A Means of Coping

Everything’s out of whack. You don’t need to be mainlining CNN to know that. Maybe you haven’t spoken to another flesh-and-blood human being for days. Possibly, you’re working from home, or worse, find yourself without a job entirely. Almost certainly, if you’re reading this, you’re missing baseball. If you use baseball to mark the seasons, these longer days would, under normal circumstances, portend the last few stress-free days of spring training and the imminence of Opening Day, the moment of deliverance from our long period of privation.

But these aren’t normal circumstances.

No live baseball and no hope of it anytime soon has me filling the void any way I can. I’m reading about baseball, of course. Not the daily output of the beat writers, mind you, because there’s no news to report, no matter how hard they’re digging. Instead, books (some old and some new) help soothe a bit of the ache in these moments. But they can’t replace the way baseball, when all is going as it should, fills in the cracks that emerge throughout the day, which I typically soundtrack with a background game. Making dinner, cleaning the dishes, whatever. The TV’s reassuring glow, the announcers’ voices, the crowd’s reedy murmur, the sweet, utterly ignorable presence of it.

In the absence of anything resembling the commonplace, I find myself reaching into my bag for the trick that gets me through winter’s coldest, darkest, most remote days: plumbing the depths of YouTube for old ballgames to watch, listen to, ignore. That there is no live baseball on the horizon only lends the act a greater urgency.

Some thoughts on the baseball history available through a certain well-known video site.

RADIO INSIGHT: TuneIn Becomes Oakland Athletics Flagship Broadcaster

“The Oakland Athletics are moving their game broadcasts to their “A’s Cast” 24/7 streaming channel on TuneIn.

The franchise becomes the first MLB franchise to move to a completely streaming audio platform after spending the 2019 season on Salem Media Conservative Talk “860 The Answer” KTRB San Francisco. The games will be available for free in most of Northern California and as part of TuneIn’s premium service elsewhere in the country. The franchise will also continue to operate an eleven station network based at Bonneville’s 1140 KHTK Sacramento.”