I am sitting in the loge reserved section at a baseball stadium which has not yet been renamed to BankOne Ballpark, UMAX Coliseum, Qualcomm Stadium, 3Com Park, or Citi Field. I have one eye on the bluegrass “field of play” where the game itself is transpiring. A second eye is scanning in statistical information about individual players and other ongoing games from the 86-feet (28.3 meters) high Budweiser-Bulova clock scoreboard behind right-center field. My third, fourth, and n-th eyes are taking in video feeds from the 54-feet (17.8 meters) diagonal Sharp Corporation high-definition, high-resolution, multi-scan deflection circuit TV screen which towers above the left-center field fence. The large-scale televisual display is quizzing my knowledge of “historic” data from the baseball archives, and from the jukebox repositories of pop music nostalgia. Between half-innings, razor-sharp, dynamic pixel highlights from the Reds-Cardinals and Dodgers-Cubs games are fast-downlinked to my switching sensorium, using non-interlace refreshing, contrast filters, and thermal recalibration to avoid any flicker, flutter, motion blurring, patchy colors, or light dispersion.
Show me the latest at-bats of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa (two sluggers who are chasing Roger Maris’ 37-year-old single-season home run record), but please show them edited for speed, show just what happened at the instant when the ball crossed the plate, no pitcher’s windup and delivery, no exchanging of secret glances between players, no dramatic pauses between pitches. “So that’s what McGwire and Sosa did in their last at-bats,” booms the virile voice of the system’s announcer, “and now back to the Mets and Braves!” Back to our narrowcast. The alleged live reality in front of my eyes, the Braves-Mets baseball game, is just another TV channel, just another packetized unit or slice of the multimedia information system of all the baseball games which are going on this particular Friday night. I could be @home playing my Microsoft Baseball 3D-99 CD-ROM, except that I am, on this occasion, inside the virtual stadium, and I do not have my Inter-Act four-button Pro-Pad with me to manipulate the actions of the players. But the full-fledged 3D-engine rendering technology here is very effective. The infield dirt, natural grass, and players’ uniforms, skin, and faces all definitely feature some smooth and nifty texturing.
Major league baseball games are just a pretext or source of data input for the information processing systems which break down their living constituent parts in order to reconfigure them into hyperreal games which are extraneous to the sport itself. A hypermedia baseball information system on the World Wide Web (ESPN SportsZone, Fastball, CNNSI.COM, Yahoo!.Sports) or on cable-satellite TV twenty-four hours a day (ESPNEWS, CNNSI). On these software-driven, television-Internet convergence systems, the exhibited instance of a specific baseball game juxtaposes video highlights in one portion of the screen with animated flash-graphics and numerous text windows showing variable data on team and player performances. A Roto or Fantasy baseball information system (“the most popular game of our time” – Adam Lerner) where the participant is a franchise owner in an “imaginary” baseball league. Starting with a budget of 50 million play dollars, you draft your own team from the pool of all players in the realware baseball leagues, and make personnel trades with other virtual owners throughout the season. Your result for a given night (genuine cash prizes are awarded) is determined by recombining the statistical achievements of individual players (extracted from their own teams) into a composite tally for your team. An online gambling baseball information system where betting odds on a dozen games per day are constantly adjusted due to player injuries, changes in starting pitchers, weather and wind conditions, or lopsided cumulative wagering on one team.
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