If I hadn’t been born a baseball lover, I may never have watched television as a kid. When I was growing up, it was about the only thing our TV seemed capable of showing on weekends, at least after the Saturday morning cartoons were done. There were no satellite TV sport subscription. After saving the world in his office all week, my father had a plan for Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon: to crank up the footrest on his recliner and take in the great American pastime.
Those were different times, of course. First, we only had the local teams to watch, although living in Connecticut gave us three local teams: the Mets, the Red Sox, and the Yankees. Our cable system carried each team’s hosting channel, and there was also the Saturday Game of the Week broadcast nationally on a major network. I can still see that bulky, old-school cable box resting on the arm of the recliner, its wire stretching across the living room floor, waiting like a snake to trip any kid who tried to sprint across Dad’s view. Dad claimed we were the first family on the block to have cable TV, but I assure you we weren’t the first to have a remote control.
With seven kids in the family there was not a neat agreement on a favorite team, so sometimes we’d fight over what game to watch. If one of us wanted to watch some non-athletic programming we were generally out of luck if Dad was home. “This is a sports house,” was his standard line. “We’re watching sports—wholesome sports.” Ah, as far as we knew, that was true back then.
When it comes to sports, though, how much is enough? Is there such a thing as too much?
At the time there were 26 baseball teams, which meant a lot of games were going unseen in the Sports House. Our patriarch, who was known for his offbeat ideas, hatched a plan one day: he was going to have a satellite dish installed. But this was 1985, and home satellite dishes were not only extremely uncommon, they were huge.
A cherry-picker arrived one day to lift the eight-foot-diameter device onto the roof, high above the gingerbread porch of our Victorian. It was so many things at once: an anachronism, an eyesore, and, in the eyes of a dad who liked to slip ahead of the Joneses, a status symbol. Most of all, though, it represented that all-important, wholesome family entertainment.
Now, let’s fast-forward almost 15 years, and keep in mind this amended old saw: You can take the girl away from baseball, but don’t waste your time trying to take the love of baseball out of the girl. It was thoroughly ingrained over those formative years, making me a baseball lover for life.
When I moved to Massachusetts and could only pull in my beloved New York Mets on the car radio, Dad swooped in for the rescue. He let me take his portable German-made shortwave radio, a piece of technology that had cost as much as a top-notch 27-inch television at the time. He’d bought the radio to listen to his own beloved Detroit Tigers, so his sacrifice was duly noted—and much appreciated.
After renting for a couple of years I knew I wanted to stay in the Bay State, and it was time for me to buy my own place. I found a small cottage that was perfect, meaning that it had a clear view of the southwest sky, where the TV satellites hover beaming their images.
On the afternoon following my closing, I took care of an errand that was more important than unpacking. I stopped at a family-run electronics store and slapped down my credit card for DirecTV service. Yes, times had changed drastically: the dishes were barely bigger than a salad bowl, and they could be seen on at least one house per block. Most importantly to me, though, I didn’t have to wait for the Mets to be on the Game of the Week.
For six sweet months of the year I could watch them nearly every day.
Movies aren’t my thing, so my entertainment dollars don’t go to those premium pay channels or NetFlix subscriptions or anything of that matter.
What I pay to pull in 30 teams’ baseball games each season might make some folks choke, but for me it’s as automatic as paying my car insurance. That satellite-TV sports subscription is just another necessity. After all, I grew with baseball, and now I’ve got a Sports House of my own to maintain.
