In its Special Report on the Web, NEWSWEEK reviews MLB
game trackers on Yahoo!Sports, Fox Sports.com, ESPN.com, CBS
SportsLine and MLB.com. MLB's GameCenter offers "lots of
stats at a glance," while SportsLine's Baseball Live's chat
rooms "allow you to flame opposition fans," but its graphics
are "a tad clunky." ESPN's Gamecast is the "cleanest,
classiest site out there." While Fox's Gametracker 2000 has
"multigame or multiangle viewing," it has "long load time."
One of Yahoo!'s "hits" for its Gamechannel is that it has
"no banner ads during action" (NEWSWEEK, 9/20 issue).
THEY LYC-OS FOOTBALL SITES: Lycos's new report called
"The Lycos 50" lists the top 50 terms searched by Lycos
users based upon data generated by the 12 million searches
requested each day. For the week ended last Sunday,
September 12, "football" was the third most searched term,
while the "NFL" came in seventh (USA TODAY, 9/15).
WEB NOTES: The Vikings' new official site, vikings.com,
received 200,000 hits last Sunday, "causing the server to
crash" (Minneapolis STAR TRIBUNE, 9/16). The site alerts
users today that "while the server is up and running," the
current level of usage "is leading to a delay" for some
users (THE DAILY)....In Pittsburgh, Chuck Finder reviews the
Web sites of teams in the AFC Central and lists the Jags'
site as the best, followed by the Ravens. Finder, on the
Ravens: "They must've sold the stadium naming rights to the
best web designer available, because PSI Net created a site
better than the Ravens did a team." Finder ranked the
Bengals last and notes that the team lets let espn.com
operate their site (POST-GAZETTE, 9/16)....The WALL STREET
JOURNAL's David Sweet, who examined Web sites for "defunct"
pro leagues (remembertheABA.com): "The pull of nostalgia,
along with sites that are much slicker and captivating than
the league themselves, seem to lure fanatics and curiosity
seekers alike" (WALL ST JOURNAL, 9/15).
