Author Archives: Andy Boyer

Farewell Ernie Harwell

Posted by Andy Boyer in Media

I was going to put some notes together on the passing of Detroit Tigers Broadcasting legend Ernie Harwell.  However, before I had a chance, the North Sound division of AndyBoyer.com but together this list which I’ll forward here:

  • Was born two years before the radio was invented.
  • Was a bat boy for the Atlanta Crackers (really) at age five.  He never had to buy a ticket for a baseball game since then.
  • Broadcast games for the Atlanta Crackers but was traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948 for catcher Cliff Dapper becasue Branch Rickey liked Ernie and Brooklyn needed a third guy to substitute for Red Barber who was sick with an ulcer.
  • Broadcasters were fired often because as the teams’ radio sponsors — mainly beer companies like Strohs, Gunther, Goebel — won contracts, the new sponsor often thought the broadcaster identified too much with the old sponsor.
  • Vin Scully replaced Ernie Harwell for the Dodgers
  • In Harwell’s first broadcast for the Tigers in 1960, there was not room for him or his color guy in the Cleveland press box so they had to do the broadcast from a table set up in the upper deck.  It was 35 degrees and windy.  The 15 inning game lasted almost five hours.
  • Rick Rizzs did the unthinkable by spending a year as Ernie’s “replacement” in 1992.  Bo Schembechler made this decision and resigned a year later.  Ernie was broadcasting for Detroit again in 1993.
  • In 2002 the Cleveland Indians named their visiting radio booth for Harwell
  • When he retired, he had twice outdone Cal Ripken’s consecutive games streak.  He missed two games in his career.  One for his brother’s funeral and the other for his Hall of Fame induction.
  • It’s Harwell’s call of the 1963 World Series you hear in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
  • He and his wife Lulu were married for 68 years

Photo borrowed from http://rodgerdodgerowl.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/ernie-harwell/

Entrepreneurship Reigns at UW Business Plan Competition

Posted by Andy Boyer in Uncategorized

For the last several years, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of being a judge at the UW Business Plan Competition.  I’ll admit, this year I was a little scared when 6 of the 7 plans I read in the screening stage failed to pass the Pets.com sniff test.

But last Wednesday, I was able to tour the 36 semi-finalists and talk with the teams in action.  It’s always an interesting exercise.  You see a few companies with ideas that you see every year, and you see some companies who are developing a cure for cancer.  But then there are those teams with ideas that are interesting enough that they just may work.

I gave “money” to a number of the teams, and while I won’t tell you who I tried to help make the next round, here are some ideas and companies I will try to keep an eye on:

Thanks SMC Folks

Posted by Andy Boyer in Seattle, Social Media

Just want to take a quick second to thank Shauna Causey, Joann Jen and the rest of the SMC crew for allowing me to grill three esteemed panelists for 45 minutes Tuesday night about Social Media topics.  I wish we had had more time for Q+A from the crowd, though I think the topic was so wide, we could have gone another hour and still not covered everything.  

A few follow-up notes for the record, in response to the #smcsea Tweetstream from last night. 

  • No disrespect to Whrrl.  I usually say, “Foursquare, Gowalla and Whrrl.”  Not sure why I left them out yesterday.  
  • I do believe GeoLocation and hyper local are key.  However, I wanted to surface some issues with them past the hype, which is why I asked Matt to take a devil advocate’s role.  For example, I still don’t understand how a major advertiser can deploy a hyper local campaign as painlessly as buying a TV spot. 
  • I don’t think you need to have a Twitter account to have Social Media expertise.  Social Media is about connections, deep and shallow.  Choosing not to engage in thousands of shallow conversations, doesn’t mean you don’t have knowledge about particular aspects of this medium.  (Yes I know that is too many negatives in one sentence.)
  • Thanks @Chex_mix for dropping in and watching the stream via Ustream.  Good to have you be part of the conversation.
  • Thanks to anyone who said nice things about the panel and/or moderator.  No offense, I’m just not going to get around to sending @replies to everyone.  But I do appreciate the kind words.
  • Ustream archive link is here.  Panel starts about an hour in.

See everyone at the next event.

What Ethical Questions Can We Answer For You?

Posted by Andy Boyer in Seattle, Social Media

The good folks over at SMC Seattle invited me to moderate a panel next Tuesday on “Ethics, Money and New Ideas.”  I’m not sure if they think I have plenty of those things, or am lacking.  Either way, I was happy to accept.

The panelists that I’ll be trying to prod into healthy debate include Andru Edwards, the CEO of Gear Live Media.  Andru went from blog hobbyist to full-time paid blogger, and he’s a definitive source for technology, pop culture, and entertainment news.  We’ll also have Izabelle Gorczynski, a privacy attorney at Microsoft, who is going to speak to international data protection matters relating to product development, sales and marketing, social media and data security,  as well as HIPAA compliance and medical privacy issues.  Rounding out the on-site group will be Matt Haynes from Wunderman. Ad agencies and ethics are always good ingredients for a spicy conversation.  So we’ll have the Influencer, the Lawyer and the Mad Man – If I can’t lead that cast into interesting storylines, I should be banned from any future events.

