Ray Kowalczyk called me at 7:14 on Thursday and asked why the sky above the ballpark had a QR code in it. I told him I didn’t know, Ray, I was watching the same broadcast he was, and the broadcast had spent four minutes on a drone show, ninety seconds on a woman in a sequined jumpsuit playing the anthem on an electric cello, and had not yet, at any point, shown me the starting lineup.
This is what Opening Week looks like now. There is a fireworks cue, a hype-video cue, a mascot cue, a partnered-content cue, and somewhere down the run-of-show there is a baseball game, which the network cuts to when nothing else is scheduled.
I counted the sponsors before first pitch. There was a presenting sponsor for the drone show. There was a presenting sponsor for the FIRST INNING. There was a presenting sponsor for the seventh-inning stretch, which is a stretch — you can’t sponsor a stretch, Coach DiMaggio would’ve walked out of the dugout and taken the microphone. There was a presenting sponsor for the manager’s post-game comments, which is how I learned that even the manager’s mood is now brought to you by a sports book.
My guy at the section-108 concession stand — Petey Corrigan, been pouring beer at that park since I had hair — told me the ushers now have iPads. Not for tickets. For “guest experience feedback capture.” Petey said a woman in row 14 gave the game a three out of five and got a coupon. I asked what the game got a three out of five for. Petey said the game itself. As an event. She wanted more.
More. That’s the word. Baseball is a game where a guy stands still for six seconds and then throws a ball ninety-eight miles an hour and another guy tries to hit it with a stick, and somewhere along the way we decided that wasn’t ENOUGH, and now we need a light show and a mascot cannon and a between-innings segment where a kid races a hot dog. Coach DiMaggio used to say if you can’t sit still for nine innings you don’t deserve to sit at all. He’d have loved the pitch clock. He’d have hated everything else.
The pitch clock, I’ll give them. I’ll give them the pitch clock. Games are shorter, pitchers work faster, and a man my age can now finish a ballgame before his second Tylenol. That’s a win. But they took the twelve minutes they saved and gave them to a guy with a headset who yells “MAKE SOME NOISE” between every out. That’s a wash. That might be a loss.
Robot umps are coming to the bases next year, or so my nephew tells me — he works in “content” for a team I won’t name, because I love him. He says the players are FOR it. He says the umps are for it. He says the league office is for it. I said, well, who’s against it, and he said nobody, and I said then it’s already lost, kid, because the best things in baseball were always the ones somebody was against.
My team, for the record, opened 2-4. The shortstop situation — which the broadcast never got around to explaining — appears to be a rotating cast of four different guys, none of whom can go to their left. My starting rotation includes a man who throws a pitch called a “kick-change,” which sounds like something you’d do to a vending machine. My closer has a walk-up song with a feature verse. He has a walk-up song with a FEATURE VERSE, folks. The song has guests.
And yet. Yet. On Saturday afternoon, in the top of the eighth, with two outs and the tying run at second, my leadoff kid — twenty-three years old, hair down to his shoulder blades, looks like he sells crystals at a farmers market — turned on a slider and put it 418 feet into the second deck. The park went dead quiet for a full second before it went insane. No drone show. No DJ. No sponsor. Just a bat and a ball and a sound.
That’s the thing they can’t sell you, and it’s the only reason I still turn it on. Ray hung up. Petey texted me a picture of the ball landing. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.