Matt Carpenter, but I find the Cardinals to be boring. Sorry, St. Louis. Maybe if they hired that long-eared rabbit who frequents the city…

For the rest of this part of the list, I tried to mix in as much as possible. Position players pitching doesn’t amuse me like it does so many others, but I do see the appeal. You’ll see some stolen-base leaders in here as runners, which is a feature I really like. It seems like the stolen base is a lost art, and so seeing those chances will be a lot of fun. You may notice I don’t have a ton of starting pitchers on here. I figure that the more starting pitchers I have, the less jumping around Game Changer will do, and I want it to retain as much flexibility as possible. I had to put Jon Gray on there, though. Loving him right now.

You see two teams on there: the Mets and the Cubs. I don’t particularly like either team, but I do like their broadcasters, and you do, too. One note here: you can now set it to feature only when a specific team is hitting or pitching, which could come in handy for elite units like the Indians’ or Nationals’ rotations, and the like. But I chose to stick with the team-level here, because the hook for me is the broadcasters.

On to the top of the list.

Here, I mixed in a couple of favorite players, such as Carlos Beltran and Andrew McCutchen, a player who is rapidly becoming a favorite in David Dahl, as well as other great players. The Giants make the cut thanks to Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow, who are probably my favorite broadcasting duo in the game since Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy were needlessly separated. Vin Scully landed higher on the list, though, since it’s his last year and all.

Speaking of, what struck me as I was filling this out is how much this list will change in the future, as well as how different it would have looked even six weeks ago. Dahl and Gary Sanchez weren’t major leaguers then. Next year, both Beltran and Ichiro Suzuki might be off the list, and Scully definitely will be off. Go back to the start of the season, and McCutchen and Bryce Harper are probably in the top 10. Baseball plays out over a long period, but change still comes quick.

At the top of the list, I put in the three catch-alls that seem most appropriate. To be honest, I might be double counting with them, but I put all three in just in case. At the top of the list, you have two players for whom this tool is made, at least in the year 2016: Mike Trout and Joey Votto. Few people want to watch whole Angels and Reds games at this point, but lots of people want to (or should want to) see Trout and Votto hit. I almost included Trout as a runner, too, but given the state of Anaheim’s offense behind him, that figured to be a depressing exercise.

One of the things I’m most interested to see is just what the frequency of each event ends up being. Some of these items, like Billy Hamilton as a runner, Dellin Betances as a pitcher or Madison Bumgarner as a hitter, occur pretty infrequently, so it might end up that the list ends up defaulting to a lot of Cub, Dodgers, Giants, and Mets. We’ll see. I could probably just go ahead and do the math on all of that, but it seems like it would defeat the surprise of it all, and I like surprises. We’ll see once I have the chance to field test my priority list. It might change dramatically once I do — I’m not sure how this will all play out. But I can’t wait to find out.