But being that this is a social media event, I do want to include ideas from attendees or readers.  If you have a social media ethics question, let me know via email, Twitter or comment box below, and I’ll work it into the conversation.

Baseball Milestones

Posted by Andy Boyer in Personal, Sports

It’s not often I get content for this blog from my softball cronies.  But this article came across the kucklehead telegraph today and is full of great baseball trivia. My only question now is which one of these guys reads the Wall Street Journal.  Here are some highlights.

  • Marlins Jorge Cantu stared the season with at least one hit and one RBI in each of the Marlins first 9 games.- Never done before.
  • A-Rod: 13 seasons; 30 HRs and 100 RBIs in each one;  A-first

There have been 173,383 MLB games since 1903

  • No player has ever hit 3 grand slams in one game
  • No player has ever hit for the cycle in two consecutive games
  • A game has never had two players hitting for the cycle
  • In 49 years, the Mets have never had a no-hitter (Seaver for the Reds, Cone for the Yanks, Ryan for several, Gooden for the Yanks).  In 18 years, the Marlins have 4
  • 40 pitchers have throw the immaculate late inning (9 strikes to 3 consecutive batters).  But No pitcher has done it two innings in a row.
  • 26 batters have come to bat 3 times in 1 inning.  But none of them made all 3 outs in the inning.
  • Twice, not once, a game has ended with an unassisted triple play – Last year and 1927.

 

The Question No One is Asking About the iPad

Posted by Andy Boyer in Big Businesses, Media, Technology

I’m not writing a review of the iPad.  Since I’m not a tech blogger, I’ll leave that to JetCityDigital, Mashable, Jeff Jarvis, and AllThingsD.  (And yes, I did put Ron Schott in the same sentence as Walt Mossberg, so remember this post in 10 years people.)

I don’t want to debate if the iPad is a laptop killer, or simply the media companies’ attempt to put us all back in a walled garden.  I have a much simpler question.

In every publication I read, articles focus on 10% unemployment, a looming deficit, and the fact that we’re all doomed.  So why on earth do we need a laptop that’s not a laptop, or a phone that’s too big to be a phone, or a $500 way to read magazines that still cost $5 per issue to download?  The iPad seems like something we should have gotten in 1998, when we all used $100 bills as post-it notes.  But in a recession?  Who needs to drop that kind of coin on a device that serves a secondary function for all the functions we already have solutions for?

I got the iPod.  I got the iPhone.  I get Android.  I get the iPad in Tokyo or Shanghai.  I may even get the iPad in the U.S. in 2 years, or if the content was all free.  But I have to admit, I’m not sure how far “shiny” and “new” takes you in 2010 middle America…  I’m looking forward to being wrong on this…  

Connecting Desperate Housewives to the Health of the MLS

Posted by Andy Boyer in Sports

Fine, it’s a leap, but a fun one.  Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria married San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker a few years back.  One of Parker’s Groomsmen was fellow Frenchman Thierry Henry.  Now there’s word that Monsieur Henry will be heading across the pond to join the New York Red Bulls after the World Cup.

Let’s look at the timeline of a few recent moves the MLS has made.

First, they managed to work out an amicable deal between the players and owners, avoiding a strike that would have destroyed the league.  The players union was rightly arguing that franchises in Seattle and Toronto were profitable, that soccer only stadiums in LA, Chicago and other cities showed promise, and that the new and incoming franchises in Philly, Vancouver and Portland were poised for huge success.  The easy thing for the owners to do would be to give the MLS players a raise and keep the league at status quo.

But, after 15 years or so, the league is finally at an inflection point.  It’s ready to “cross the chasm” if you will.  You have a nice little storm where the league is gaining momentum in one of the few years that the mass public will spend at least 3 days this summer watching the U.S. World Cup team.  And since ESPN started covering European soccer a few years back, they know a few names of super teams like Manchester United, Arsenal, Barcelona and Real Madrid.  They also learned about a few stars like Beckham, Ronaldhino, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, and Thierry Henry.

So what’s great now, is that those guys are getting old.  Not too old to perform, but too old to compete in Spain and England.  And all of a sudden, their agent can tell them that L.A., New York, Chicago, etc… all can provide them more money than they’d get from some 2nd tier Italian team.

So the MLS makes an incredibly sound decision.  Even though the league is salary capped, they give each team the ability to add a 2nd player that doesn’t count against the cap (called a Designated Player).  We’ll call this the Thierry Henry rule.  Why?  because New York already has a Designated Player.  But nothing could be better for the league than it’s largest market getting good, and adding the best player in the league.  I know Henry landing in New York makes it harder for the Sounders to win a league cup.  But it’s so great for the league.  You can’t run a successful league without New York or LA being one of the top attended teams.  

Think about it.  There’s a simple problem in which to get corporate sponsors, you need to schmooze some execs.  And the league office is in New York.  The CMO of Budweiser, Coke, P+G, Clorox or Apple is not going to go to a game in the Meadowlands with 6,000 people and write a check for $10MM.  You get Henry in a packed, soccer only stadium, and that same CMO suddenly has budget.

So forget Beckham.  He may have gotten the MLS some buzz.  But watch for Henry and the stream of guys that come over in July 2010 as the people who buzz the MLS into the mainstream.