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.