Most of you have probably seen the new Insider feature we’ve rolled out at ESPN.com, the RealTime scoreboards.

Well, we’re now working on the baseball one. I’ve got a sneak preview of what it might look like. We’re incorporating a bunch of feedback we got from users into the new one, focusing on the most common complaints. The technology to do this is still too complicated to install on the client end, IMHO. You need to either have Flash 7 and be on a home network (or an office network that is set up like a home network), or use the Java/DHTML version. Even then you need to have things configured correctly or no dice. It’s frustrating to have something that is so close to actually working universally (we followed just about every standard there is on this stuff), but to get snagged on a few implementation inconsistencies. Oh, and poor proxy support in Flash 7 and Java.

Here’s the preview of ESPN RealTime for Baseball:

You need to be an Insider to use this technology, but it’s well worth it. Heck, I wanted an app like this so bad that I wrote my own ESPN GameCast client before I came to work here. The new RealTime scoreboard has just about the same functionality but is hooked right into the feeds we get, so they’re literally up-to-date within seconds of each pitch.