Baseball on the Radio

Tonight, I'm listening to the Sox game. (As opposed to watching it.)

I used to listen to games all the time. That was mainly out of necessity: In Portland, before mlb.tv, there was only Gameday Audio and the occasional national broadcast. Other than that, if you were out of area, the Red Sox were not available on television. You could only listen to it over the radio.

In 2000, I spent summer afternoons, from 4 until dinnertime, upstairs in the stuffy study with a scorecard or my journal, listening to the Red Sox. Okay, not every afternoon, but a huge amount of them. It's a very pleasant memory. Sleepy warmth and good baseball - I especially remember a come-from-behind win on a double off the Monster by Nomar against the Texas Rangers. It was a sweet summer, except for all of the drama with Carl Everett and Pedro getting punched by Gerald Williams of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and barely missing a no-hitter against them.

Lately, though, I've been watching a lot more games. It gets cheaper every year on mlb.com, and it's nice to know what players look like, to see how they run, how they catch, what their wind-up or batting stance looks like. I heard about Jacoby Ellsbury scoring from 2nd on a wild pitch, but didn't see it - didn't see him play - until months after it had happened. Since then, I've preferred watching to listening.

But there are other benefits to listening to the games. For one thing, I like the announcers better. For another thing, you learn more. The announcers talk more - there's more color commentary and therefore more background information. And I like the commercials, because they're local - to Boston. It makes me feel closer.

Coincidentally, I was surfing the web today, looking for updates about the Portland Beavers, and found this Dwight Jaynes post about building a casino by the Rose Quarter. At first I shuddered. Can you think how horrific that would be? Whenever there's a concert at the RQ the traffic is insane. Imagine having concerts at the RQ AND a casino? And those horrible lights? And the very idea... I kind of agreed with Gov. Kulongoski when he refused to let a casino in Portland to fund MLB, even though I really wanted an MLB team. He was right: baseball and gambling don't mix, as Shoeless Joe and Pete Rose know too well. It was... in bad taste.

But then, while thinking about baseball on the radio, I remembered my favorite commercial: The Foxwood's Casino jingle. "Take a chance, make it happen/roll the dice, fingers snapping/Spin the wheel, round and round we go-o/life is short, life is sweet/grab yourself a front-row seat/and let's meet, and have a ba-all/at the wonder of it all" and then the background people chant, "Meet me at FOXwoods."

Scary, the things we remember, but I loved that jingle, and I was sad when they changed it. I would pick that to sing in a karaoke bar for sure.

And then I realized: there's one casino-baseball connection that isn't so horrible.

Kind of tacky, and really not something you want to associate with baseball.

But I think I'd rather have a casino and baseball than no baseball at all.