The seventh-inning skim.

Baseball is a game of nuance, of the little things. The outcome of a game can hinge on something as seemingly insignificant as the distance between two fingers on a pitcher's left hand, or an infielder standing a couple of steps too far to the right. TiVo can be a valuable tool for those who like to focus on these sorts of things: The ability to watch a game on your own personal tape delay, to control the replay of a crucial at-bat, to skip commercials and stay in the flow of the game; these are all things that can enhance the experience of watching a game on TV.

There's a potential downside to TiVo as well, though. Once you get into the habit of fast-forwarding through commercials, the temptation becomes greater and greater to skim over a boring 1-2-3 inning, and once you get into the habit of skimming, it's not long before you get to the point where you're just skipping straight to the parts of the game with the big hits, at which point you might as well just be watching Baseball Tonight. All the subtlety is drained out of the game, and it's simply reduced to a brief series of big swings.

One the other hand, watching a game in fast-forward gets Joe Buck and Tim McCarver off of my television set that much faster, and that can't be a bad thing.