Pocket PCs have their position in "America's Game"

“CALL MY AGENT.”

Albert Pujols was in a bad mood. For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, Mr. Pujols is an all-star slugger for the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the best young hitters the major leagues have ever seen. He also stands 6-foot-3 and weighs 215 pounds, and as many baseballs would tell you, can swing his heavy wooden bats really, really hard. So when he scowled at my interview request and sneered, “I’m not doing anything until you call my agent,” I took him seriously.

Seriously enough to whip my trusty Pocket PC out of my jacket and meet Pujols’s challenge head-on. He figured I was a crackpot, and assumed I wasn’t connected enough to know his agent’s name, let alone his numbers. A few pokes of my stylus and I had more than a Pocket PC in the palm of my hand. I had a major leaguer.

Three numbers popped up on my screen. “Should I call Danny at home or work . . . or how about his cellphone?” I asked, flashing the evidence in Pujols’ increasingly embarrassed mug. Put it this way: I got the interview.

Evolving with the technology

I have spent the last 13 years as a baseball journalist, writing for Baseball America, ESPN, The New York Times, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. I can’t imagine doing it without all the technological innovations that have cropped up during that time, gizmos I have embraced and which in turn have returned the love, making me far more effective at my job.

My fetish probably started in April 1998, when I got sick of dialing 73 numbers to use my company phone card and purchased a clunky Qualcomm cell phone, which allowed me to forward office calls anywhere in the country, to whichever major league game I was covering that day. (Roger Clemens once reached me as I was deplaning in Seattle.) Nipped by the gadget bug, I tried out an HP 300 Handheld PC so that I could write stories on that little one-pound device if I wanted to travel light. Next came a new Dell laptop, which eventually was outfitted with a serial-port adapter that let me reach the Internet through my cell phone. That made me the envy of the press box, where phone lines are at a premium–and where I would sit, happily typing away, untethered.

I tried a color Palm OS device after that, but all my Excel spreadsheets for baseball statistics made me wish I’d gotten a Pocket PC. So I pawned my Palm off on my ESPN editor and got the Compaq iPAQ just as it was blowing everyone’s eyes out. Thirty-two megabytes of RAM! Oh, the stats I shoved on that sucker. So many people in baseball try to remember historical trivia off the top of their heads, and most of the time they get the facts wrong. If I had to know whether Vic Wertz’s batting average in 1958 was .279 or .281, I had it on my hip, literally.

(Please don’t ask about the spring training during which I tried an early version of GPS. The thing almost fried my iPAQ.)

Today, my mania for electronic widgets having fully matured, all sorts of other little friends come with me on road trips: A Dell hard-drive music player (with the mandatory Sony noise-canceling headphones), an Olympus flash-memory voice recorder for interviews (with downloading cord and software), a SanDisk Cruzer thumb drive to back up stories on deadline, a Canon digital camera in case the photographer flakes out on me; you name it. When the pilot tells me to turn off any and all electronic devices, I’m not finished until we reach cruising altitude!

Baseball players—Gadget freaks

The most fun part is how these gizmos help me relate to the ballplayers I encounter in the locker rooms. Many of them are gadget freaks, too. It helps when you make $14,000 a day, sure, but they often need advice on cellphone carriers, the eternal Pocket PC-versus-Palm debate, how to outfit their Hummer with a kickin’ GPS, laptop configurations, and more. Make no mistake–athletes love it when they can talk about something other than sports. More times than not, I talk with them about gadgets, and have a great time.