I hate instant replay. It’s killed sports for years.
Last week at our workout facility, I situated myself for my first set of ab crunches. TV screens abound. Donald Trump rants on one. Storm clouds explode across another. A third shows an early season major league baseball game. It draws my eye.
The pitcher unleashes a curve. Replay. They show it again. Replay with a line drawn from the release to the catcher’s mitt, tracking the ball flight. Another replay demonstrates the other spots the pitcher either hit or missed within the strike zone.
In less than five seconds I am bored and focus and tightening my stomach muscles against the force of gravity and time. I ponder this while counting to 30 reps: “Quick, incessant replays destroy baseball.” By extension, this occurs in all other sports.
I grew up in New Jersey, just outside New York City, rooting for the Yankees because the Mets were mired in Loserville. As I came of age, the Yanks were winding down, and I remember a World Series, then they too joined the joined the losers’ bracket for well over 10 years. That didn’t stop my support.
All the names stay with me, from Bobby Richardson, Mel Stottlemyre and Joe Pepitone to Horace Clarke, Gene Michael, Roger Repoz, Danny Cater, Thurman Munson and Tom Tresh. Some made it from the early part of the 1960s to the 1970s and saw the franchise re-ignite.
When the Yanks got hot again in the mid-1970s, my energy and enthusiasm rose with them. So many years in the depths makes you more appreciative of ascension to the top. I stayed a fan all those years, and into the mid-1980s because of the grittiness and clutch hitting of players like Munson and Cater. Though free agency had begun, few players jumped teams year-to-year.
That changed in the mid-1980s, and I slowly drifted away as big bucks caused cash registers to ring in the players’ eyes. It became harder to follow your team because you didn’t know the roster from one year to the next. I lost interest in learning the names, checking out their stats or reading box scores.
At the time, I didn’t consider replay as a killer of enjoyment. Yet its insidious encroachment on all sports contributes to a lack of desire to watch a game on television. When you see a tag at second in baseball or a dunk in basketball five times in quick succession from different angles, you grow bored. I don’t want to see it.
Last spring I watched a college Division III baseball game at our older daughter’s school, and recently I sat through an entire high school game with a buddy to see his son play. Both times it struck me why I LOVE baseball live, but not the televising of it: The pace.
Baseball, if it moves along smartly, captures the slower rhythms of life. That’s nice in our explosively-speeded-up world. You take time to watch where players position themselves, how the catcher grabs a handful of dirt to signal the first baseman he’s going to try and pick off the runner. Subtle hints abound, and if you know the game well, it is those things that make it so enjoyable as a spectator (along with sitting in the first row of the bleachers and keeping the scorebook).
Like all sports, baseball is an escape. It allows us to get outside our daily lives. We’re fortunate Abner Doubleday invented it. If we could un-invent the replay, we might be able to enjoy all sports for the raw athleticism and dynamic teamwork they present. We’d spend less time critiquing and dissecting, and more time alert and paying attention. There’s a lot to be said for that.
Last week at our workout facility, I situated myself for my first set of ab crunches. TV screens abound. Donald Trump rants on one. Storm clouds explode across another. A third shows an early season major league baseball game. It draws my eye.
The pitcher unleashes a curve. Replay. They show it again. Replay with a line drawn from the release to the catcher’s mitt, tracking the ball flight. Another replay demonstrates the other spots the pitcher either hit or missed within the strike zone.
In less than five seconds I am bored and focus and tightening my stomach muscles against the force of gravity and time. I ponder this while counting to 30 reps: “Quick, incessant replays destroy baseball.” By extension, this occurs in all other sports.
I grew up in New Jersey, just outside New York City, rooting for the Yankees because the Mets were mired in Loserville. As I came of age, the Yanks were winding down, and I remember a World Series, then they too joined the joined the losers’ bracket for well over 10 years. That didn’t stop my support.
All the names stay with me, from Bobby Richardson, Mel Stottlemyre and Joe Pepitone to Horace Clarke, Gene Michael, Roger Repoz, Danny Cater, Thurman Munson and Tom Tresh. Some made it from the early part of the 1960s to the 1970s and saw the franchise re-ignite.
When the Yanks got hot again in the mid-1970s, my energy and enthusiasm rose with them. So many years in the depths makes you more appreciative of ascension to the top. I stayed a fan all those years, and into the mid-1980s because of the grittiness and clutch hitting of players like Munson and Cater. Though free agency had begun, few players jumped teams year-to-year.
That changed in the mid-1980s, and I slowly drifted away as big bucks caused cash registers to ring in the players’ eyes. It became harder to follow your team because you didn’t know the roster from one year to the next. I lost interest in learning the names, checking out their stats or reading box scores.
At the time, I didn’t consider replay as a killer of enjoyment. Yet its insidious encroachment on all sports contributes to a lack of desire to watch a game on television. When you see a tag at second in baseball or a dunk in basketball five times in quick succession from different angles, you grow bored. I don’t want to see it.
Last spring I watched a college Division III baseball game at our older daughter’s school, and recently I sat through an entire high school game with a buddy to see his son play. Both times it struck me why I LOVE baseball live, but not the televising of it: The pace.
Baseball, if it moves along smartly, captures the slower rhythms of life. That’s nice in our explosively-speeded-up world. You take time to watch where players position themselves, how the catcher grabs a handful of dirt to signal the first baseman he’s going to try and pick off the runner. Subtle hints abound, and if you know the game well, it is those things that make it so enjoyable as a spectator (along with sitting in the first row of the bleachers and keeping the scorebook).
Like all sports, baseball is an escape. It allows us to get outside our daily lives. We’re fortunate Abner Doubleday invented it. If we could un-invent the replay, we might be able to enjoy all sports for the raw athleticism and dynamic teamwork they present. We’d spend less time critiquing and dissecting, and more time alert and paying attention. There’s a lot to be said for that.