Richard Meltzer: The Wisdom in Our Underwear

From Jan 6, 2000…Lowdown scroll for Richard Meltzer’s hot n’ haruspicy take on instant replay. (hep up Feds)

1969

The year instant replay became standard for major league baseball, not merely for homers and crucial fielding plays but practically every pitch (“Curve ball, low and away, Ralph”).

An accursed season not even redeemed by the up-from-the-sewer N.Y. Mets snatching the World Series.

This wurn’t no simple, gratuitous recoverability number, like reruns of old films or “oldies but goodies,” the concept/package introduced on AM radio around 1960, but something (in the scheme of things) genuinely pernicious: the undermining of spectator consciousness.

An end to unidirectionality…to events in time heading somewhere…to time/expired actually meaning something.

PLUS: the root beginnings of nonstop cross-cut sports editing (with hyperactive fans and players’ wives and the crippled kid who’s got a month to live and all o’ that), employing “cinematic” means to manipulate the perception of real-time events in real time, thus rendering space permanently unreal (first done “experimentally,” and with major malice, in the live broadcast of the JFK funeral some five-plus years before), a follow-the-dots aimed at more than a quaint li’l studio audience: the stay-at-home sporting masses, bub!

Our first taste of such as STANDARD MALICIOUS BROADCAST PROCEDURE.