Games: #4 (@RedSox, W 7-6), #5 (@RedSox, W 4-1), and #6 (@RedSox, W 4-1)

I had hoped to get this up before the first game of the Pirates-White Sox series, but it’s been down to the wire a little bit. (The first inning just started, with old friend Rich Hill back on the mound for Pittsburgh). The short version of things is in the first part of the week, the Boston Red Sox hosted the Pirates and were soundly swept. It speaks, maybe, to the mediocrity of this Red Sox squad. But the part of me that likes the enneagram and astrology thinks it’s also indicative of a season where down is up and up is down, where these rule changes seem to introduce variables that allow anyone to have a shot.

Even if that’s just how it feels, that’s really something. 

Rule changes aside—and there’s no shortage of hot takes on the subject—the other aspect of this experience that’s new is technological. I’ll say more about this soon, but one piece of the media experience that’s shaping this series of little essays is the presence of a projector in our house. (Not just that projector, but a tiny little adapter that connects it to my phone, the only piece of electronic equipment that MLB.TV is compatible with. Everything else is too old or too cheap or both.)

What this enables is an viewing experience that is certainly impressive and immersive—the projector produces an image the size of a living room wall, with remarkable clarity—but also shared. There have been years where my Red Sox experience is deeply isolated: alone on earbuds or while washing dishes or doing housework, listening to Joe Castiglione and friends on WEEI (and not, thankfully, the deeply problematic hosts on during the rest of the station’s broadcast hours), occasionally bringing Seema to a bar to watch the first four innings of a Yankee game, and this only when we didn’t have kids.

But now, watching a likely terrible team hold its own against other likely mediocre teams, what’s left is the game itself, and that’s a spectacle worth seeing at scale–and sharing with others.

Things take a minute to get started, in baseball and in life. Here, the one image I have of this series is of (MLB home run leader, at the moment) Brian Reynolds in left and Jack Suwinski in center miscommunicating and dropping a flyball between them. I watched a minute of the Red Sox broadcast, just to see how Kevin Youklis and Dave O’Brian get along. Both pretty happy with their work, it seems. Hooray for them.

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