BPro: Silver: Shrinking the Ballpark

More broadly, there are many ways to follow baseball these days without actually watching it, such as being into fantasy, video games, or even sabermetrics. What might seem like anti-social behavior to a 50-year-old—sitting on one’s computer, flipping back and forth between several games, obsessively checking one’s fantasy statistics, and IM’ing or text-messaging friends—may seem like the most natural thing in the world to a 20-year-old.

Still, I’ll bet you that most of those 20-year-olds were significantly influenced by having attended games as 12-year-olds, or by continuing to attend games occasionally as young adults. The experience of watching a game at the ballpark need not necessarily be a superior experience so much as it is a different experience that allows these younger fans to enjoy and embrace the game in different ways. Conversely, I tend to think that, if one’s engagement with baseball becomes overly virtual, it is at more risk of being displaced by other virtual pursuits, such as playing Grand Theft Auto or renting something from Netflix.

Although...The Rise and Fall of the Pavano Crime Family was never made into a flick.