by Jason Snell
Baseball and magicians, but not Bluetooth
Last week Joe Posnanski wrote an excellent story about PitchCom (subscription required), the technology that’s now used by Major League Baseball to relay pitch calls between catcher and pitcher. After a century of catchers sticking down one finger for fastball and two finger for curve, two magicians adapted technology used for mind-reading acts to work in baseball.
It’s a fun story, but there’s one technology-related line that made me laugh out loud:
How about using a Bluetooth device so the pitcher and catcher could just talk with each other? Well, in the words of Craig Filicetti, one of the world’s great builders of magic devices, “Bluetooth sucks. It’s completely unreliable and nobody can figure out how to connect and disconnect. It will never be Bluetooth.”
Good ol’ Bluetooth. But General Motors thinks it’s good enough for iPhone users.