Baseball at 2:00 a.m.: The postseason from the other side of the pond
by Max MarchiOctober 13, 2011
{exp:list_maker}1. Wake up at 1:00 a.m.
2. Watch the game.
3. Have breakfast around the sixth or seventh inning.
4. If the game ends quickly, take a nap.
5. Go to work and try to look alert.
6. Back home, have dinner.
7. Go to bed early.
8. Repeat until the end of the World Series. {/exp:list_maker}
That's what it takes to watch the postseason for someone living in Europe, six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.
Actually it hasn't always been that easy.
The '70s: U.S. bases radio
Note: I was born at the very end of the decade, so this paragraph is more retelling than personal experience.
There was no way in Italy to watch MLB back in the '70s, but there were baseball nuts who just kept turning their radio toggle until they found some station broadcasting the World Series for the benefit of U.S. soldiers serving in European bases. I personally know one guy who became a Red Sox fan after following the 1975 Fall Classic this way—and he didn't even speak English!
The '80s: VHS making the rounds
Video cassette players and recorders began to appear in Italian houses in the '80s. Thus, the potential for a new and enhanced way to follow Major League Baseball was there. But you needed to find someone who actually possessed tapes of the World Series. I was kind of lucky. One of the best national baseball teams plays in my city, and back then it usually employed a couple of U.S.-born players as imports, and the imports had the tapes!
I was not too far behind in the queue for getting the cassettes as I played second base in the under-15-years-old team, and the U.S. players occasionally came to our practice to teach us a some baseball fundamentals. Trouble was, the first kid who got the tapes (on a promise of creating duplicates, because he owned two recorders) was the one taking forever watching the games. And when he finally passed along the yearned-for treasure, there was no trace of the promised duplicates.
It wasn't that bad—I believe I even watched one World Series before the ensuing season began! Well, maybe memory is failing here, probably it was before the ensuing season ended.
The '90s: enter Pay-TV
The 90s brought Pay-TV to Italy. In the beginning there were just two pay channels, one for movies and one for sports. You didn't even need a dish to receive them. Also, without the decoder you would get a mute version of the broadcast with negative colors.
I perfectly remember a light-skinned Otis Nixon, wearing a black Braves uniform, laying down a two-out bunt with a runner on third and running on the green base paths. He did not reach the black first base bag in time, and the Yellow Jays celebrated their first World Championship.
I never got Pay-TV. In the beginning, I couldn't get over the fact that I had to pay to watch TV. (Moreover, I wasn't earning any money back then as I was in high school.) Then things became more complicated: You needed the dish, for one. Then each year it wasn't clear whether the sport channels would broadcast MLB (the only reason for which I would remotely start thinking about paying to watch TV).
So the '90s, like the '80s, were a decade of VHS for me. And since the number of people subscribing to Pay-TV was growing, I was able to get the tapes first-hand, a big improvement over the wait-for-the-kid-who-promised-the-duplicates times. In the '90s, I watched the games no later than a week after they were played, and very often, a few hours after they had been completed.
There was a little problem in the 90s: Tape measure. No, I'm not talking about moon shots by the biggest sluggers. The videocassettes had a capacity of four hours at most, and with the extended postseason commercial breaks, sometimes the game would not fit onto the tape. That did not occur every time, just in game going to extra innings.
Can anybody tell me what happened when Luis Gonzalez went to the plate to face Mariano Rivera? And what about Charles Nagy versus Edgar Renteria?
Third millennium: MLB.tv
I got my first MLB.tv subscription just in time to witness the Red Sox sweep the Cardinals and end their eight decades long World Series drought. MLB.tv was the deal I was looking for: Pay to watching baseball and nothing else. (Pay-tv offered a limited number of games plus a lot of other stuff, not baseball or sports related, I didn't care for.)
Thus, for the last few years, I've been able to watch the postseason live (and the regular season's day games, too).
And that's why you don't get any article from Max Marchi in October (look back at the eight points listed at the beginning of this article, which I wrote back in June).
Why not the following day?
You might ask why can't I watch the game the following day after work. Well, I tried that in the past. Theoretically, I would just need to stay away from the internet and e-mail to avoid knowing the result before watching the game. Though that's increasingly challenging in the third millennium, it can be done.
TV is not a problem. There is so little interest in baseball here in Italy that the chances you hear the World Series result on air are slim to none. (Exception: When the Red Sox broke The Curse, it made the news). For the same reason, you'll hardly run into a baseball nut who can't wait to tell you about the game. And the few baseball nuts, as soon as they meet you, they first ask you if you have already watched the game, to avoid playing the spoiler.
So, why not? Because every time you plan to watch the game the following day after work, you run into somebody (either at work or during the commuting), who couldn't care less about baseball. He will tell you the outcome of the game. He is not armed with bad intentions; on the contrary, he wants to please you, letting you know he knows about that strange game you like.
Because of that, it's been three years since the last time I tried to watch games on a 12-hours delay. And because of that, as you read this, my boss is trying to figure why I look like a zombie.
Poll
What's the most annoying character / event in this story?
{exp:list_maker}a. The kid not doing the duplicates
b. Running out of tape on the deciding at-bat
c. The guy who doesn't give a damn about baseball for 364 days a year telling you the outcome of the Series. {/exp:list_maker}
After creating a baseball rendition of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper cover, Max began his baseball writing because he needed an excuse to show the picture. He wrote for an Italian audience for six years before making the jump to The Hardball Times. You can contact him by e-mail.
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