When I was growing up, my parents used to send me to bed long before Pirate games ended during the school year. That meant that every morning, I would bound out of bed and run to the end of the hall to ask my dad, “Did we win last night?” That was what qualified as suspense for me during the baseball season.
Tonight, I found myself sitting in a bar celebrating a friend’s birthday, obsessively pressing “refresh” on my phone with Pedro Alvarez at the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning, then repeating the action after he drew a walk and Ryan Doumit, Ryan Church, and Ronny Cedeno came up to the plate. This is what qualifies as suspense in 2010.
What struck me about this is not how divergent the two situations are — one involved me falling asleep with no way to access the information I required without asking my dad who was in turn forced to watch either the end of the game or the 11:00 news to obtain the result while the other involves me hitting a refresh button on a phone — but how few differences there really are when you strip away the differences in age and technology. Back then, the Pirates were bad but I was still waking up hoping that they’d won. Now, I’m still hoping for the same thing.
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