I sat down on the couch at 8:04 p.m. on Saturday expecting baseball. At 8:18 there were drones. Four hundred of them, according to the graphic Fox put up, arranging themselves over the outfield into a glove, then a baseball, then the team logo, then — and this is real — a QR code. I’m seventy-one years old. I am not scanning a sky.
First pitch was at 8:31. I want that on the record. Twenty-seven minutes between me sitting down with a beer and a man on a mound throwing a baseball, and most of those minutes were spent watching little blinking dots pretend to be a glove.
Behind home plate they had built a riser. On the riser was a DJ. I do not know his name and I refuse to learn it. He was wearing sunglasses indoors at night, which is a tell. He spun something before the anthem, spun something else after it, and at one point during the seventh-inning stretch the camera cut to him nodding with his eyes closed like he had just discovered fire.
I called Ray Kowalczyk at the second commercial break. Ray played outfield at Bucknell in 1974 and has held a grudge against every change to the sport since the designated hitter. Ray said, and I am cleaning this up considerably, that the postseason has become “a rave for billionaires with a baseball game breaking out in the middle.” Ray said he muted his TV at 8:09 and only unmuted it for at-bats. Ray is, as usual, ahead of the curve.
Coach DiMaggio, who ran my high school football program for twenty-six years and who watched exactly one inning of baseball with me in his life, used to say the only pregame ceremony a man needed was the umpire walking out from the tunnel. He said when the umpire showed up, the game started. Coach died in 2003. I am glad, on his behalf, that he did not see a drone form the shape of a foam finger over center field in the middle of October.
My neighbor Petey Corrigan flew to Game 3. Don’t ask. Petey paid $1,800 for a seat in the upper deck and another $46 for a hot dog and a beer described on the menu as “craft-forward.” Petey is sixty-eight and works part-time at the Ace Hardware. He told me when he got home that the stadium had a “curated speakeasy concourse” with a velvet rope, that the bathroom had ambient music, and that a man in a vest tried to sell him an NFT of his ticket stub. Petey came home with a sunburn and what he described as “a feeling of having been swindled in a new and creative way.”
The game itself, for the record, was actually pretty good. There was a 4-3 lead that turned into a 4-4 tie that turned into a 6-4 win in the bottom of the ninth. A reliever struck out the side in the eighth on twelve pitches. A second baseman made a play in the hole that I’d watch ten times in a row. None of it is what anyone is going to remember. They’re going to remember the drones, and the DJ, and the QR code, because that’s what the broadcast spent forty-three minutes on.
Somewhere along the way the postseason stopped being a baseball tournament and became a content event with baseball garnish. The sport is the parsley now. The drones are the steak. I don’t know when this happened. I suspect it happened the same week somebody decided a mascot needed a Twitch stream, and I missed the memo because I was watching baseball.
Game ended at 12:47 a.m. Eastern. I was awake for it because I am a professional and because Ray called back at 11:50 to tell me the DJ had played a snippet of “Sweet Caroline” between innings and he wanted me to know in real time. We sat on the phone, two old men, listening to each other not say anything, while a stadium two states over played a Neil Diamond remix at people who had paid $1,800 to be there.
Denise is bringing chili tonight for Game 4. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m going to eat it and I’m going to mute the pregame, and somewhere up there Coach DiMaggio is going to nod once, which is all the credit he ever gave anybody.