The Swedish National Team is off to the US May 16-28. Six Stockholm players are included.

While in the US the Swedish team will be taking part in extended Spring Training in Florida, taking on young minor league players from the Altanta Braves, Detroit Tigers, and Houston Astros. Afterwards they'll be off to Wisconsin, to play teams in the Northwoods League, a summer league for college players.

The Stockholm players traveling to the US are last year's Elite Division MVP Magnus Pilegård, last year's best Swedish pitcher, Joachim Claesson, the brothers Björn and Peter Johannessen, Peter Diurlin, and teen pitching phenom Oscar Carlstedt, who threw a (seven inning, called for mercy rule) no-hittter last week in his pitching debut for this season.

Home team, and defending Swedish champs, Stockholm won their opening day of the 2009 season, defeating Gefle 12-2 in 7 innings (the game was called then because of the mercy rule).

Stockholm also won game 2, 12-2.

Earlier, Karlskoga took two from Rättvik, 11- 1 (8 innings, mercy rule) and 11 -3.

This year's Gameday Audio player from MLB.com is even worse than last year's flawed attempt. How can you have a media player without controls for Fast Forward or even Pause?

Having delivered the same service as last year during Spring Training, MLB.com apparently chose Opening Day to replace the Windows Media Player/Silverlight alternatives with a new and seemingly untested Adobe Flash player. The first indication that something was wrong was when none of the Opening Day games were available afterwards for on-demand listening. Every single game was listed as coming "soon".

Messages on the support forum apologized for the "inconvenience" that a product people had paid for was not there, and promised it would appear "after 3:00 PM ET", a concept which could have meant they might be there sometime after the World Series. Or maybe next century. Fortunately the games showed up, but certainly several hours after 3:00 PM ET.

Worse yet, the Adobe player, apparently designed for video, is massively flawed.

For several years the Fast Forward control on the MLB players has often failed. You try to drag the slider and the player just freezes while it is "buffering". This is a problem because invariably the game recordings start very very early. (For example, trying to listen to Wednesday's Giants game today, I had to sit through more than 20 minutes of inane chatter by KNBR program hosts.) But at least last year, and during Spring Training, the Pause control worked.

The Adobe player has no controls at all, just invitations for TV features at extra cost.

Not only is this idiotic, but one wonders why MLB.com didn't use Spring Training to test their new system? Better complaints then, followed by fixes, than having the whole thing flop on Opening Day!

The player of the last few years also offered the option to view the score by innings in a game, a helpful feature. That's gone too, replaced by three alternatives that seem rather useless.

One "improvement" this year seems to be that anyone can subscribe to the USD 2.49 a month extra package to listen to games on mobile phones. Last year for reasons that are hard to understand, only subscribers to one single American carrier were offered this service.

Of course one could ask why mobile listening isn't included in the overall Gameday Audio package? All platforms ought to be covered by a single subscription. Obviously MLB.com just wants to make more money. But eventually they are going to discover than anyone with a netbook and a Gameday Audio subscription can access the games while mobile anyway.

What is seemingly particularly dumb is that the extra mobile subscription, as well as its iPhone counterpart, apparently only provide access to live games. Here in Sweden, we're asleep during most live games, and those that are played during our waking hours, happen in the late evening, when most people would be home anyway.

On-demand listening is a no-brainer for mobile baseball access. One really wonders who is making the decisions at MLB.com?

Continue reading 'European Baseball Triumphs!'...

Saturday's amazing upset by the Netherlands over the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic showed the world European baseball is not to be laughed at.

Even though they won by the narrowest of margins, 3-2, beating one of the very best nations in baseball was a remarkable achievement, especially considering that except for veteran pitcher Sidney Ponson, the Dutch team consisted of players from the American minor leagues (mostly A level) and the Dutch league. The team they defeated had major league players, some All-Stars and MVPs, at every position.

The Dutch may have scored all their runs in the first inning through a series of flukes and bloopers, but they held on to beat the mighty Dominicans. It was certainly no disgrace to be shut-out for three innings by Pedro Martinez.

Three years ago the Dutch upset Panama in the first World Baseball Classic. That was a surprise, but Panama is no where near the powerhouse that is the Dominican Republic. No matter what the Netherlands does in its game against Puerto Rico, its national team has established the quality of European baseball.

