Dan's Papers -November 6, 2009 - Me, My Remote and I

This is a true 21st-century story, and it involves a terrible text message I received as I was plugging my iPhone into its charger in East Hampton just a few minutes before one o'clock in the morning on October 23.

The text read ARE YOU WATCHING THE YANKEES?, and it came from my daughter in California, where it was three hours earlier-10 p.m. her time. Frankly, it ruined everything.

One of the big fascinations in sports is that you root for your team and hope and hope and hope. On TV, you often see the fans, at crucial moments, with their hands touching in prayer in front of their faces, trying to invoke God to help them through. You just never know.

This particular night was the second game of the American League Pennant playoff between the Yankees and Angels. It began at 8 p.m. EST. I am not a baseball fanatic but I do watch important games, and this was one of them. We would be out to dinner at Nick and Toni's at 8 p.m. So, at 2 p.m., thinking ahead, I scheduled to record the 8 p.m. game on TiVo. I would get home around 10, put the game on from the beginning but whiz through all the commercials, and get to bed at 11:30, satisfied with whatever the outcome might be.

In case you are interested in whom I root for, I spent my boyhood going to Brooklyn Dodgers games. I know that dates me but I don't care. This means that I root for anybody who plays against the Yankees. Since this year, or since the All Star Break anyway, the Yankees have played the game better than anybody in the history of the game, and that is a fact. This perverse rooting has been a formidable task for me.

We got home from dinner, as planned, at 10 p.m. I was full of my favorite dish at this restaurant-roasted chicken with baked potatoes, garlic and pancetta-and I was a happy camper. I would get through three hours of angst in two (I could clasp my hands and pray for the Angels, an appropriately named team, at fast forward), and go to sleep satisfied.

I should note that when I set this up at 2 p.m., I was very smart. Baseball games in the 21st century are very cerebral and calculating affairs, often moving at a glacial pace and exceeding the three hours allotted them by the networks. The networks oblige by removing any regularly scheduled programs that might be in the way. So what I did was schedule to record the three hours of the game, the half-hour post game and the two half-hour "Seinfeld" episodes after that. That would take me until 12:30 a.m. in real time. Four-and-a-half hours would be plenty of time to complete a ballgame.

On my TV, the game proceeded slowly and methodically into a drizzle. It was indeed taking a long time, but the prediction was that the drizzle would evolve into an angry storm (they'd break occasionally to show this green and yellow blot from AccuWeather moving jerkily up the coast), and that the game would likely have to be postponed.

Good, I thought around 10:30. I can go to bed early. The score was Angels 2, Yankees 0. I was so proud of myself.

The game continued through the drizzle ever so slowly. There was foul ball after foul ball after foul ball, plus trip to the pitcher's mound by the catcher, trip to the mound by the coach and then trip to the mound by the manager. In the fifth, the Yankees tied it up 2 to 2, and the game continued on into the drizzle. I marveled as I always do at the length and number of commercials between innings. In real time, you don't really notice how long these take. Anyway, I was silently whizzing through. I couldn't tell you what they were about really. I was so proud of myself.

As we approached the four-and-a-half hour mark on my TiVo, which was around 11:30 my time but 12:30 TiVo time, it became obvious to me that two things were about to occur. One was that I would not see the last of the game. It would freeze sometime in the eighth inning. The other was that the rainstorm was worsening. The game would either freeze in the eighth or the umps would call it off because of the rain just before then.

At that four-and-a half-hour mark, with the score still 2 to 2 in the top of the eighth, it did indeed freeze. An Angel was walking to the plate. The rain pellets were clearly visible, stopped in mid-air. I turned the TV off with a mixture of 1/10 frustration and 9/10 contentment. It was 11:15 p.m. The game would end one way or another. I could get a good night's sleep.

Chris and I got ready for bed. I picked up a book I was reading-Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn-and we read in bed for quite a while. The rainstorm soon began to kick up outside our bedroom window. I lit a fire. We read some more, and at a quarter to one in real time, I made final preparations to turn out the lights. I plugged in the laptop, turned off the lights, looked out the window at the storm, which so recently had been over Yankee Stadium, and plugged in the iPhone. Plugging it in lights it up. There was the message.

ARE YOU WATCHING THE YANKEE GAME?

I considered calling the daughter, but decided against it. She'd just tell me what the hell was going on. No, I will go downstairs and watch whatever this drama is in real time. I got up to go downstairs-and suddenly thought to check when my daughter had sent the text. She had sent it, according to the iPhone, almost an hour before I saw it. Dramatic moments in baseball happen fast-it would be over by now.

I lay back down in a funk. So be it. I'd read about it in the morning. But three hours for a baseball game with a three-program extension was not enough. I had, messing with time, actually out-computerized myself.

I tried to figure out what I could have done differently to be able to go back down to see the end, but messing with the various times in my head only made me sleepy. Shortly, I was miserably out.

Well, it turned out the umps had let the game go right into and through the downpour. It actually outlasted the downpour. It went 13 innings, the teams used 14 pitchers and more than 400 balls were thrown. The Angels scored a run in the top of the eighth just after the freeze to go ahead, but in the bottom of the ninth A-Rod came up and hit a dramatic solo homerun to send the game into extra innings. It went on and on. The downpour returned to a drizzle, and finally, the Yankees won the game on a fielding error in the bottom of the thirteenth.

After this incident, I decided that it will never happen again. You want me to mess with time? I will mess with time. I hold the ultimate weapon: the remote. Now, I TiVo baseball games for the three hours plus six-count 'em, six-programs after that, for a total of about seven hours all together.