Somewhere back east on Wednesday morning a baseball fan will pick up his sports section, glance briefly at the Giants/Marlins boxscore and think, yeah, the Giants have to beat those guys, and move on. What he might miss was a bit history that might very well slip by a baseball media more interested in Roger Clemens’ Single A start and Barry Bonds big head. Last night Jason Schmidt grabbed a bit of history and firmly etched his name as the most dominant Giants pitcher of his generation.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, I have several partner links listed on LostinaFog.com to help connect you readers with cool products or services. You can use me to purchase from Amazon, sign up for NetFlix, buy songs from iTunes, or connect to a bazillion google ad buyers. But the most successful of my partner links is with MagsForLess.

I posted earlier that using a discount magazine subscription to ESPN the Magazine was by far the cheapest way to get access to the Insider content on the ESPN website. And if you read ESPN online, you know that all the stuff you really want to read is behind that wall. You can click on the magazine cover in this post to hop over to MagsForLess and pick up the cheapest subscriptions on the net.

I watched last night’s Giants-Padres game in a place with music playing and the TV sound down. Somebody had turned on the Close Captioning. I ignored it mostly until I started noticing that some of the typing was pretty funny. I’m sure I couldn’t sit there listening to Kruk and Kuip meander through a ballgame and get it all down right either. But, it seems to me that when you’re hiring that person to do a ballgame, you might want to pick somebody that is a baseball fan and would understand some of the lingo.

They seem to make it harder and harder, but I am still a baseball fan. And that makes this one of the best sports days of the year…even more so since the NCAA Basketball Finals are tonight also. If you are a baseball fan too, then you’ve already used my ESPN Insider hack to get access to all that extra content on ESPN’s website.

Baseball is about to investigate itself. Not because it is fighting with its collective conscience over the effects of steroids on baseball. Not because it is concerned that some kid in sacramento is going to harm himself trying to be “like Barry”. Not because outraged fans are beating down Bud’s door and demanding it. Commissioner Selig is opening an investigation into Barry Bonds and illegal substance abuse in baseball because he is being forced to by Congress.

Newsvine launched today, moving out of beta. The link above takes you to the official blog of the site that lays out what they have now and what more is in the works.

I post and seed at Newsvine, with some overlap to lostinafog, but not much. I like the site for the instant wire feeds and can sometimes find news I would miss otherwise. Check them out.

As part of The Great Magazine Experiment I subscribed to two sports magazines: ESPN the Magazine and Sporting News. The first comes twice a month and the latter every week. This was the area of the experiment that I entered with the greatest doubts. Sporting News’ whole reason for existence ages ago was to supply baseball stat guys like me a single spot to see all the baseball stats every week…and the stats from those other sports, too. And by other sports I pretty much meant basketball and football. It expanded to fuller coverage of hockey at some point and now gives NASCAR pretty much equal treatment.

NFL to re-air Super Bowl commercials. CNET is reporting that the NFL Network will air a special show that includes nothing but the ads from the Super Bowl. Now there is no reason to put up with the interruptions from all that damn football to get to what we all really want–the new Budweiser ad campaign. Or Pets.com….what year is this?

And when exactly did the Big Ads become bigger than the Big Game?

WASHINGTON, DC — Each new year brings with it new laws, many of which became effective on January 1, 2006. Having seen the huge success the Motion Pictures Asssociation and the Recording Industry Association had in protecting their material through draconian DRM measures in 2005, several other industry groups lined the halls of congress in 2005 looking to protect their assets, also.

The Great Magazine Experiment includes two big costs–the monetary cost to subscribe to all these mags and the time cost devoted to reading them. The latter will be explored along the way as I report back on the results. But the Monetary cost can be laid out fairly completely right now. The list today includes 16 magazines (pending decision to renew New Yorker and Esquire, not currently included in the list here. There are 12 monthly titles, 2 that are biweekly, and 2 weeklies. Some of these were bought in package deals, most as annual subscriptions, but a couple as multi-year subscriptions. The discounter that I purchased most of these from (and affiliate with) is MagsforLess. They offer some free magazines for points you earn by buying other titles from them. So, I have a couple of freebies coming from them for the purchases made for this experiment thus far.

I wrote several posts ago(here and here) that it appeared that it was far cheaper to subscribe to ESPN Magazine through a discount service for a great price as a way to get access to ESPN Insider content on the website. I can certainly confirm that this hack works great, with one caveat. Here’s the details: