Take Me Out to the Flat Screen

And the Fake Noise Goes Wild!

I don’t know if people have noticed, but it’s a great time to be a sports fan.  The US Open of Tennis just happened, as did the Open of Golf; the basketball playoffs are in full swing and the baseball playoffs about to start, at the same time that the NFL season has started, and college football too (when the games aren’t canceled).  Sports fans are like kids in a candy store.  Games are everywhere.

You can’t actually go, of course.  But you can watch on the tube (which is all you ever did anyway).  And as you watch you can try not to be distracted by the weirdness of the whole situation.  The cardboard cutouts of fans in the stands.  At first they seemed generic, but in a baseball game I tuned into the other day, it looked as if they were photos of actual people, perhaps the people who own those season tickets.  Earlier in the season, Duke football allowed people to put cardboard cutouts of themselves in the stands to support the team.  I only wish they’d suggested that years ago, when the team was so bad.  I didn’t want to go, but I would happily have sent a cardboard cutout.

There is also the fact—I’ll stick with baseball here—that players are unmasked, but the managers and coaches have masks on, even as they’re chewing away on something, presumably not tobacco, because I understand spitting is prohibited.  No spitting in baseball?  Is that still baseball?  A pop foul goes behind the plate, and comes hurtling down, and the moron cardboard cutouts just sit there.  Ditto for a home run to the stands, where there isn’t even any cardboard.  And the whole time—at least on the games I’ve watched—there is fake noise, like the fake noise they used to have on late rasslin’ from Chicago when I was a kid.  If you stayed up past the late movie, a pro wrestling show came on with just three rows of real people, and, behind them, figures painted on the wall.  But there was fake noise too, so you’d think there were a lot of people there.  Except you could see the painted figures in the background, not moving.

One question haunts me: are the baseball players hearing the fake noise, so they get pumped up (even though it’s just some guy turning a dial)?  Or do only the fans hear the fake noise, while the players play the game in dead silence?

Also, are the announcers in the ballpark?  Or are they at home watching on the tube and talking with each other by Zoom?   I think I know the answer, but I’m suggesting a possible innovation.  Why risk your life flying to the site of a game with no fans when you can just as well watch it in the comfort of your home, and give us your insights from there?  While you lie on the couch like the rest of us.

The only sport I watch avidly is college basketball (which will probably start any day.  Why have seasons at all, why not have every sport all the time?).  Pro basketball games take too long, especially the fourth quarter; I’ve long since become disaffected with pro football (a heretical statement for a Pittsburgh native); and though I love baseball, it’s the sport I’ve stuck with the most in the course of my life, I really only like to be at the ballpark.  Hearing the sounds and eating peanuts and drinking beer, on a hot sticky summer night.  Years ago I used to go back to Pittsburgh to take in three or four games with my mother, and in recent years—since she died—I’ve gone to see my brother in the city and always taken in a game.  But I would rather watch a minor league game in person (which I often do when there are any) than the World Series on TV.  I don’t think baseball is a good TV sport.

I am addicted to an ESPN show called Pardon the Interruption, in which a couple of old farts—one roughly my age, so he’s really a fossil—discuss the day’s sporting news.  For a period of time during the pandemic it wasn’t on, and I was bereft (I record the show and watch it after dinner.  That’s why I was watching that ballgame the other night.  PTI wasn’t on, so I watched two innings of a real game.  Only the fans were cardboard).  So I’m thoroughly familiar with the news from the world of sports (as is my wife, who hears it in the background as she cleans up after dinner, and has strong opinions about everything.  “Carmelo?  He’s still around?”  “Why do they keep talking about Tiger?”), but I don’t actually watch the games.

I have mixed feelings about the whole enterprise.  On the one hand, I understand what a consolation sports are, in a time when there’s so much else we can’t do.  On the other hand, are we so addicted to sports (am I so addicted to a thirty minute sports program?) that we can’t do without them during a worldwide pandemic?  Do I want college basketball players to risk their lives, or the lives of their family members, to play the college basketball season this year?  I do not.  If one person dies, one grandmother of one Division III player who got the virus because he was on the team then passed it on to his grandmother before he knew he had it, that will be too many.[1]  We can do without basketball to save that woman’s life.  The height of sanity was when the NBA paused its season last spring when a few players were infected, and the NCAA canceled its tournaments at the same time.  I’d never been so proud of my team.  These days—when college football teams are playing—I’m not so proud.

The only sporting situation I completely approve of (except maybe golf, but who the hell wants to watch golf?) is the NBA bubble, which is the most fascinating thing in the world of sports.  Talk about sacrifice.  Does anyone mention that none of these guys—who are among the most testosterone fueled people on earth—are getting laid (at least not the straight guys)?  When a team gets ousted from the playoffs, do the players say to themselves, Well, we didn’t win, I gave it everything I had but we lost, but at least I can have sex with another human being again.  And the sacrifices that the wives are making, the girlfriends, the wives and the girlfriends, countless people we never hear about.  It’s staggering.

All this so people can watch ballgames instead of binging on Netflix.

Where they’ve already seen everything anyway.

[1] Sadly, I find since I first drafted this piece that deaths have already happened.  A Division III college football player died, and more recently a college basketball player died.  Are we waiting for some famous player to die?  Will we then ask the obvious question: why are we having these games?