On the watching of baseball

I've been slowly reading through Roger Angell's Season Ticket over the past few weeks. Today I came across an intriguing statement in it from Roy Eisenhardt, former president of the Oakland A's. He says, "The delivery systems of baseball are a great concern now [...] televised baseball is is almost an auto-immune disease [...] Baseball can't really be taken in on television, because of our ingrained habits of TV-watching [which teach us to expect instant gratification ...] Baseball is a terrific radio sport by contrast, because radio feeds our imagination" (92-93).

My baseball-watching experiences jive with this statement. Although I now do a large majority of my baseball-watching via television, I would never have developed a love for baseball without first seeing it live. I became a baseball fan when my dad took me to a Mets game in 1985 when I was five years old. The Mets destroyed the Braves that day something like 13-3 or 14-4, and the two most mythical Mets of the era, Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry (whose names along with those of Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter I knew even then, even though at that point in my life I knew basically nothing about the outside world), played important roles in the outcome - Strawberry hit a homerun and Doc got the win. I was hooked. It wasn't just the fact that the Mets had shown that they were an entity to be worshipped with awe and devotion which converted me, but also the communal aspect of watching the game with thousands of other excited fans. The woman sitting next to us kept yelling "Yay Darryl Strawberry!," and gave me some wafer cookies, my favorite at the time. Once I was initiated into the community, I was able to take my appreciation of baseball and apply it to my watching of it on television, but this appreciation probably never would have been developed if I had just experienced televised baseball.

Once I became a fan, I did grow to love watching the Mets on WWOR-TV Channel 9 with Ralph Kiner and Tim McCarver announcing. This was back when McCarver was still a serviceable analyst, in large part because he respected Kiner as former player and therefore didn't feel like the burden of offering inside scoops to the viewers about the game rested solely on his shoulders. Now, when he is teamed up with Joe Buck (who is the most insufferable play-by-play announcer of this era) on Fox's baseball telecasts, McCarver tries too hard, he sounds like he thinks he must be brilliant every time he opens his mouth, and as a result is just shrill and annoying.

I also loved listening to the Mets on the radio on WFAN 660 with Bob Murphy, and later Gary Cohen. Aside from the food and the people, the thing I miss most about New York City is WFAN. In junior high I would come home from school and spend the afternoon listening to "Mike and the Mad Dog," and during the winter I would listen to Rangers hockey games at night with Marv Albert or Howie Rose doing play-by-play alongside Sal "Red Light" Messina. During the 1993-94 season when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup, I listened to so many of their games that I learned the Canadian national anthem by heart, something I've still been unable to do with "The Star-Spangled Banner," which is the worst national anthem ever - "America the Beautiful" would be a much better choice.