Baseball and fatalism
Living On The East Coast* again has very much affected the way I watch sports.
In my previous life, the fact that sporting events came on at 8 or 9 at night was no big deal. They’d come on, I watch them and then after they were done, I’d start on my homework. Before I started a real life in which falling asleep before 1 am became important to my continued success, I had moved back to a time zone where things came on at a “normal” time. Games ended at 10 pm and even a little OT fit within the acceptable margins that allowed me to get enough sleep.
This is no longer always the case. Sunday Night Football (the sports program formerly known as MNF) very often runs so late that unless the game is compelling, it gets turned off at halftime. Sometimes, even the compelling games go too late. For these cases, I have discovered the Tivo’d sports event.
Oddly enough, the first time I can remember watching a recorded sports event was the massacre of the Minnesota Vikings by the Giants in the NFC Championship after the 2000 season. I can’t remember why we couldn’t watch the game, but some time after the game had ended, we met up at an apartment belonging to our friend, a Vikings fan, and played poker while watching the game, which his girlfriend had recorded for him. As things went from bad to worse for the Vikings, he asked her if it got any better. And of course it didn’t. So we turned it off.
Tivo has been nice as an occasional thing for those “compelling” football games. Ahh, but the introduction of baseball has changed things. Having split time between Denver and Cleveland, both the ALCS and NLCS held my interest this year. But of course, the start times presented a problem, as did the sheer volume of games, which (along with a hectic work schedule) began to monopolize my time, to the chagrin of my wife. I Tivo’d quite a bit. I have found that it is quite easy to not accidentally stumble across a baseball score, even in the World Series. But all this Tivo-ing has had an effect.
After a few times, I find myself watching a game that has already become history with a sense of fatalism that I don’t have when I know the game is nearly “live.” It’s as if I’m watching a movie I haven’t seen before. I have a preferred outcome, e.g., my team winning. But I no longer watch with that irrational feeling sports fans get that they somehow could affect the game. I’m not worried about jinxing my team, not waving balls fair, Fisk style, as if it would make a difference. The…fatalism is almost…kinda…peaceful.
But the sense of fatalism is tweaking my sense of time, too. I’ve started to think of time as this…two way street. I mean, it’s a generally accepted principle that an event at time t > t0 can’t affect an outcome at time t0. But maybe this is a convenient convention that we have to use simply because we are so used to thinking of time as uni-directional, because we can’t “remember” the future as we can the past and so we are unable to see connections that have been there all along. Maybe our view of time is completely backwards. Maybe, instead of entropy increasing inevitably, the Universe is actually moving to a more ordered state.
Maybe, baseball is just too slow and I have too much time to think between pitches.
*-Yes, this is deliberately absurd. But no more absurd than considering the Mountain Time Zone as part of the “West Coast” as the networks do. Note to New Yorkers: you cannot see the Pacific even from the highest peaks in the Rockies.
