Pirates Desperately Need Wi-Fi Upgrade at PNC Park

Pittsburgh Pirates Changes 2014-Episode Two

You know the feeling.  You’re at the Pittsburgh Pirates game.  You just snapped a great pic of Neil Walker.  Or your drunk buddy pointed out Chest Hair Guy and you took a photo of how he carefully sculpted Let’s Go Bucs into his voluminous chest carpet.

You MUST share this picture.  It’s your civic duty to let the universe know about this.  You need to tweet this to all of your friends, followers, and of course then text it to your Mom.

It’s ready to send.

You hit send.

Nothing.

The fail wheel just spins.

PNC Park has awful wi-fi.  Most of you know this already.  A perfect example for us was during the NLDS.  Absolutely nothing would work.  Everyone knew who was at the game because they disappeared from social networks for three plus hours.

We saw first hand how the poor setup also impacted businesses within PNC Park.  Because my son just had to feed his inner Lloyd McCledon and have the souvenir of all souvenirs, first base, we went to Hunt Auctions after the Pirates victory.  The line was ridiculously long which is always a good thing.  But the reason behind the line wasn’t.  The credit card processing was taking three or four attempts before transactions could be completed.  And this was twenty minutes after the game was gone and the ballpark was mostly empty.

I think the challenge is that Major League Baseball attendance, revenue, television rights, sponsorship and merchandise sales, the value of Bob Nuttings ballclub, the healthy labor contracts, hell everything is sky high with no sign  are all sky high.  Why should anything change?

Maybe they could look closely at the NFL who is requiring all league stadiums to meet newly crafted minimum Wi-Fi and cellular standards.  It all must happen by the conclusion of the 14 season.  The NFL wants desperately to make the in-game experience better.  I believe MLB did a study looking into it.  Yeh, whatever.

I read that the median viewer of last year’s World Series was 53 years old.  Perhaps they aren’t into social networking as much as the fans at PNC Park, but here’s the bottom line.

Baseball fans in Pittsburgh shouldn’t have to turn off their smart phones and be exiled into the post-appocolytic palace that Kevin built.  Come on it’s 2014 already.  Fans should be able to share everything from a grainy picture of the Pittsburgh Kid taken from the very last row to a close up of some kick-ass chest art.