The Silence Of Pictures

So I'm being told this one also counts.

Watched faithfully, again, at work, with a cup of coffee and the sound off. Now Baseball has amazing flexibility across mediums. It works well on the radio if you have good announcers. It succeeds on T.V. because little fails on T.V. really. There the action doesn't need commentators, but it helps to have them. You can watch the game and judge for yourself if a pitch was a fastball or not, if a batter was out, or if a pitcher looks flustered. On the radio, the good ones tell you just enough to let you judge for yourself. Radio announcers -- the good ones -- are minimalists. There is a basic assumption among the listener and announcer. It is a prerequisite of the listener to possess, if nothing else, an active imagination. A strong ability to picture and feel and assemble for yourself the details as they are presented. And it is the delight that a baseball game gives us the time and pace to do this: to imagine.

Yet, I am drawn at times more often than not, to the silence of pictures on the television. Where my imagination is acutely silenced. And I feel something is lost.

Transworld Depravity On Opening Day

So we're 1-0. Today was opening day -- or so they've lead me to believe. That this is the first playing since my team stole the fire of the gods. Well, so much for tradition. So much for hot dogs. So much for ice cream. So much for opening day.

In any other year, opening day is a proper noun complete with capitalization. But today, with the first pitch coming at 6AM EST live from Japan, there was nothing proper about it. Nothing that reminds me of Opening Day. The time when I used to run home from school or work, smell the hot dogs in the house and watch baseball. Eggs and bacon can't replace hot dogs and ice cream. And a 1-0 record, a win, can't replace this emptiness either. This feeling that I've let down my childhood because I couldn't muster the energy to get up and eat hot dogs and watch baseball before heading off to work. That somewhere, if we are to believe that every moment of time exists at the same time, a little child with a ball and glove and mustard around his lips saddeningly looked at me and this game and this version of opening day across dimensions as we sipped coffee and watch the Red Sox win. Alvin Plantinga might call this Transworld Depravity.

But they tell me this counts. They tell me this is Opening Day.

Transworld Depravity, which is used to prove that it is logical for evil to exist and their still be a good God, has proven something utterly stultifying today. And I'm sorry for that.