Baseball, Baby Vladimir, and Other Discontents

I must admit I don’t see TV much. I even avoid restaurants that have teevees blaring on every wall. That was easy to do back in the states. I had no money so I didn’t go to any restaurants and that teevee problem solved itself.

There are plenty of TVs in Merida, Mexico. They’re all tuned to one of three things: soccer games, soccer highlights, or episodes of COPS dubbed in Spanish. I know Mexico is portrayed everywhere as living in Mad Max times, but in reality, Mexicans are mystified by American criminality. There’s a paucity of crime here, so they like watching ours. I’m mystified by soccer, although the lawns are really nice, so we call it even.

We were invited to a friend’s house yesterday. He lives in a privada. That’s a gated subdivision. His house is attached to a row of others, mostly identical. They’re a couple of years old. They’re small-ish, and entirely constructed of some form of masonry. There are two bedrooms up, one with a balcony that also serves as shade for the parking space underneath it. Downstairs, there’s a small all-purpose room for living and dining, with a kitchen next to it.

It is not possible to not watch TV at Carlos’ place if it’s on, because he’s got one so big that it sticks out of both sides of his house. No matter where you plunk your ass, it’s like sitting in the front row at the movies. You slouch down and your head reels back and forth like a lawn sprinkler while you try to take it all in.

In some ways, I had the most interest in what was on the screen of anyone in the crowd, because I had no idea what was going on, on any level. Once you’re out of the teevee loop, you can feel Amish in a hurry. Yesterday was like that. Everything was familiar to everyone else, so they just let it drift on by, unremarked and unremarkable. Me? I had questions.

The baseball game was on. It was a Canadian broadcast, with the Toronto Blue Jays playing the Houston Astros. I did not, as they say, have a dog in that hunt. However, the assembled crowd was rife with Canadians and people from Houston, so they cared who won.

I was mostly interested in the commercials. Canadian teevee commercials were slightly weirder to me than the Mexican variety. I don’t understand anything in the Mexican ads, so I find them soothing. But Canadian ads are disturbing. They enter an uncanny valley because they’re in something resembling English (eh), and the products they’re touting are almost, but not quite familiar.

Just like the US, mildly retarded ballplayers tout boxes of inexpertly heated chicken guts shoved out of a hole in a drive through wall. However, it’s from a brand I’d not only never heard of, but I still felt I hadn’t heard of after watching the ad. There was so many nouns and adjectives on the boxes they were selling that I wasn’t sure which was the cook and which was the cook-ee, as it were. The original ad man that came up with the idea of putting everything in lower case is probably already dead, so it would be pointless to execrate him here. But a little part of me wished that whatever he died of, I hope it hurt.

My search for familiar things perked up a bit when Vladimir Guerrero was announced to take his place in the batter’s box. The thrill of recognition faded a bit when I was informed that it was Vladimir Guerrero’s son, not the genuine article. I began to feel old. I’m informed that Junior makes half a billion dollars, and strikes out a lot. He also wears two earrings that would be too feminine for a drag queen. My eye wandered on.

The game was tied after nine innings. This produced a longer stoppage in play, and treated us to a larger ration of advertising than before, which, being a baseball game, was a lot already. A deal at a totally different off-brand chicken place was offered to me, although the 4,000 mile trip to the drive through might have rendered the value of their digital coupon nugatory. Baby Vladimir reappeared. He was featured in a commercial to exhort the public to gamble responsibly, which is an oxymoron. The next commercial after him was for a degenerate gambling app that lets you cash in your bets before the end of the game if your team was up by more than 4 runs, so you could get another bet down faster.

So we came back from the commercials to view the extra innings, and get this, there was a guy standing on second base. Literally just standing on second base, outta nowhere. I thought it first he might be a streaker, but he was wearing a uniform and everything, and not running, just standing idly, exactly like 17/18ths of the ballplayers do through most of the game, when all 18 aren’t doing nothing. Streakers are a more wayfaring animal, and rarely even slow down except when tackled.

So the guy on second was a head scratcher. I cast my mind back to coaching T-ball. You could find all sorts of players on the field at odd times, and in odd places. An opposing player standing on second would excite little commentary. His friends ran off to sit on the bench, but he saw a butterfly in center field. It’s understandable.

But there was no butterfly in center field in Toronto’s stadium. There was a TV screen almost as big as Carlos’ mounted over the stands, but the guy didn’t seem to be looking at it, even though it had lots of statistical information on it, and multiple chicken sandwich offers.

I asked around the room, trying to figure out this mystery. Did I have a seizure or something, and black out? Did the chicken ads run long? Whahappen?

Everyone told me that they just stick a runner on second base during extra innings. It’s what they do. They said they’ve been doing it for a while. They said it made the extra innings games go faster. I asked if they let the other team stick a man on second, too. They said yes. So I asked how this could speed things up, if the other team can just tie the game again under the same circumstances.

This conundrum made the crowd uncomfortable, and they started making the same sort of faces that crowds about to burn a witch used to favor, so I deftly shifted the conversation to the designated hitter rule. Apparently, they don’t let the pitcher take his turns at bat anymore…