Normal is hard to imagine, but baseball has always been constant in my life. And for the last fifty years, that’s meant the San Francisco Giants. And living in France that means MLB.com. Not perfect, but once I learned how to get to yesterdays’ game without revealing the final score, I was fine. It’s not easy and not recommended for the inexperienced.
So MLB.com brings me games, but as I’m sure you’re aware, there are no fans in the seats. This is surprisingly disorienting. The canned fan noise isn’t much help. The celebrity cutouts in the seats are amusing the first time you see them, but then it’s time for baseball and it doesn’t feel right. It’s more like some futuristic nihilistic experience designed to keep the people content. It’s Orwell-ball, and I suppose the participants are rewarded with extra rations.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you know the Giants are in what we might politely call a transition period; i.e., they suck. This is a changing of the guard, but I can’t help but feel that the good teams understand that change is inevitable and prepared for it. I will not, I cannot cite the Dodgers. The Giants chose to ride the wave until there was nothing left and now begin a total rebuild—from scratch. Hard to blame them, the wave was high, the money was good, Let the Good Times Roll.
BUT, we still have Kruk and Kuip: Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper They can’t pitch, they can’t hit, but somehow they make every inning enjoyable. They know the game and never talk down. What a pleasure. They never pretend to be dumber than they are—an epidemic in sports broadcasting—presumably because they think listeners aren’t very smart. Add in Jon Miller and Dave Flemming on radio, which is not available to me at the moment, and you have a reason to pay attention.
Yogi
My friend, Larry Walker, who grew up in the Midwest with the Cardinals on radio, prefers to listen. I’m a few years younger, was raised in New York with Mel Allen, Red Barber, Russ Hodges and the early days of television and have always leaned on the visual.
Sidebar: I‘m thinking about beer: Yankees- Ballantine; Dodgers-Schaeffer; Giants-Rheingold. Not sure that’s right. Anyone with better memory, please set me straight.
Normal—not quite. This virus that I think of as the earth’s response to all the damage we’ve done, has rearranged any idea we may have had about normal. Everything has changed and, like the Giants, we can ride the wave as long as we can, or we can rethink our relationship to this planet, and try to rebuild what we have so severely damaged.
©2020 Ron Scherl
