“It’s hard to say exactly which moment it was that we realized the iPod had taken over our entire civilization. But it might have been this one: The day we first heard, last summer, that baseball players were using their iPods to do their pregame video studies — as opposed to, say, their pregame Shakira video studies,” Jayson Stark reports for ESPN.com. “The iPod as indispensable baseball tool. Who knew?”

“‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Astros pitcher Jason Jennings told ESPN.com. ‘It sure beats looking at videotape.’ Until a few weeks ago, Jennings played for the team that pioneered the iPod’s invasion of baseball — the Rockies,” Stark reports. “He was one of 17 Rockies players who got swept up last season in a trend that began with an event that didn’t exactly have the look of a major sporting revolution at the time: Brian Jones, then the Rockies’ assistant coordinator of video coaching, got an iPod for Christmas. Pretty earth-shattering, huh?”

Stark reports, “It wasn’t even a video iPod, either. Just your basic Nano. But all it took was some initial fooling around with it to get Jones thinking there might be more to this fascinating gadget than the ability to download the Red Hot Chili Peppers on it.”

Stark reports, “So Jones and his video cohort, Mike Hamilton, did some iExperimenting to see if it might be possible to load their baseball videos on this cool little contraption. And the next thing they knew…”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Col. Angus" for the heads up.]

Related article:
Apple’s iPod with video helps Major League Baseball teams – June 16, 2006