Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

Major League Baseball's web site, mlb.com is very cool. It's cool because you can follow a game, pitch by pitch, and go back and review plays that happened while you were in the kitchen, en route to the bathroom or actually paying attention on that concall to another time zone. In addition to statistics, fantasy games, and more editorial content than you'll find in a dozen local newspapers, mlb.com seems to have some new feature - new game, new contest, new online store inventory - every few weeks. It's hard to be bored by their website, even if the nation's pastime involves a lot of equipment adjustment between pitches.

Tonight, however, was a night for the real thing. Game 2, at Yankee Stadium, sitting just behind the right-field foul pole, taking in the sights, the sounds and the smells of a playoff game. Meet our hosts for the evening, Justin (l) and Rufus (r). Rufus is a teacher, skiier, and Red Sox fan, and I'm certain that Rufus is a nom du plume to avoid ridicule for wearing Red Sox national garb in the House That Ruth Built. That's all we have to say about Rufus for tonight.

Justin, on the other hand, is the chief architect of mlb.com. He's the guy in charge of scalability, security, and making sure the Java Server Pages compile and generate the right HTML. In real time. All of the time. Or many people send angry emails, and Justin's life is restricted to fixing things. Forget going to the game, he's lucky if he can go to the bathroom. But here he is, at the stadium, one of 55,000 strong. I'd like to think that he had the guts to wander out of mlb.com central and take the 4 train 147 blocks uptown because he has confidence that mlb.com will run just fine without him watching, thank you. Did I mention that mlb.com is 100% Sun servers, and 100% Sun JES software, with the exception of the rather large and fast database that holds all of those statistics and per-game events. But that runs on our hardware too. Bet you didn't know there's a huge amount of NFS gluing the front end web servers to their content, ensuring that every web server brings the high heat in synchrony. Nothing worse than having the load balancer send you to a different web server only to find yourself quite literally behind in the pitch count. I'm reasonably proud of what we've done with mlb.com, and Justin implicitly agrees with me. Or he would be hunkered down watching packet counts, not pitch counts.

But don't take my word for it. What do 55,000 people chanting "Who's your Daddy?" look like? We have photographic evidence that suggests you don't want to upset this crowd. What's it like to be on the other end of a Bronx Cheer? Now multiply this capacity crowd by somewhere between 10 and 50, and that's the potential number of people who could be indirectly torqued with Justin. Happily, his Blackberry remained silent, we watched Olerud deposit one dinger just in front of us, and Charlie Steiner summed it up: "The Yankees win, th-uuuuuuh Yankees win". And so do mlb.com fans.