Walking past the middle school mural for the ten-thousandth time, I noticed something: It’s a baseball mural! Right in the middle of the seventh enormous letter, there’s a batter standing and waiting for a pitch. The ball has motion lines. I stared at the motion lines and wondered, what pitch type is that supposed to be?
The lack of any perceivable drop suggests (to me) a high-spin four-seamer, “rising” from the release of a drop-and-drive power pitcher. But then the spin suggested by the motion lines is confounding. Could it perhaps be a gyroball, quivering like a bullet as it approaches the plate? If you imagine it that way—
—well, the question isn’t really that important. What’s important is that I only noticed any of this on my ten-thousandth trip past the mural.
There’s a concept called inattentional blindness, which basically suggests our brain takes in everything in its perceptual range but only notices—gives attention to—the small subset of stimuli that the subconscious deems relevant. Subjects in a study, for instance, were asked to stare intently at an image in the center of a screen, while words flashed on the periphery of the screen. The subjects didn’t notice that there were flashing words at all, focused as they were on the image in the center. If it flashed “Sum” and “Sim,” I wouldn’t even notice the flash. But if “Sam” flashed—my name—then I’d suddenly become aware and see it.
I walked past that mural on Wednesday morning at 7:30 a.m. The reason I noticed it this time is: It was the first day of the Major League Baseball season. I was walking toward my home to watch the archived broadcast of the Dodgers and Padres, who had opened the season a few hours earlier in Seoul. The start of the baseball season had changed my attention, changed how I was seeing the world.
I found this fact pretty powerful, and also—this year—frustrating. MLB has now persisted for 25 years in giving us these periodic soft launches, where the season starts a week early in a distant time zone as part of the league’s efforts to expand their reach worldwide. Instead of the national holiday that is Opening Day, this year began with a single game starting at 3 a.m. Pacific Time, before the Sports Illustrated baseball preview had even hit the shelves, before most people had drafted their fantasy teams, and before various kinks had all been worked out. The first day of a baseball season is the biggest day of MLB’s year, or perhaps behind the World Series alone. But the soft launch makes it inaccessible and anticlimactic, defusing the season of its momentum before any can even be generated, and making what should be three hours of communal giddiness into a lonely and low-energy experience. And, as we saw this year, it doesn’t even produce a particularly good product. Disappointing. I’m disappointed.
**
I watched the archived broadcasts of the first two games at about 9 a.m. my time. There are worse ways to spend two mornings, to be sure. But dodging G-Chats, avoiding social media, afraid to go to any baseball web sites to look stats up, not even letting anybody in my house talk to me so as to evade any spoilers is not how I usually watch ball.
The games had been broadcast (at 3 a.m.) on ESPN, but since those national broadcasts aren’t archived on mlb.tv, I watched the Padres’ and Dodgers’ broadcasts instead. The local broadcasts had to rely on the “world feed,” meaning they didn’t get to direct their own cameras. There’s an awkward disconnect between what the commentators want to talk about and what, because of the pictures on the screen, they must talk about. When they express curiosity about an umpire’s call, there’s no replay coming, and the question just dies out unresolved. When in the first game the broadcast repeatedly shows a trio of fans in Dodgers’ jerseys clapping and cheering—25 times or so, throughout the game—it’s super confusing, until the alert viewer figures out around the 24th time that one of those fans is probably Shohei Ohtani’s wife. Nobody on the local broadcast ever mentions this, that I hear. Who knows if they know.
A lot is a bit janky for this soft launch. The broadcast keeps trying to show Ump Cam replays of pitches, except the umpire’s camera is aimed too low and so the pitch isn’t even visible. Even after several of these failures on replays, the broadcast nevertheless cuts to Ump Cam live, giving us this fantastic, nausea-inducing view of the last two feet of a live pitch to Manny Machado:
The cameras aren’t particularly well synced,
and, perhaps for the same reason, there are a few times when the audio of the play (contact on screen, delay, crack of bat) aren’t well synced, either. Even the on-screen pitch clock ticks down irregularly, making me question whether the reliability of time is real:
Cameras would cut to strange angles of empty screens or lonely binders, presumably because camera crews were managing in an unfamiliar stadium.
The games themselves showed the same clumsiness. There were 25 walks—double the usual per-game rate—and only 61 percent of pitches were strikes, which would have made these two teams the sixth wildest pitcher in baseball last year. The Padres ran up a staggering five pitch-clock violations, though one—a consequential third strike against Xander Bogaerts—came on an absolutely inscrutable ruling by the umpire. (Inscrutable, and not even attempted to be scruted by the local broadcast, though the national broadcast did address it.) Grounders were kicked or whiffed; game two, especially, was a bizarre spectacle of relatively weak contact adding up to a football score. The most consequential play of the Major League Baseball season so far was a groundball that went through a hole in a player’s glove, just out-and-out equipment failure. A runner scoring uncontested randomly ran into the home-plate umpire. These were two weird games.
And since these are top-to-bottom the best in the world at their jobs—the players, the umps, the broadcasters, all of them—one has to conclude that it’s the challenge of the situation, not failure on their part, that made things so weird. Given how much unfamiliarity was piled on everybody this early in the season, none of it is too surprising.
**
Clearly, the biggest problem is less in the details and more in the headline: Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s only hope for crossover mainstream attention, was making his Dodger debut after signing the biggest contract of all-time. If the average person knows one thing about modern baseball—and, realistically, the average person knows exactly one thing about modern baseball—it’s Shohei Ohtani. And yet his Dodger debut is buried on a pre-dawn broadcast that few Americans will be awake to see, and practically no West Coast Americans will be awake see. If you were actually watching, he was pretty compelling—he was on base four times, twice by fielder’s choice, and he twice got to show his exceptional speed—but viewed in a box score upon waking up it was a pretty mundane debut: He had a couple singles and didn’t score. These were quite literally the most newsworthy regular season games that Major League Baseball will produce before late September, and yet the median American’s exposure to them was four words in the second half of a headline on a news feed:
You could argue it was just bad luck for MLB that Ohtani’s debut came so anticlimactically, that the league couldn’t have known when they scheduled this game (last summer) that they risked burying their biggest star’s debut. But a) they could have, since Ohtani-to-the-Dodgers was seen as at least a 50/50 proposition all along, and b) they definitely knew that they were burying Opening Day.
One of the great things about consuming baseball is that, because of its constancy, it creates and feeds a momentum for consuming more baseball. You have a game on while you’re cooking or driving, and if it ends you’ll ideally and probably have a different game to switch to. (Hence the sad moment every night when there is no more game to switch to.) This is especially true in the first days of the season, when the stomach is empty and the primitive part of our brain wants to hoard that which has been so scarce. But here, we get the first game of the season, and then nothing else for 21 hours. If we’re up for doing the drill again, either waking up early or avoiding spoilers for another archived broadcast, then we at least get a second game—and then nothing for a week. Nothing! They’ve given us a week of nothing in which to let our winter-induced hunger for baseball fade away. It would arguably have been smarter for me to have never watched these two games at all—and preserve the snap of next week’s “real” Opening Day—but then Ohtani’s biggest moment would, truly, have been a tree falling in the woods. I’m not sure there’s a way to win, here.
**
One of the defining concepts of modern life over the past year has been Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification.
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