Been watching a lot of baseball lately.
And thinking about baseball as a new-media experience.
At one point in the fifth game of the Red Sox-Yankees series, one of my housemates wondered aloud about the year won-loss record of the pitcher, Bronson Arroyo.
His daughter, who had her lap-top on (so she could IM her friends during the game) the whole game, went to the Major League Baseball website and found out. There it was a database/encyclopedia at our disposal. Having stats available at all times is of vital importance for the baseball fan, since it's such a stats-worshipping game (epitomized by the GenX General Manager of the Red Sox, Theo Epstein, who is famous for playing by the numbers).
It also seemed to me that there were other database/encyclopedia aspects of the game presentation, with the computer-generated graphics, such as the (extremely annoying) talking baseball, and the pitch presentations by Al Leiter.
A far cry from my teen summers, in the 70s, long before cable, long before laptop computers, watching the Chicago Cubs every day on WGN. Jack Brickhouse and Jimmy Piersol in the announcer's booth. No fancy graphics then, or encyclopedic presentations (no nightgames either, unless the Cubs were on the road). It was magical, even without computers, even with the Cubs never even coming close to first-place after mid-July.
Oh, and I almost forgot: we even got to vote, on the MLB website, for the Red Sox Best Hair: Pedro with his "jeri-curl" look, Manny with his near-dreds, Bronson with his corn-rows, and Johnny with his Biblical locks.
We voted for Bronson because he shut down the Yanks in the 7th, and not for Manny (the runner-up) because he failed, once again, to hit a homerun in the top of the inning.
Posted by jeb at October 21, 2004 1:16 AM | TrackBack