Watching Sports in the Modern Age - it’s just so hard being a fan these days
Do you remember being able to turn on the ball game on your TV, on a regular network station, kick back with a beer and root for your favorite team, without trying to juggle with which streaming service it is on, what the password is for the app which isn’t loading, and when it does, it’s glitching so the game isn’t even in real time? Of course not, electricity hadn’t even been invented yet.
I’m a sports fanatic. I love watching and listening to sports on TV and/or the radio, especially baseball, especially the New York Yankees. In my dining room, instead of a fine china cabinet, a $10,000 hand-carved table, with equally ornate chairs, I have two seats from the old Yankee stadium. At the center of my mantle in my living room is a signed baseball by members of the 1988-89 New York Yankees and another one by the great Dave Winfield. My coat rack has a hook designated to my yankee ball cap.
Watching or listening to sports in the modern age is analogous to being psychologically sodomized by Genghis Khan’s entire army and then after they are done, the cooks, and administrative staff get a run at you. And if you are a sports fan, trying to locate your team on one of the stupid streaming channels is like figuring out how to date Lalisa looking like you do. I rarely watch much TV anymore, unless it’s a sporting event they somehow miraculously forgot to block.
Times have changed, and so has technology. But people haven’t.
Back in the days of big hair and jolt cola, the Yankee game came on network television channel 11, WPIX-TV or WFAN on the radio. Up until 1988 and for 38 years prior, the games broadcasted by WPIX-TV were transmitted from the Empire State building. But then cable television came along. Cha-ching. The Yankees became the first MLB team whose front office sold their TV rights to cable television allowing MSG network to broadcast 75 games.
Little did I know back then that the end was coming. From 1991 - 2000, MSG had exclusive rights to 150 games per season. In 1991, if you lived in Manhattan you paid $20.95 per month for cable television. By 2000 it was $60 per month. Today it is like $675.
To watch Yankee games requires some finesse, like being forced to relocate your entire family to some sluttish homogenized rathole like Scarsdale, run by backwater political shadows with a taste for medieval violence. Otherwise, you’ll more than likely be blacked out.
And if you try to get clever watch or listen to a game through some other venture, like using a relative’s passcode, and those vultures catch you, you will be dragged from your home, tortured, and shipped off to a gulag labor camp on the outskirts of Kingsport, Tennessee, never to be heard from again. I’m not making this up.
It’s hard being a Yankee fan in today’s world. Most of us just read the stats in the morning paper. Pretty soon the MLB will block that too. And God forbid you are caught by the MLB’s brown suits, the “secret police” that supposedly go around and fine people they catch wearing baseball apparel in public unless you pay the monthly licensing fee. A friend told me after they sick their German Shepards on you they laugh hysterically.
Highlight reels are also on borrowed time, unless of course you pay the fee.
The MLB, the sleazy owners club and the TV nazis even went so far as to block iTunes from allowing fans to listen on the radio because we were only paying $8.99 a month. “That is piracy!” They screamed.
Loose thugs running wild is a way of life. Have you ever been to Palm Beach where the cocaine blankets backyards like freshly fallen Wyoming snow? Don’t let the big homes and palm trees deceive you. I was told, “Never let your car come to a complete stop lest some bloodshot-eyed, drug-crazed billionaire puts a knife to your throat demanding you take him, or her to the nearest West Palm Walgreens where they still don’t lock up the codeine.”
Greed-laced bandits like Juan Soto, the punks at the Yes Network, the back-alley head-thumpers better known as the MLB Member Club Owners who own the MLB Network, Adolph Hitler, George Custer, Hernan Cortes, you know the type of goon who’d hold up your sisters in an alley for a few sheckles are always behind the trouble the good people of society have to endure. It’s nothing new, but it’s getting worse, and nowhere more so than professional sports.
Gold fever, baby. Do you think you’re immune? You might think you can withstand the pull, but you’ve never had blocks of sweet, shiny, magical, blood-stained gold stacked at your feet. 90 percent of you would slit your own mother’s throat for a few gold shavings.
When did it get so bad? It’s always been this way. It’s always been all about the cheddar. Nothing wrong with that, unless your abuse teeters on the level of Genghis Khan, or Castro. Why do you think Jesus was hammered to a cross on that April 3rd afternoon in AD 33? To save you from your porn addiction or infidelity Come on. He didn’t want to be up there any more than you would.
He died because Tiberius was afraid he was stealing their customers from the Church of Rome. Stealing their fees and donations. You all will scream and yell that they were just stupid barbaric pagans and that I’m a blasphemous heretic that can rot in “H, E, double hockey sticks.”
Think what you want, it was all about the coin. Someone’s wealth, i.e. power, was threatened and JC paid the price for it. You think Judas Iscariot betrayed JC because of his loyalty to that weak toad Tiberius? Don’t be a fool. His palms were greased just like Juan Soto’s.
I don’t know how well acquainted you all are with the maniac that JC of Nazareth went up against back then, but he was completely unhinged. I hear put JC down because they are weaklings. They do it to try and impress the losers they hang out with, to be edgy, but there’s no sharp edge there. That’s soft and predictable. People mock what they don’t understand. JC seemed like a pretty straight shooter to me, and I’m no Bible-thumper, I don’t like them either.
Jesus was a cool guy, liked good wine, liked building things, and happened to have an ideology far ahead of his time and became immortally famous, not by choice. After reading about him in the good book, my interpretation was that he just wanted to be left alone to do his thing. At 33-years-old, he didn’t see his destiny as that of a martyr for the filthy-minded rabble - I don’t believe that for a second. JC is a hero of mine, along with my parents, my grandparents, my sisters, Shakespeare, Ambrose Bierce, and Mark Twain.
I talk about these guys from the past as if the times they lived were any grander than today. They weren’t. I personally like modern world. I like antibiotics and inhalers. I like working from home, clean water, flushing toilets, warm showers, gas stoves and heated cars with windshield wipers. I just don’t like having to pay $800 a week to watch baseball. I can’t wrap my mind around that! I can’t do it. I have tried to accept it you slugs! But I just can’t!
If it was up to me, all of you nameless, faceless cupidinous bums who ruined baseball would be shipped off to Kabal or La Rinconada and never allowed to return!