You can watch sports today in the clearest, high definition.
I still prefer listening to ball games on an AM/FM radio.
On a spring day that's almost too hot for April.
A cold, cheap beer cracked.
I'll wear my team's hat and a sweat stained white t-shirt that still has grass clippings or sawdust on it.
I'll fight the antannae and dial until the static is tolerable, but almost never gone.
People say baseball is a boring game.
But the spirit of it is something as close to a national pastime as we have in this country.
Blues. Jazz. Rock and Roll. Muscle cars.
And baseball.
Listening to baseball on the radio abstracts it even further.
Taking a "boring game" and boiling it down to only one sense.
But where space and boredom exist, imagination rushes in to fill the void.
I am alone, but not alone.
Piped into an experience of a crowd I can only hear as a background hum.
Joining the frequency with a handful of others on porches, with beers.
There are some commercials. And pauses for network identification.
But no bright colors. No scrolling graphics.
Just hum. Static. The smack of a ball in leather. The crack of a ball on hickory.
The enthusiastic voices of commentators trying to fill the air.
Baseball has no pre-packaged thrill. You have to work at it. You have to look at it from different angles and think "what can I do with this?"
The thrill of it isn't obvious. You have to make it up.
And so your mind travels down corridors of the spirit of the game. Your imagination works to make something of it.
It is slow. Deliberate.
It doesn't ask much of you.
I guess I'm okay with warm air and a beat up glove by my side.
The strain to make sense of a game I can't see.
A wandering mind and sips of beer as deliberate as the game itself.
The sensation of sandlot baseball when I was a kid and old legends of the game.
The lore makes it great.
And a game on the radio leaves room for the lore.
It only carries the local games. No baseball package.
That’s fine — I like rooting for the home team.