Baseball on the Radio
On traditions.
I don’t have a new Enthusiasm for you this week, but here’s one from the archives. Happy opening day at Fenway; at least we have baseball. <3
If you cannot be at a baseball game in person, the next best way to watch is not at all. I love it, though I can understand how one might find baseball boring. But bad TV makes for incredible radio.
Baseball, I think, is best if you can treat it not as an experience but something more like atmosphere. Like you’re a little anemone and just taking in what’s around you. Listening to Joe Castiglione announcing a Sox game on the radio is, to me, better than ASMR—non-stop impeccable vibes, inject it straight into my veins, etc. It is, of course, also free to tune in. For me, without cable and not committed enough for a subscription to anything, a gift.
I love the banter, the little hum of crowd noise, and zoning out and zoning back in. I suppose this makes me not a particularly devoted fan—I admit I am not up on most team lore—but maybe something more like an admirer. By chance of fate and my regional broadcast area, I’ll follow the Red Sox all season, but I keep an eye on the Cubs and Giants for no other reason than that someone I love did once, too.
Also, I can’t think about baseball without thinking about my dad—a devoted Giants fan from when they were a New York team. More than anything, I love baseball because he did, too. I miss going to a game with him, which we did every year, and his insistence that we stay until the final out because anything could happen. He would wear his Giants hat no matter who was playing, and now, whenever I see someone sporting the orange-and-black SF here on the wrong coast, I think of him.
I think of him, too, when a game is on the air. On a nice summer day, instead of staying inside with the TV on to watch, he’d take the radio into the backyard and sit in the shade of the little tree in our yard—Giants hat on—and listen.