The MLB Network presumably launched on January 1. But no one seems to know about it where I am, in Ukiah, California.

I know about the network because I read about it in "USA Today". None of the local newspapers here in Ukiah or Santa Rosa seem to have written about it. If you plug our zip code into the MLB network website, it says our local Comcast cable system has the network on channel 612. This is impossible, as 612 is a digital music channel.

So I tried to call Comcast.

There is no local number, just an 800 number, obviously somewhere else in the country. None of the voice mail options there are for information, they are only for upgrading or downgrading. The closest thing I could find was the option to report a technical problem.

But the guy who answered there was very helpful. He saw the 612 entry and realized it was bogus. But he couldn't work out what channel the network would be on, except that it would have to be among the digital channels above 100. He did say I could access the cable box menu and choose the messages option to see if the local Comcast had said anything about the new channel.

Unfortunately when you key in the menu on the cable box here, there is no messages option.

I tried every channel from 100 up, and there was no MLB Network.

Dear MLB, if you want people to watch your new network, you're gonna have to do better telling them how to find it!

The International Baseball Federation has published the first ever international baseball ranking. Of the 50 countries rated, Sweden finishes in 22nd place.

But the ranking, based on World Championships, the Olympics, and the World Baseball Classic, seem a bit strange in some places. The Domincan Republic, a baseball powerhouse, is rated 16th, behind Mexico (8), Australia (9), China (10), Spain (11), Germany (13), Britain (14) and Italy (15). This makes no sense.

Personally I think Sweden is better than Britain, based on watching the two teams play here. That of course is more subjective than the system used for the ranking.

But how can Nicaragua be in 24th place, and Colombia number 30?

Nation Points

1. Japan 245.5
2. USA 239.9
3. Cuba 234.7
4. South Korea 231.4
5. Taiwan 157.6
6. Netherlands 150.5
7. Canada 131.6
8. Mexico 96.5
9. Australia 77.3
10. China 51.7
11. Spain 51.5
12. Venezuela 47.2
13. Germany 47.0
14. Great Britain 45.0
15. Italy 40.3
16. Dominican Republic 38.1
17. South Africa 35.8
18. Puerto Rico 32.8
19. Czech Repbulic 32.0
20. Panama 31.9
21. France 31.0
22. Sweden 25.0
Lithuanian 25.0
24. Nicaragua 20.0
Nigeria 20.0
26. Philippines 17.5
27. Croatia 15.0
Ghana 15.0
29. Brazil 14.0
30. Colombia 12.0

Stockholm won today's away game at Karlskoga, taking the best of five series in three straight games.

Leading 5-2 after four innings, Stockholm held off Karlskoga to win 6-5. Joakim Claesson, winning pitcher in both games 2 and 3, was named as Most Valuable Player in the finals.

Last weekend Stockholm's 16-19 year olds won the Swedish Junior Championships.

Shortly after Sunday's Elite Division final victory, the Stockholm Juniors won this year's Swedish Juniors Championship.

Stockholm defeated Eskilstuna 13-4. Jakob Claesson was the finals MVP, both for his pitching and hitting.

Stockholm secured its finals spot by defeating Sundbyberg on Saturday 13-3. Last place Eskilstuna made it the finals with a walkover when Leksand defaulted.

Sadly, HeatStat, the otherwise excellent statistics site operated by the Sundbyberg Heat baseball club, seems to have neglected this year's Juniors series, so no boxscore from the game appears to be available online.

Daniel Wood bunts home a run for Stockholm

Stockholm defeated Karlskoga 8-2 Sunday, to take the second game of the 2008 Swedish Elite Division Baseball Championships. Following Saturday's 6-2 victory, Stockholm leads the best-of-five series 2-1.

The Stockholm offense started early, with 4 runs in the first inning, and altogether 16 hits, including back-to-back triples by Peter Johannesen and Markus Rosenkvist in the 8th inning.

Photo: Peter Blomqvist

Joachim Claesson pitched a complete game to get the win, allowed 8 hits and 1 earned run, and with 5 strike-outs. The losing pitcher was Kent Karlsson.

Boxscore at HeatStat

The series now moves to Karlskoga next weekend, for game three, and if needed, games four and five.