• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, May 8, 2013

If you haven’t see it already, you will soon: Major League Baseball video clips will start showing up on TheLocalBugle.com newspaaper site in your town where you read the game story written by your team’s widely-admired, but hopelessly-grizzled  beat reporter.

Ah, it’s baseball.

NDN, the video content syndication and advertising provider for the online media market, has just started its new deal with Major League Baseball Advanced Media, that will ship streaming video clips to more than 4,000 publishers that are Associated Press members or affiliates.

It’s a major league deal for NDN, which gets to sell premium video advertising that is fresh and renewed daily in some way, shape or form for most of the year, and certainly from April through October.

Take a look at how the Boston Herald’s Web site used chat about Red Sox hurler Clay Bucholz from the MLB’s cable channel to fortify a Herald columnist’s own story about the  “non-troversy” a week ago that Bucholz  was throwing an illegal spitball. 

I watched the video and ended up skipping the words. Maybe that’s because I’m not much of a Red Sox fan, but it also could be because I got distracted by the MLB game highlights clips on another part of the Web page.

At a lot of newspaper Websites, the sports section is a major attraction, and probably nothing much draws them there more consistently than baseball stories. It’s a long season—162 games, at least, and that doesn’t include six weeks of spring training and about a month of playoffs.

“We feel like we’re bringing very premium video to these sites,” says Kevin Gentzel, NDN’s chief revenue officer and a baseball fan I caught by phone while he was visiting Milwaukee and just before he was heading out with clients to a Brewers game. “You can see the beat writers linking video to their stories. It creates a rich experience for the reader and advertisers.”

NDN divvies up advertising pre-roll revenue with the Website publishers and the MLB. NDN’s roll of advertisers include JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, SunTrust, Visa, Procter & Gamble, PNC Bank and BP, but their commercials also show up in the other features, business, news and entertainment content NDN sells and distributes.  

Probably quite intentionally, the easy access to MLB video could give the sport a little shot of media adrenaline. For a lot of reasons, I think baseball players are the least known athletes in their towns. There usually aren’t lengthy television pre-game shows, and there’s no halftime to provide time for interviews with stars, and unique to baseball, a lot of them aren’t really comfortable speaking English. It could use wider exposure of some of the slick programming MLB presents on cable.

“We are committed to expanding the reach of the national pastime across leading news destinations,” said Kenny Gersh, senior vice president, business development of MLBAM, in a statement.

I was looking at the New York Daily News site yesterday and it featured an MLB clip of a really horrible and pretty funny ceremonial first pitch toss by a singer at a Los Angeles Dodgers game. I doubt that would have been noted on the Daily News site two or three weeks ago.

If that’s the case for baseball, keep your eye on the ball-- or something. Gentzel says he’s in negotiation with another major league sports franchise to make the same kind of deal, but he won’t say which one, or even describe the shape of the object players are trying to do something with.  

NDN tried to get the baseball deal done in time for the new season, but didn’t quite get it done. No doubt, at least one big boss wanted it to happen. Reggie Jackson, the legendary Mr. October of the New York Yankees, is a major NDN investor.  

pj@mediapost.com