This is no secret, of course, but watching a baseball game in 2009 is entirely different than it was three years ago, five years ago, and, of course, all the years before that. This is not only because of that incredibly annoying &#8220;Lumiere Place&#8221; commercial that they play 20 times during Royals games, the one where the preposterously obnoxious &#8220;friend&#8221; leaves voice messages like, &#8220;Come on, answer the phone, I know you&#8217;re just watching TV.&#8221;</p><p>How this guy got anyone&#8217;s phone number, I&#8217;ll never know.</p><p>No, even more, the information available when watching a game is remarkable. Saturday night, I closely watched the Royals-Twins game because &#8212; and this is no secret either &#8212; one of my great joys as a baseball fan is watching Royals starter Brian Bannister pitch. This is one of the really fun parts of being a Royals fan this year. Every fifth day, you can watch Zack Greinke pitch &#8212; he throws four devastating pitches, pitches control, fields his position brilliantly, knows how to go for the strikeout. He can throw a masterpiece any time he goes out there.</p><p>And every fifth day, you can watch Bannister pitch, and he is a lot more like the rest of us. He is trying to get by with what he has. He can sometimes throw a four-seam fastball 90 or 91 mph, but it tends to get hit hard at that speed. He has a curveball that he will occasionally try to spin in there, and his best hope is that the batter doesn&#8217;t see it coming. He has a change-up but that pitch has been unreliable, like a car that might or might not start in the morning.</p><p>So basically, he tries to get by with his fastball, which is also his cutter, which is also his slider. Nobody really knows how to categorize it. He throws it without touching any of the seams on the baseball, and basically it will go anywhere between 85 and 89 mph, and it will cut to the left, and it has been just unpredictable enough to get him to the big leagues.</p><p>It&#8217;s a funny thing: Banny went away from that pitch last year. He had studied the statistics and came to the conclusion that he could not be successful at the big leagues by throwing that pitch. So he started to throw the more conventional pitches &#8212; four-seam fastball, curveball, slider, change-up &#8212; and he got lit up. He went to spring training this year and kept trying to throw those pitches, and he got lit up. He went to Omaha, and in his first minor-league game he tried to throw those pitches. He got lit up again.</p><p>So, in desperation, he went back to his crazy, no-seam fastball/cutter/slider pitch. And immediately, instantly, he started getting people out again. He could not figure it out. And for the first time, he did not want to figure it out. He read a quote by the knuckleball pitcher Charlie Hough that inspired him. Hough said, and I&#8217;m paraphrasing: I don&#8217;t like being a knuckleball pitcher, but I like pitching in the major leagues.</p><p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t like throwing my fastball at 87 mph,&#8221; Bannister says. &#8220;I don&#8217;t like being that guy. But I like getting paid to play this game.&#8221;</p><p>So, yes, I settled in front of the television set to watch Bannister&#8217;s start on Saturday in High Definition. And I had more information than the NASA people had when trying to land Apollo 13. I had one Internet browser set up on MLB.com Gameday, so I could see the precise speed and location of every pitch.</p><p>I had another browser on Baseball-Reference.com, so I could see exactly how every Minnesota Twins hitter had done against Bannister. Twins slugger Justin Morneau was hitting .389 against him. This made it a little bit more meaningful when Bannister got out of a jam in the first inning by striking out Morneau and then having catcher Miguel Olivo throw out Alexi Casilla trying to steal third base.