Think about how different it is to process a professional football game in frame-by-frame replay and razor, high-definitION clarity, with how we process a baseball game on the radio.
The advent of high-definitION TV has not only changed the way that we watch sports on television, it is in the midst of changing sports themselves, as our games retrofit themselves to fit the package by which we consume them.
With incredibly sharp pictures broadcast onto the incredibly large televisions, sports fans have never been closer to the games. The intimate access we now have as fans is leading us to demand more from the games arbitors and decision makers, and to change the way we value our sports.
Televisions began entering American homes in the 1940s and 50s. In 1972, sales of color TVs finally eclipsed black-and-white sets. But it was the 1980s that began bringing sports fans closer and closer to their games.
The USA Today began publishing in 1982, and was the first newspaper to devote large portions of its sports coverage to statistics. Fans ate it up and began flocking to news stands to get their hands on all that raw data. Around the same time, a newspaper man named Daniel Okrent invented fantasy baseball. Okrent also introduced American to the work of Bill James, the pioneer of intensive statistical analysis in baseball, in 1981.
Fantasy sports exploded in the 1990s as the internet spread into homes and offices, and fans delighted in taking ownership over the sports they loved.
Today, amateur SABRmetricians from the Bill James school have a knowledge of their favorite baseball teams that rivals that of the Manager or General Manager making the decisions. Meanwhile, TV technology gives fans the ability to save high-definitION broadcasts of games onto their DVRs and do intensive film-review that only a few years ago was possible only for the teams themselves.
Perhaps most importantly, fans now have instant access to crystal-clear slow-motion, replays that reveal any and all missed calls by referees and umpires, down to the split-second and half-centimeter.
Replay technology, obviously, is changing the way games are being officiated. Football games are constantly put on hold while the lawyers gather in little booths for reviews. Goal line technology will soon be a part of competitive soccer. Replay is even rapidly expanding in the oldest dinosaur of them all, baseball.
But beyond simply changing how our sports are officiated, high-definitION TV is now the linchpin in this new era of access and ownership for sports fans. New information and technology has not only changed how we watch sports, but how we process them and how we value them.
The shift, simply: objectivity > subjectivity.
Here's an example: Remember the old rule in football that when a receiver jumped in the air, caught a ball along the sideline and was shoved out of bounds before his feet came back down, the referee made a judgement call as to whether or not he would have been in bounds? Thanks to HD replay, that rule was changed. We simply cannot stomach such subjectivity. Now, if an airborn receiver is shoved, the call is a black-and-white ruling based only on where his feet land. And it's reviewable.
Aesthetically, the sport lost something with the change. Amazing and exciting athletic plays that used to be rewarded with a catch are now ruled incomplete - all for the sake of objectivity.
Our sports and games have never been more precise. But I wonder, too, if they've ever been less mysterious.
Compare the way our sports today must be broken down into images, frame-by-frame, to the lush imagination required to listen to a baseball game on the radio. Mystery can be beautiful. It can also be the product of ignorance.
And before I get too wistful for my radio, I need to go set my DVR to record tonight's game.
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Follow on Ology: Bison Messink
Follow on Twitter: @BisonMessink | @OlogySports
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