An Analog Approach to Enjoying Baseball

It’s Baseball Week on TechGraphs. Our writers have been describing tools they use to keep up with the baseball season. Bryan Cole’s is below.

Look, I get it. Technology makes baseball better. There’s no question. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that being able to flip between any MLB game happening live anywhere around the world*, with a little pull-up menu that instantly that shows how your fantasy teams are doing isn’t amazing. It is.

* – Certain blackout restrictions apply.

If you wanted to follow the 1912 World Series, here’s what you did: you went down to the newspaper office and you stood outside and you watched an electronic scoreboard with mechanical players that operators updated every time they got a telegraph from the stadium. This sounds like an “uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow” style exaggeration, but this really happened. Some people paid as much as 50 cents — the same price as a bleacher seat at the actual Series! — to watch these scoreboards.

Still, baseball is one big nostalgia trip for me: listening to the game on the radio, scoring the game on paper, saving ticket stubs to commemorate the games you went to. But there are still ways to bring some of these parts of the experience into the 21st century.

Radio Broadcasts

We’ll get the easy one out of the way first. An MLB.tv subscription of course includes the home and away audio broadcasts of all games, and you can get an audio-only subscription for just $20 all season. If you speak Spanish (or want to learn the extremely hard way), those broadcasts are available too. If you want still more people talking about baseball, there are a number of baseball-centric podcasts* that go incredibly deep on virtually every aspect of the game.

* – I’ve been looking for a daily baseball podcast on the level of The Basketball Jones for a couple years now, but I still haven’t found anything quite like that.

Keeping Score

Baseball Reference is a thing of wonder. Your dad can start reminiscing about this time he saw Yaz play a doubleheader against the Senators when he was in elementary school and boom, you can tell him who the winning pitchers were before he gets to the part where their car overheated in traffic on the way home.

Before then, the only way to get those details was to keep score with paper and pencil (or a pen, if you felt confident). There are a number of different scorekeeping guides and books, with varying levels of complexity. If you want to just mark down whether a player reached base safely or not, that’s fine. If you want to track balls and strikes, cool. If you want to try to indicate where the ball was hit on that tiny little diamond they give you, go for it.

My only advice is to get one that’s wider than it is tall. Most of the books available in sporting goods stores are designed for Little League coaches, so they have something like 16 lineup slots and only nine innings. But if you happen to be scoring an extra-inning game, your choices are either (a) stop keeping score at the most interesting part, or (b) copy all of the lineup information over again only to have the lead-off hitter hit a walk-off homer in the bottom of the 10th.

Obviously you don’t have to do this to enjoy a baseball game. At the professional level, you don’t even have to do this if you want to see how your favorite player is doing, since it’s usually a couple of smartphone clicks away. But it does give you something tangible to remind you of the game you went to and that, yes, Dad, Tim Wakefield did give up six homers in that game.

Paper Tickets

The ticket stub is a built-in souvenir, a reminder of the specific game you went to (so you can look it up later on Baseball-Reference). And recent tickets — the ones with photos on the front — tell you even more: a generic shot of the stadium or fans cheering tells you that team probably wasn’t very good. But teams have stopped mailing out those admittedly easy-to-lose pieces of paper, instead sending a PDF fans can print at home. And that’s great, and they’re actually really convenient if you’re meeting up with people, but no one’s going to pay for a super-sized PDF printout to hang on their wall.

For once, technology actually offers ways to counter this. Apple’s Passbook can be used in a number of MLB parks and lets you hang on to past tickets, meaning you can actually take your collection with you. Then again, when you think about the phone you were using ten years ago, you realize these digital tickets might not be with you for as long as you’d think.

The fundamental language of baseball is one of tradition, of grizzled scouts and outdated equipment and 60-year-old men wearing uniforms and suboptimal strategies because That’s How It’s Always Been Done. It’s ridiculous, sure, but if you squint (or if your vision is going), you can convince yourself that Ted Williams and Babe Ruth and Sandy Koufax could actually still survive in this game, giving it a link to the past none of the other sports really enjoy. In a few minutes, the nostalgia will pass, and I’ll be back to looking at StatCast data while watching two games at once.

Until then, get off my lawn. I just found the tickets from that road trip I took to see Pedro Martinez pitch against the Braves in Shea Stadium.

(Photo by Scott A. Thornbloom/U.S. Navy)