The Boys Are (blessedly) Back In Town

One of my best friends cannot read an analog clock. He literally stares at it for a moment, and finally says, “Why do you not just look at your phone?”.

While some small-and-no-I’m-still-not-old part of me rails at this disagreement, it’s a sadly losing one. At this stage in our digital lives, it’s actually hard to fault his argument. Reading an analog clock face quickly is just a mental trick you teach yourself when that’s your primary interface. It gets easy after a very short time.

It’s also how a doctor tested my mom’s memory, seeing if she could draw the hands of an analog clock face, as there was a time it was the only way she knew. She’s since re-learned the skill, but that first trip to the doctor was an embarrassing moment for her. Some things work their way out of your memory if you stop practicing them.

It’s why I re-learned skills like playing cribbage, and hand-scoring a baseball game, skills my grandfather taught me, and I have already taught my kids, and hopefully someday, my grandkids. They are each a weird art unto themselves, but also arts of eras much older than mine, which will make them all the more archaic and brain-stretching for my kids and their kids. For the record, one of my daughters hates analog clocks, cribbage, and baseball scoring. But she doesn’t hate that she learned how they work.

Baseball comes from an era where those hand-logged scores used to be the language that told remote viewers what had happened. America’s Pastime (TM) started in an era (1846) that the President was James K. Polk. Baseball preceded the Civil War, was a scant 40 years after Lewis and Clark did their thing, and America saw baseball through a different lens. The main reason early baseball didn’t have television contracts? The sport had to exist for 81 years before there was such a thing as a television. Of course there were less franchises. Hell, there were less states (29) when baseball spread its wings.

That age, and the attention baseball is getting of late is of concern to the baseball fans left out there. Which may be a part of why the game saved itself from a massive step towards irrelevance by avoiding a stoppage in play this season. By finally finding a path to compromise, players and owners hopefully just saved themselves in a critical moment for the game. Baseball had its lowest attendance in 37 years last season, and television viewership numbers aren’t faring any better. Had both sides of the fight remained as entrenched as they’d seemed to be, the fall could have been catastrophic.

The middling Rockies would have especially ill-afforded the layoff, with last season being the second-worst year for attendance in their history. Colorado baseball needs more positives coming their way, and they can only make them happen if they can get on the field. Even better with all 162 games intact.

Major League Baseball has only had three meaningful stoppages in their history, but each was followed by a slow return from some reticent fanbases. Each of those eras eventually had a story that brought fans back to the parks, like McGwire and Sosa, but the sport suffered mightily in the interim every time. While Shohei is putting on a hell of a show, and Bryce Harper just keeps cranking, the stars of todays game are not capturing the next generation’s imagination, and keeping them under wraps was only going to further exacerbate that situation.

I was deeply relieved to see that baseball found its way to play another day. If the game can make it another 24 seasons, it can celebrate a bicentennial. Maybe even a Rockies Championship somewhere in that time. As much as I rail at the current state of things with the team, I love them, and hope to see that championship and bicentennial both come to pass… and hope there’s anybody watching by the time they do.

Thankfully, summer must be coming. The boys are back in town.