A while back Emily and I lucked into a little windfall — not win-the-lottery stuff by any means, but enough for a bit of irresponsibility. Whereupon I broached the idea of HDTV.
Where HDTV was concerned, I'd been waiting for next Christmas for several Christmases now, determined to get a big flat-panel set with various bells and whistles for a bargain price. Somewhere along the line, I'd grown comfortable with next Christmas turning into next Christmas, forever and ever amen. I wasn't an HDTV refusenik, I just understood what I wanted and was waiting for the world to come to me. Or so I told myself.
When I raised the possibility of HDTV post-windfall, Emily agreed immediately. So immediately that I quickly realized something: My wife had been ready for HDTV for some time now, and with other things to do with her time, had resigned herself to waiting for her stupid husband to come around. I'd gone from our house's technology tester to its Luddite laggard without even noticing.
Last week I finished my due diligence and bought a 46-inch Sony Bravia LCD TV and a whole lot of gear to go with it, some of which we might actually need. When I told a colleague who made the HDTV plunge years ago, he asked how I liked it and looked aghast when I said I wanted to wait until I had all the gear on hand before I hooked things up. He shook his head pityingly and said, “That's another game you're not watching in HD.”
And he was right. Since getting things cabled and labeled and assembled, I've watched some Discovery HD (dude, that beach looks soooo real) and a DVD (“Pirates of the Carribean 2,” arrrr) and they were cool and all, but they're just distractions from the real purpose of HDTV, which is to watch baseball.
Tonight was my first chance to really sit back and take in a game in HD, and it lived up to the hype. The first thing I noticed was that I could see the spray pattern of the blue airbrushing on the Mets' helmets, and the little ridge of the NY decal. Then I saw I could practically read Ron Darling's score card. Sweat, dirt, rosin, stubble — all seemed like they might jump out of the set. I could count the growth rings on Jamie Moyer and Tom Glavine, those oldsters who used to never face each other and now do all the time, and Antonio Alfonseca's sixth finger was finally not just a blur of pixels that I felt vaguely guilty for trying to stare at. But the real jaw-dropper was looking at the live shot from that camera high behind home plate, the one that surveys the entire field, and realizing I could read the out-of-town scoreboard.
Alas, what I saw with this hallucinatory clarity was a mess [1]. Not an unexpected mess, but a mess nonetheless. We're not hitting, between whatever's wrong with Wright (could Keith Hernandez just go chat with him, or at least buttonhole Rick Down?) and whatever's wrong with Delgado and Beltran coming back from injury. And say what you will about the limitations of Moises Alou and Shawn Green and Jose Valentin, but without them guys like Damion Easley and Endy Chavez are exposed for what they are: supremely useful players and members in good standing of a championship-caliber club, but not everyday players.
This isn't to say we should overreact, or even react too much. All teams slump. All teams have to fight through injuries. Even superb setup guys (like, say, Pedro Feliciano and Joe Smith) are going to roll snake eyes now and again. We're not the Phillies, at least — my goodness, remember when Pat Burrell was scary, instead of this pitiable lummox who can't field and runs the bases so poorly that his manager didn't trust him not to screw up trotting home from third? We'll come through this, maybe tomorrow or this weekend or next week or on the other side of Hell Month [2], and I'll be surprised if we're not in good enough shape to put the hammer down and head for October.
But we're not there yet. And being confident the down nights will soon pass doesn't make them any more fun to watch. Even when you're marveling at the details.