Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2004 > October > 19 > Entry
Fatigue and confusion of a baseball couch potato
The Red Sox-Yankees series is killing me — on so many levels.
No sporting event should last more than four hours. Last night’s game started in the afternoon and ended past my bedtime. It lasted longer than “Gone With the Wind” and longer than it takes to cook a 20-pound turkey, come to think of it.
I’m not inherently a baseball fan, but for reasons beyond my control, I’ve become a Boston Red Sox fan. My husband is a lifelong Sox fan (which means he’s spent many springs and summers in a deep depression), and our son is a freshman at Boston University.
So here I am, glued to the television for hours on end, listening to Tim McCarver babble on and on and ON about sliders and knuckles and minutiae that only stats nerds care about. Here I am learning all about Johnny Damon — who apparently was a good player until this series but now can’t make his bat find the ball except for a muffed bunt. I’ve been sucked into baseball against my will.
And watching these games has turned me into my late grandmother. She was a diehard Dallas Cowboys fan who never understood the concept of instant replay. She would leap up and down when a touchdown was replayed, thinking her beloved Cowboys had scored twice in a matter of seconds. Then she would cuss like a maniac when she thought a fumble had happened multiple times.
Now I’m more sympathetic to her confusion than I was back then. Watching the Red Sox-Yankees games on Fox has been a struggle to figure out what’s happening NOW and what happened, oh, a few minutes or a few years ago. Fox tosses in replays from previous games and earlier plays with frantic abandon.
Who sits down and watches a five-hour game continuously? I can’t be the only viewer who occasionally gets up to do laundry or cook dinner or pay a bill or two. When you suddenly hear raucous cheering and see David Ortiz slamming a home run over the green wall at Fenway, you think, finally, that interminable 4-4 has been broken. Then you realize it’s a clip from a previous game. Bummer.
To make it easier on us fair-weather baseball fans, they should limit the playing time to three or four hours (whoever is ahead at that point wins) and either label the live shots “live” or the replays “replay.” It’s just too depressing to realize I’m turning into my grandmother, screaming for joy in the kitchen when the only thing that just happened was a replay.
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