LOOKING AHEAD 2011: DIGITAL

GAMERS WILL be able to add a new dimension to their NFL experience in March with the release of Nintendo's 3DS, a handheld dual-screen device that can display 3-D graphics without the need for glasses and will count a Madden game among its launch offerings. EA senior director Ryan Stradling calls Madden NFL for 3DS "the traditional Madden experience" with a few wrinkles, namely the 3-D graphics (which, he explains, are facilitated by the 3DS's approximating the distance between the device and the user's eyes) and a new interface that will allow players to sketch out pass routes on the bottom screen with a stylus and execute them on the top screen.

Brow Beat

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SABERMETRICS?

Bah. Artist Craig Robinson prefers his baseball more free form. At Flipflopflyball.com, his quirky anthology of charts and graphs, Robinson, 40, ponders the cost to MLB if bases were literally being stolen ($248,102.43 in '08); the year in which the Yankees project to run out of double-digit jersey numbers, having retired every option (2100); and other such arcane questions. Robinson admits to spending "a lot of time in my head," the results of which are so appealingly presented that one could imagine his work hanging in a living room as, for example, a reminder of what A-Rod's salary in pennies looks like compared to the Earth. Never wondered these things? Admit it; you're curious now.

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IN 1884 labor unions championed the eight-hour workday—but that didn't lighten the labors of Providence Grays ace Charles Gardner (Old Hoss) Radbourn, who won a record 59 games that year. Today, that work ethic carries on in the form of a Twitter feed on which an anonymous Hoss stand-in riffs on current events ("The Patriots are 'dropping a Gettysburg' on the Jets") and the softening of today's athletes ("After winning the 'Cy' Young, F. Hernandez had a cry. After winning 59 games I went to the bordello for a whisky and a trollop"). Hoss's frequent tweets are refreshing in the typically banal twitterverse.

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COURTESY OF EA SPORTS (3DS)

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MARK RUCKER/TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES (RADBOURN)

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FLIPFLOPFLYBALL.COM (DEFENSIVE POSITIONING GRAPHIC)