MLB.com launched what it calls the Interactive Baseball Network today, a three-channel expansion of its MLB.TV video streaming service. I had MLB.TV this season and thought it was the best thing MLB had done since expanding beyond 16 teams. It's hard to believe that the skinflints in the commissioner's office would allow fans to gain access to every one of their games for just eighty bucks a year. The last time I went to a ballgame, that's how much my jumbo beer (meaning with extra suds) cost. It must be that the powers that be are so computer illiterate that they

Their announcement comes just one day after I purchased MLB.TV for the playoffs. It's a no-brainer: ten dollars for all the playoff games, including those in the afternoon, the late ones on the west coast, and those that overlap with the game another game that I prefer watching. Ten bucks is basically a commemorative scorecard nowadays.

Now baseball is buttressing this great service with "Cooperstown.TV for classic games, BaseballChannel.TV for news, highlights and talk shows that go beyond games." Both are free, at least for the time being. They also have an online schedule.

As ESPN continues to dumb down there once nonpareil baseball site while making more and more content part of a pay service, who would have thought that MLB.com, a domain name that Major League Baseball didn’t have the foresight to nab and didn’t actually own until fairly recently, would become one of the more useful baseball sites around. Remember that it was just two seasons ago when MLB was more concerned with cracking down on fan sites than in developing a useful site of its own.

Now all they need is someone how can write content that doesn’t sound like your company's newsletter ("Today's birthdays…"). If whoever is running baseball's Web business moves next to resolve this issue, where else should he turn but to blogging community. That's where the best (and cheapest) content is now available. So MLB, the time is right to come a-running for the smoky flavor of Mike's Baseball Rants.