Southwest Airlines customers will soon be able to watch their favorite baseball team 30,000 feet in the air.

Row 44 Inc., Southwest’s in-flight broadband Internet provider, signed a deal with Major League Baseball that will allow the airline giant to stream audio and video broadcasts to passengers’ Wi-Fi enabled devices.

“Major League Baseball is such a part of the fabric of America — and has always been more than a professional sports organization,” said Howard Lefkowitz, Row 44′s chief commercial officer. “It is an honor that they’ve chosen to undertake this innovation with Row 44 — becoming the first sports league to offer in-flight live streaming video of its games. This partnership is the first in a series that underscore Row 44′s commitment to creating a unique broadband entertainment experience for our airline partners and their customers.”

Southwest is slated to have their entire fleet wired by 2013.

Longtime New Haven Register sports columnist Dave Solomon died Saturday evening around 7 p.m. in a one-car accident on I-91 in Connecticut. Solomon was returning from covering a UConn football practice when his car skidded off the road and hit a tree near Cromwell. Police are investigating the cause of the accident. Colleagues of Solomon, 59, recalled a long and distinguished career as a prominent voice in Connecticut sports.

“He was a true professional, but he’s like the best friend you have, too,” said Register sports editor Sean Barker said. “He was my confidant. I talked to him every single day, about stories, about the paper, everything. We had a couple of battles, but it was like family. He never let it last long.”

Solomon’s ability to move on has found immortality on YouTube. After Providence College’s Ryan Gomes, from Waterbury, lit up UConn in January 2004, Solomon asked Jim Calhoun, “Recruiting is hardly an exact science, but what does Gomes do that blows you away now that maybe no one saw?”

Solomon never said how did you miss on Gomes and never meant anything like that. He was talking about Gomes’ improvement. After he famously carpet f-bombed the XL Center, Calhoun came to this realization. He called and apologized to Solomon the next day. Solomon’s reaction? Calhoun didn’t need to apologize.

Jeff Jacobs of the Hartford Courant wrote,

“As a columnist, he stood his ground without histrionics. I admit there were a few times when I felt, wow, if I wrote black, Solomon would write white. And if I wrote white, he would write black. When I told him this once, he said, “I wasn’t aware you were wrong that many times.”

And then he smiled.

Barker said condolences from sportswriters poured in from around the country.

Tweets and messages came from across the sports world Sunday. Some of the most prominent names in sports journalism offered their condolences: Jack Curry, Andy Katz, Dick Vitale, Peter King, Les Carpenter, Adrian Wojnarowski, Seth Davis and many others.

They are household names to sports fans.

They all knew Dave. They all respected him. And they all liked him. A lot.

Former NFL veteran Hugh Douglas is joining ESPN as a studio analyst.

The former NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year will provide analysis on SportsCenter, NFL Live, First Take and ESPNEWS.

Douglas makes his ESPN debut Monday, including an appearance on NFL Live at 4 p.m. ET.

“I am very excited about becoming a part of the ESPN family,” Douglas said. “I plan to approach my role with ESPN with the same tenacity and commitment that I had during my 10-year NFL career.”

Following his retirement in 2004, Douglas worked as a sports radio personality on Philadelphia’s WIP 610 Radio and served as an on-air reporter for Comcast SportsNet.

If you’re like me, you need to be given a damn good reason to take an interest in NASCAR. Well, how about one million reasons? For the second year in a row, DirecTV is running its NASCAR Head2Head Knockout fantasy racing game on ESPN.com, which pits 32 drivers against each other in a four-week contest to determine which one is still standing when the checkered flag drops. And if your bracket is perfect, it could be worth $1 million. If it’s not perfect — but simply better than everyone else’s — you’ll win a $45,000 truck.

Starting at Pocono and continuing through the three races at Watkins Glen, Michigan and Bristol, you’ll have a chance to pick a winner in 29 driver matchups. In week one, each correct answer in the 16 matchups will be worth 20 points with the eight potential wins in week 2 worth 40 points apiece. Then, the wins in week three will add 80 points per to your total. In the final week, you’ll rank your final four drivers according to order of finish, and if your top one comes out ahead, you’ll get 160 points. That means over the four weeks, the maximum number of points you could receive is 1,120.

If you collected that many points there’s a very good chance you’d be the champion with the first prize a full size truck valued at $45,000 from on the manufacturer of the winning driver of race four.

You could also be in line for the Perfect Bracket Prize, which would be worth up to $1 million. To be “perfect” you would not only need to nail a perfect score, but also predict the correct finishing position order for each of those final four drivers in the race at Bristol.

The Walt Disney Resort in Orlando will no longer serve as the home for “ESPN The Weekeend.”

