Through a confluence of events, some of which are being written about in this very journal, I have not enjoyed one of my very favorite summertime traditions in many weeks; that being the televisual feast that is Friday Night Baseball. In fact I have seen very few Mets games at all since the last day of May. But life happens, and I have found that when it does it happens suddenly and compounds quickly until the proverbial snowball becomes a metaphorical avalanche of the mundane.
Fortunately for my loved ones and myself, nothing bad has happened, in fact many good things have – but my attention, as it inevitably does as summer begins, has drifted away from the television and with it the New York Metropolitans.
I’ve seen two games at the ballpark since the last one discussed here on the last day of May, and I’ve taken in a number of games at my local minor league park, but I’ve watched no more than a handful on TV; which is quite a dramatic downturn from having seen nearly every single game (at least in part) from Spring Training until June.
But despite my apparent disconnection I have kept in touch, and an unexpected byproduct of this absence has allowed me to reconnect with another passion of mine: the nearly archaic print newspaper. I’ve always had a love for newspapers, despite growing up in a house where we only subscribed to the often quaint but completely lackluster regional daily. As an adult I became a weekend New York Times subscriber, though am certainly not like the archetypes shown in their vomit inducing commercials – seriously, I’m a fairly intellectual liberal myself and even I want to punch out those douchebags.
Despite the Times’ Sunday Sports section often being quite good, it’s not the kind of sportswriting and baseball coverage that I crave. I’m more of a fan of the old cranky New York writers that pound out terse sentences and approach the sport from an almost mythological standpoint, as if the battles of the Iliad were playing out in stadiums across town.
When I lived in Brooklyn I took great joy in picking up a copy of the Daily News, my tabloid of choice, at the bodega on the corner along each morning along with my Red Bull and pre-packaged croissant. Tabloid papers are much easier to read while standing up on the train, and I used to quickly read the headlines and the comics, and then skip right to the baseball.
I’m a Daily News subscriber now and I relish each morning sitting in the chair by the fixed portion of the sliding glass door that leads to our little deck, reading about the baseball like Santiago, the titular old man of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, the tattered newspaper his only connection to the Great DiMaggio.
And for the past month or so, this has been my only connection to the game as well. Rather than just rehashing the game I watched a night or two ago or going over the same news and analysis I’ve already downloaded or listened to on the car ride home, I’m experiencing it the way it has been for generations and it transports me to a much earlier era when discoveries were still there to be made and we weren’t all drowning in a sea of information.
This is something that I think about quite a lot actually, and it is spurring a deep resentment for technology, putting me at odds with my vocation and the livelihood it provides. I’m old enough to have had a childhood before the Internet, and I find that what I miss most from those idyllic days is a sense of wonder that pervaded every interest I pursued. I’ve long been a story junkie and every new comic book, novel, television episode, movie, video game, and album that came down the pike was a mystery – and the scraps of information gleaned from print media like magazines or the even more powerful hearsay only fueled the fire of anticipation.
Gone are the days when I would walk into a bookstore and find a new release from one of my favorite authors, as if it had appeared there suddenly like magic. Or the thrill of finding the missing issue of the comic book you collected just starting to yellow on the bottom shelf of a drug store’s magazine rack. Or of seeing a new movie having only caught the barest glimpse of it in a 30 second trailer months before.
Coming to the paper each morning, empty of knowledge, has helped to rekindle that fire – if only a little. I have no plans to abandon watching the game I love, that would be incredibly counter-productive, and my absence has had nothing to do with my ruminations on the pre-Internet era of limited communications. But this side-effect has been interesting, and it leads me to ponder if whether we can exercise enough control over our lives to live them the way we wish they could be?
I don’t know, and a terribly hot and muggy Friday afternoon is not the time to tackle such weighty questions. All I do know is that tonight I am excited to watch the Mets take the field in Florida and to see what comes next.
