After another long hiatus, I’ve decided to come back to the blog. Let’s see if I can keep up with it on at least a semi-regular basis again.
Since Spring, there has been one thing that I’ve been predominantly obsessing over, and that is baseball. It’s been a long time since I’ve followed baseball with any kind of regularity. I remember watching when I was younger…particularly the play-offs and World Series. I didn’t try to watch every single game of any team back then, probably because I never had much interest in my local teams - Oakland A’s, SF Giants and in a roundabout way, the LA Dodgers. Those were the teams that local TV stations were usually broadcasting. I’d watch other team games such as Yankees, Boston, Cubs, etc. when local teams played them or when networks deemed such games profitable enough to broadcast here…but it’s hard to become an obsessive team fan from a distance. I remember liking Boston and trying to follow them a bit, but there was no internet or live streaming feeds in those days. There were newspapers and sports columns. So if you liked a distant team, you’d follow them via daily print articles and box scores. Not very exciting.
Then came my mid-teenage years and boyfriends, whereby my interest in baseball largely evaporated. None of my paramours, including my husband-to-be, had any interest in baseball, which didn’t help matters. I still watched the play-offs and WS when I remembered to, but not every year. Boston’s WS’s wins were exciting and reminded me “Hey, I like this team.” But it wasn’t for me the event that it was for people who have been active, dedicated fans of Boston for years…hats off to those long-suffering fans…for when the playoffs/WS would end I’d forget about baseball again, until I randomly happened to surf to a game at some point late in the season. It’s a strange relationship to have with the sport, for so long.
Last year towards the end of the play-offs I finally became frustrated by the fact that I’d get so excited/happy watching Boston during the post-season but then have to ‘turn it off’ during regular season because I couldn’t watch their games all the time. I wanted to be more than a long distance and post-season fan. I knew about cabletv sports packages, but had never investigated them to see what they were about…once I did, I also discovered that for the past few years MLB had been offering live streaming of almost all non-local games over the internet. It was a revelation. There were four main things that convinced me to try this service. One, it offered HD-quality streaming, while the cabletv baseball package where I live (Comcast) is relegated to the non-HD channels and looks rather fuzzy on the 50″ TV. Two, since I can watch games on the computer, I don’t have to hog up the TV all the time. Three, MLB.tv is about a hundred bucks cheaper than the cabletv package. And four, my favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, is nowhere near where I live and it’s the only way I can see nearly all of their games live. NESN broadcasting does not exist on the West Coast. Also, when I wish to, I can connect a computer to the 50″ tv and use it to watch the internet feed on…and it looks fairly good too. Certainly better than Comcast’s non-HD baseball broadcasts.
Thus, this year I have been completely obsessed with baseball, and more specifically, the Red Sox. I check game times and I watch every game that isn’t blacked out in my area (occasionally happens), I read sports news and blogs, and I’ve found a few internet communities to share live game chats with. It’s cool. The strangest thing about picking up my interest in baseball again, after so many years, is how different the game has become. It’s like becoming a fan of the sport all over again, with many things seeming brand spanking new.
I’m not quite sure what my husband thinks of all this, when for so long he believed my interest in baseball/sports was extremely casual, heheh. He has watched enough of the games with me to be casually familiar with the current Red Sox roster, but he’s definitely not a baseball ‘fan.’ Myself…well, mostly I just love watching the games. The debates about trades etc. are background noise…I am a fan of the gameplay itself, not the managerial/business aspects, if that makes sense. I’m not the manager and I wouldn’t want to be, so I’m not interested in thinking about what I’d do if I was one. I understand why many do, tho. :)
I like several teams to varying degrees and try to keep tabs on them…but my heart is for the Red Sox. I may not be one of the “long suffering” Boston fans, but I have been an odd, distant fan for many years…and it’s very nice to finally be able to watch and follow them enough for my fandom to become a more permanent fixture in my life.
Go Boston.
