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Mais Ou Sont Les Scoreboards D'antan?

In the summer of 1981, major league baseball players went on strike for several months. This left what was then the Red Sox radio station, 1510 AM, with an obvious problem. In desperation, the station began to broadcast imaginary games, Strat-o-Matic Baseball games to be precise.

(For the young, or more accurately for the not old, Strat-o-Matic Baseball was a pre-video game board game in which dice were rolled to find corresponding numbers on cards approximating the performances of actual batters and pitchers. All very low-tech, but it was the state of the art in imaginary sports at that time).

As sports editor of the Boston Phoenix, I was invited to play. I had the 1981 Orioles against a Sox team managed by the franchise's ticket sales manager. We kicked his butt 7-2 in one of the most ridiculous experiences I have ever had, leading to my retirement as an undefeated big league manager. I can only imagine how the radio play by play guys felt doing those things every day. Well, every day for a couple of weeks before the project sputtered out in embarrassment.

This minor anecdote is used to make a couple points about sports media. 1. It needs sports to survive. 2. It will try any alternative, no matter how desperate or silly, to provide something, anything related to sports when the real thing is not on tap.

Almost 40 years later, there are no sports, none anywhere in the world with a few exceptions (Korean basketball, soccer in Tajikistan) of interest only to the gambling addicts among us. The coronavirus has wiped all the games off the board. And since 1981, the amount of sports-dedicated media has exploded beyond the craziest dreams of anyone in sports back in 1981. There are perhaps 20 dedicated sports networks in my cable package, everything from mainstream ESPN to Willow, the cricket channel. There's two sports talk radio stations in Boston, and presumably at least one on every American radio dial. How are they all coping with nothing to broadcast, analyze, or issue hot takes about?

Tom Brady ought to get a cut of the salaries of every employee of those talk radio stations here, as he has provided hours and hours of content. Since all call-in radio is based on endless repetition, the hosts and callers are good with Brady's decision to leave the Pats for Tampa Bay as a topic probably right up until the NFL regular season actually begins. They've all beaten much skinnier dead horses in their time.

I assume the same thing is going on in Tampa-St. Pete. The NFL offseason is the only game in town, and sports media and fans are reacting accordingly. I do not exempt myself. I am reading articles on the Chargers or Vikings or you name 'em signing some guard previously unknown to me as a free agent all the way to the end. If there were other sports, I would never have clicked on them. The draft will take place next month come what may. A housebound America must come to terms with the fact that for this next month, Mel Kiper Jr. will be the most powerful and influential voice in sports journalism. I know, I'm scared too.

Well, what about all the rest of the sports, what about baseball, the NBA, golf, tennis, the NHL and all those college sports. Where does America's mandatory staycation leave the Pac-12 network?

A week of viewing has shown that when tested, television reverts to its primal ancestral means of filling time. Reruns.

CBS used its Saturday and Sunday blocks of time devoted to March Madness to show old tapes of famous NCAA tournament games, most notably the Duke-Kentucky game of 1992, the last time Rick Pitino got to be a face instead of a heel. There was no Valspar tournament to show live, so NBC reran its 2018 broadcast. I don't think golf fans minded much. I wonder more if they even noticed. ESPN reran tapes of Tom Brady's greatest Patriot triumphs. The ACC Network is plodding through the 2019 North Carolina St. football season, game by game. There are 14 teams in that conference. They're faded until next season.

The most imaginative substitute for real action came from NASCAR, which had an iRacing (video game racing) event with actual NASCAR drivers at the wheels of their virtual stock cars. The saddest came FS1, the Fox cable outlet, which reran some XFL games. Dudes, that league only lasted five games!

All these networks have what nobody had in 1981, huge inventories of past events. They can be rebroadcast, reanalyzed, rehottaked and the audience will not be that unhappy. So very much of sports fandom is spent living in the past anyway. If bars were still open, fans in some corner would be having an argument, and it's about something that happened in 1973, not about the game on the TV at the other corner.

In the end, memories are what fans have the most of. Good or bad, it's what they take away from each game, and they remain fresh in direct proportion to the emotional vibrancy of what took place. I guarantee that Duke and Kentucky fans who watched CBS last Sunday had vivid flashbacks of intense joy and despair. If the MLB Network shows a documentary on the collapse of the 1964 Phillies, I guarantee that I ain't watching it. Almost 60 years later, it still hurts too much.

Without a present to present, sports is selling us its past, our past. Without getting too heavy about it, there's probably a very live market for the past in present-day March 2020, not just in sports, either.

Sports media and sports as a business can get by now with memories as their product. But sooner or later, their customers will want some new memories, the thrill of being in real time with an exhilarating experience whose outcome is not foretold. 

The ability to meet that demand is beyond the control of sports. What will be their coping strategy when selling memories no longer works? Perhaps they'll lobby the White House and Congress to include a free Madden 2021 for every citizen in the next economic rescue package.

posted by Michael Gee @ 9:44 AM