I am happy to report that I have found a nice little app for my Android phone that allows you to use the phone as a microphone, so I don't have to rely any longer on the ancient Powerbook G4 that I'd been using to record. The sound appears to be pretty decent, which makes sense, since it's a phone and all.

I am less happy to report that there will be no podcast because, as far as I'm concerned, there was no baseball game today. MLB.tv, a service for which one must pay, has decided that the A's-Rangers game will simply not be available. (It appears that some other west coast games are suffering from the same problem.) Coupled with yesterday's weird "video jumps forward back one second, then forward three seconds" issue (an issue, I'll note, that's pretty small potatoes compared to David Wishinsky's reported problem of the video skipping hours at a time), I'm pretty unhappy with the state of MLB's online video right now. This is a direct-payment enterprise. I buy video, MLB provides it. Only one half of this bargain is being held up right now.

I did get to watch enough of the game (3 1/2 or 4 innings, I believe) to say this: Travis Blackley's a nice guy to root for, but he's not much of a pitcher. It is kind of fun to watch an Aussie with those tattoos stride out to the mound ... and proceed to throw a whole bunch of slop: big looping curves, changes, sliders, and then the occasional medium-velocity fastball. This might work for him if he didn't throw half his changeups two feet short of the plate.