Walt Disney World sports media director Darrell Fry made the announcement on the Disney Parks blog:

“In order to focus our efforts on ESPN’s growing year-round presence at Walt Disney World Resort, we have decided to no longer host ESPN The Weekend.

As you may know, the event was first created in 2004 in support of ESPN’s 25th anniversary and, along with ESPN Club, served as ESPN’s first significant presence here. While the event has continued for seven more successful years, our relationship with ESPN has evolved significantly and positively. This has resulted in new branding for the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, new opportunities for millions of athletes, coaches and fans, and hundreds of hours of ESPN programming, making our guests part of the show. In addition, the sports complex has become home to the ESPN Innovation Lab, which is the official development hub for ESPN’s 3D network.

Moving forward, our focus will be on creating events like the new ESPN RISE Girls Showcase and the ESPN RISE Games, which provide a stage for tens of thousands of athletes from around the country, and providing opportunities for guests to be part of events they’ve only before watched on television, such as the Home Depot College Football Awards and the Old Spice Classic.”

 

For the third straight year, NBC will air an hour-long WrestleMania special.

WrestleMania: The World Premiere airs Saturday, Aug. 13 at 9 p.m. ET, and feature highlights from WrestleMania XXVII this past April.

The highly anticipated pay-per-view event in front of 71,617 fans at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta marked the WrestleMania return of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and featured a main event between John Cena and The Miz for the WWE Championship.

Charlotte Bobcats play-by-play announcer Scott Lauer was laid off by the team as a result of the NBA lockout.

According to Lauer, he was told his “position was eliminated” due to “organizational restructuring.”

“I still feel that once games begin that I’ll be broadcasting games again for them,” Lauer said. “I’m under that impression, but there is certainly no guarantee in that one way or the other.”

Major media companies relish the opportunity to promote themselves. Why else would Matt Lauer play himself in the USA series “White Collar”? Sporting events are particularly ripe for cross-promotion, with the broadcast networks paying big bucks for sporting rights. If there is an opportunity for free promotion, they take it.

The latest player is Fox News Channel, which has Shepard Smith anchoring from Phoenix, Arizona, the site of tonight’s Major League Baseball All Star Game (to be broadcast on Fox, natch).

Smith interviewed the Fox broadcast team in advance of the game, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver:

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John Feinstein, who is best known for A Season on the Brink, the year he spent embedded with former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight, has quit the Navy Radio Network after 14 years as a color commentator after the school agreed to do a documentary with CBS about the Army-Navy game — a project that Feinstein, whose book The Civil War chronicled the annual football game between the two service academies, reportedly pitched to CBS in the past, but to no avail.

I have no doubt CBS will do just fine with this. They’ll have the access and they’ll spend the money. They won’t have my anecdotal memory or know some of the stories about past players that I know and I’m SURE they won’t try to claim any of the stories I’ve written or told in the past as their own.

I’m not angry with the people at Army or Navy. This was a business decision. Could they have pushed CBS a little harder to involve me, pointing out that it would benefit the project? Yes. Would that have done any good? I doubt it.

The reason I’m stepping down then isn’t because I’m throwing a hissy fit at being left out. But, as I said in my note to the Navy people, Army-Navy and doing Navy football has never been a job to me, it has been a passion. Doing this documentary would have been a labor of both love and passion and, yes, I believe I would have done it better than anyone else.

So, to be at the games this fall and see CBS there with their cameras following players around; knowing they’re in the locker room with their cameras; encountering people from CBS all the time, is something I simply can’t face. It’s a little bit like dating a girl for 10 years, getting dumped and then being invited to her wedding. I just don’t want to watch it.

Can’t really blame him. Then again, the idea for a documentary about the Army-Navy game doesn’t seem like something that Feinstein alone could have brainstormed. Not involving him, though, seems odd. Hopefully CBS will address the reasons for doing the documentary without him.

It looks as though NBCUniversal is just about ready to announce the name for its cable sports network, currently called Versus. In April, Then-NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol announced that he expected to have a new name with “a strong utilization of NBC in the title” in around 90 days.

Ebersol may be gone, but if comments made by Comcast CEO Brian Roberts at a breakfast discussion hosted by Fortune are any indication, those plans are continuing.

During a discussion about NBCU’s Olympic rights victory, Roberts noted Versus’ new NHL deal, and hinted that a new name for the channel–likely including “NBC Sports” in some form–would be coming soon:

“We have Versus, which many have suggested will get re-named NBC Sports, or something with NBC Sports, including us allowing that we are going to start an NBC Sports channel,” Roberts said. “And take Versus which just made a 10 year deal with the NHL. We are thinking that way, and we will do something we just haven’t announced it yet.”

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