For years, I was a big baseball fan. This was largely a result, I think, of growing up in Cincinnati. During those summers when I was in college, there were few entertainment options: 1.)go to high school parties and feel like a loser 2.)Procure fake ID and go to bars to hang out with people I didn't hang out with in high school, 3.) go to the movies and 4.)go to a Reds game. I chose 3 and 4 and found myself a movie geek and a baseball fan.
I'm still a movie geek (Good Lord, but Sweeney Todd on Blu Ray was frickin' fantastic. Fantastic, I say!), but the baseball fandom fell away sometime around 2003. This was because I conflated baseball and real life in a way that was really unhealthy. When I look at the stuff I wrote about during the last few weeks of my late wife's life, a lot of it had to do with the Sox playing the Yankees. What should have been a distraction from the horror of life ended up getting all wrapped up in the horror of life.
And after that, I had a hard time caring about sports for a while. Since then, I've supported Boston teams in a kind of halfhearted fashion, but I'm also incredibly busy all the time and only rarely have three uninterrupted hours to do anything. Recently, though, due to my son's obession, I've been getting into soccer--finding myself very excited about the prospect of seeing AC Milan play Inter Milan at Gillette Stadium this summer. (We will be supporting Inter, as the boy worships Ibrahimovic, though it will be difficult for me to root against a team with a player named after poop (or Kaka, if you will)).
But there are things I miss about being a baseball fan--mostly, I think, the way in which baseball was comfort food for my brain for a long time. And yeah, there's some nostalgia for those days sitting in the $3.50 Top 6 seats at Riverfront Stadium with Eric, Steve, and assorted others, wearing my Reds hat with the card of Ron "True Creature" Robinson tucked into it, speculating on how Dave Parker's colossal butt was impacting his batting. So anyway, in hopes of rekindling my love of baseball, I shelled out 10 bucks for the MLB At Bat '09 app for the old iphone.
Whoa. This app is amazing. Live streaming audio of any game, lots of stats I will never care about or look at, and video highlights as the game is in progress. Everything loads quickly and works the way it's supposed to. (o, New York Times, why can't you produce an app that actually works the way it's supposed to? You're not streaming video or audio or providing live stats, and your app is a steaming pile of Kaka, or it would be if it would ever load successfully.) And now
For the baseball fanatic, this is an indispensible, incredible bargain. For somebody like me, it's still worth the cash--I can get highlights from the Sox and Reds games without having to wade through the dross of the local news or SportsCenter, and on rare nights when neither the Sox or the Reds are playing, I can catch a broadcast of some other game and enjoy the soothing sound of baseball announcers. They all sound exactly alike, and this, like most of baseball, is strangely comforting. Best of all, I can now enjoy baseball in a more, uh, dispassionate fashion, which is good for me and everyone around me.
Finally, the Red Sox are now 5-0 against the hated Yankees this season. Doesn't this diminish the rivalry somewhat? When, they ask, will Sox fans be satisfied? Here is the only scenario that will satisfy Sox fans vis-a-vis the Yankees, courtesy of George Orwell: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
