On Saturdays, I can watch the Twins only if Fox has determined there will not be a large national audience for their opponent. If Fox selects the game, they won’t broadcast it to me on either their New York or Los Angeles affiliates which I get by satellite. I never know exactly who gets to see those embargoed games that have the Twins in them, and there have been several this year, including today’s game against the Mariners.
Saturdays are tough. It’s a peak baseball day, and I only get my team if they slink into the night schedule away from the grasping, totalitarian Fox.
Today I experiment with another method of following the game. CBS Sports has committed itself to a serious web presence, and their Scoreboard feature allows one to follow along in halting, internet-packet jumps. I wouldn’t want to follow an entire game this way, but I monitored the last three innings of what was a 1-1 tie between the Twins and Mariners when I checked in.
Eventually, broadband will reach me here in the hinterlands, but right now I still live a dial-up life while very few big-time web sites believe such constraints still exist. For example, I can’t even load the ESPN or Sports Illustrated home pages, let alone navigate around. These sites are so soaked with video that I can’t even knock on their door. Likewise, most of the MLB.com pages are closed to me.
It’s a pleasant surprise to find the CBS site so hospitable, though I suppose people with broadband consider it a quaint little hut compared to the skyscrapers that require big bandwidth. I’ve been collecting box scores off it all season. But I assumed that the game update feature would be cranky, erratic, or impossible to use.
Not so. I can stare at a tidy tableau, giving batting order, pitching lines, and all updated stats for the game while watching crisp little notes accumulate one by one for each batter: foul, pitchout, ground out to second. There is even a little generic lefty/righty hitter cartoon beneath the batter’s head shot. Beside this illustration is a strike zone box, and each pitch is given a thoughtful little numbered dot that indicates, at least roughly, where it was pitched.
Then there’s a little diamond schematic, showing the defensive players and anyone on base. It’s all the baseball facts that you want, many of which you wish you had while listening to the radio, watching television, or sitting in the stands. I can see that Denard Span has struck out in his three previous at-bats today; I can see the ball/strike pitch count of starter Nick Blackburn. If you are looking for the facts to support your observations, here they are.
But what, exactly, would your observations be? I monitored (I think “watched” is the wrong term) long enough to dread that moment when there was a long gap between pitch updates. It either meant a hit or an out; all the other pitch outcomes posted much faster. So I look at the screen for a while, turn away to work on my spreadsheet, and peek back. Oh—inning over before I know it, or Yikes! How did Ichiro get on base?
The question can be answered, including whether he hit safely or reached on a walk or an error, but you don’t experience the moment. You get an accurate, prompt report, but no sense of whether it was a seeing-eye single, bad defense, or a scorching hit. It’s like getting a text message from the sinking Titanic, or a postcard from the moon. Yes, an eyewitness is keeping you up to date, but you are not there.
Well, I’m never there, am I? I considered driving to Boston for one of the two Twins games played there, the closest they’ll be to me all season. Wisely, I didn’t go—the game I could have seen was rained out, and turned into a day/night doubleheader to next day. I wasn’t there, and it’s unlikely I will get to any Twins game this year.
I’m not there, but I am watching most every game on television. And those TV sports producers have convinced me I’m having a real experience, as good or better than being in the stadium. I get replays, close-ups, and commentary. My attention is focused perfectly: following the sequence of the double play or the fly ball or the hustling runner. I have missed plays from the stands through minor distractions and just plain picking the wrong place to look. And for developing an umpire-quality opinion on balls/strike and safe/out calls, there’s nothing like the television view.
I’m not there, but television has made me feel I’m somewhere even better. I have easy access to a scrupulously clean restroom and a center field shot of pitch location. Why go to the ballpark?
My husband has the opposite view. Clarke will gladly watch baseball from a stadium seat, but only in the living room if I am corral him into following the postseason. We’ve been to games with good seats and games with terrible ones, but this doesn’t make a difference to him. He wants to be in a ballpark and feel the general flow and mood.
I admit to preferring television, but I, too, am swept up by the atmosphere in a stadium. I can summon up vivid recollections of moments in many of the games I saw in person, and it isn’t because these are such rare events. I’ve sat right next to a few fly balls; I’ve projected every vibration in my soul toward Carlton Fisk to drive in that needed run (nope) and to Pedro Martinez to get that strikeout (yes!). There is, ultimately, a sense that the pure aggregation of fans on any given day contributes something tangible to how the game is played that day, and I’ve whooped and booed to make it so.
Television helps me analyze; a trip to the ballpark helps me feel the joy of a team doing some winning on behalf of its fans. And radio does something else: it helps me integrate my memory and knowledge of baseball with the events of a particular game. Radio requires great imagination and can operate either with total concentration (driving or working in the darkroom) or peripheral attention (building spreadsheets).
I remember listening to a game pitched by Tommy John and having an announcer help me visualize just what it meant to be a sinkerball pitcher—how those groundouts just rippled across the field, each one to a perfectly positioned defender. And last week, I listened to the Twins announcers grope for something to say as the Twins were bring crushed 11-1 by the Indians, when even the play by play melts away into air.
Finally, I can follow the game from box scores, the condensed skeleton of a game. I’ve probed a few, trying to stitch together the why and how a win or a loss occurred. The box score can answer many questions, but never all. It truly is like the bones left over: hits and stats and facts, but no sense of time or space.
There are little pleasures in all these methods of following a team. Television remains my default position, but I got a little thrill of out-foxing Fox today. They built their fence around the game, but I found a knothole. And there it was: in the bottom of the eighth, Suzuki hit a single, and Ken Griffey Jr. drove him in to put the Mariners ahead 2-1.
Then I watched the Twins make their spectral crawl across my screen in the top of the ninth. If I can remember correctly, we had an out and then a walk, then Jason Kubel struck out. Two outs glow on the little screen display. Gardenhire pulls out all the stops, and sends in Brian Buscher to pinch hit and Carlos Gomez to run. Gomez gets to second on a passed ball that I never see—it’s just another truth reported with eerie precision on my screen.
Two outs, man in scoring position, one run down. Whether you’re in the ballpark, listening on the radio, or watching on TV, these are rich baseball conditions. It won’t take too much to win, it will take even less to lose. Some how, some way, Brian Buscher wrings a single out of the Mariners closer, David Aardsma.
Two outs, two on and Denark Span is up. He’s had an uncharacteristically bad day, the little tally reports: three strikeouts and safe on an error. C’mon Denard, I root to the compact display of unwavering facts. C’mon! Get a hit, I plead to the little team logos decorating the scoreboard display.
Get a hit, I think with my fists balled in hope at this acute, impossible distance from the game. The screen holds steady as the little images of pitches accumulate in the strike zone box. And then a large flicker and the report finishes itself completely, instantly—pffft. Span grounds out, game over, Mariners win 2-1, Twins are now 28-29, and the game immediately belongs to the past, turned over like a leaf. It was as if the players disappeared, scattered like sparks.
162 Reasons 