Baseball, sports betting, and the commodification of literally everything
If everything is an asset then nothing has value
NOTE: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but as a freelancer I depend on the income I receive from writing so please consider subscribing at one of the paid tiers if you can afford to contribute. Those who do so will get instant access to every paywalled piece in full, including those from the archives.
Last Friday night I stayed in to watch the Toronto Blue Jays play the Detroit Tigers. Neither the game itself nor the Jays’ offence was particularly remarkable — they lost 2-3 but did thankfully take the series with a 4-1 win on Sunday — but the broadcast itself was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.
By way of some background, what you need to know is this: for reasons that are thoroughly uninteresting, roughly 5-10 Jays games a year aren’t available via their usual provider (Sportsnet) and are only viewable on Apple TV. And, since I wanted to watch the game and had no desire to give Apple my money, I got a free trial. Judging from Twitter, I wasn’t the only one to find the whole thing pretty strange. The best that can be said about how Apple chooses to broadcast baseball is that there are no ads between plays. When you watch on Rogers Sportsnet, you’re relentlessly bombarded by the parent company’s agitprop and paid segments informing you that one of Canada’s biggest banks loves the Blue Jays. If nothing else, it was blissful to enjoy a game without that stuff.
Beyond this, Apple TV makes for strange viewing and does some really peculiar things with baseball — among them showing highlights from earlier plays while the game is underway and getting the names of players wrong (at one point on Friday I heard one of the Apple commentators confuse Ernie Clement and Andrés Giménez, and I don’t think this was the only error of that kind).
Still more bizarre was the channel’s decision to conduct live interviews during the broadcast, including one with elite Jays pitcher Dylan Cease about his love of oysters. As it happens, I find Cease charming and in a different context would probably have enjoyed his banter. But how anyone thought it was a good idea to put this on the screen while the main event was quite literally going on in the background is beyond me. I wanted to watch the game and I’ll bet Cease did too.
On an aesthetic level, Apple’s somewhat uncanny presentation created an odd feeling of remove from the game itself. And speaking of betting, a statistic like the one below was also on-screen during every single at bat.
