I can’t stress how much I love the internet and all the great info it gives us.  From game box scores to reviews of a movie from critics around the globe, there’s more info out there than one can possibly consume in a lifetime.  Add broadband access into the mix and now our computers have become extensions of our TVs.

But there can also be too much of a good thing.  A perfect example was my sophomore year in college and my roommate and I decided to get every cable channel available.  In order to get our money’s worth, we had to watch a LOT of TV and a LOT of TV we did wind up watching.  So much TV, in fact, that I got a 2.0 GPA that semester and I don’t think my roommate fared any better.  Obviously we cut back to basic cable that second semester, got our act together, and returned to producing average “B” grades.

One of the great applications I use a lot during the baseball season is mlb.com’s GameCast.  It allows me to have the Tigers or Cubs game info streaming to me in real time and I can refer to it throughout the afternoon in between lulls at work.  Yes, this is the nice thing about working at an internet-based company – we have unfettered internet access, Instant Message applications aren’t blocked (in fact they’re used to communicate with other offices), and our bosses know that as long as our work gets done and we meet/exceed expectations that it’s ok to visit a non-work-related web site every now and then.

Anyway, GameCast gets more and more complex each year with additional bells and whistles.  There is a section where they show where each pitch ends up in relation to the batter.  The screenshot I am showing below doesn’t include that because it was the top of this application-within-an-application that got me to thinking “This is simply too much info for me to use and process.  Heck, even the coaches of the teams involved probably don’t even use this much info.”

Here’s a breakdown of the 3 lines I’m talking about:

Line 1 – Pitch number for that batter; Where the batted ball went; Type of pitch

Line 2 – How fast the ball was when leaving the pitcher’s hand; How fast the ball was going when it got to home plate

Line 3 – pFX (I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS!!!); How far (in inches) the pitch dropped; How many degrees the pitch dropped; Arrow indicator showing the direction the pitch dropped

HOLY COW.  Too much info!  That third line is completely superfluous.  As a guy, I can appreciate an overload of gadgets for just about any electronic device or application but this simply is information overload.  I compare it to web sites that are too “busy” looking, making it hard to find the meat and potatoes of the site’s content.

For you baseball nuts, do you agree or disagree that this is too much of a good thing?