The Rapture of Listening to a Fake Baseball Game

[Nevilledog]

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James Gleick
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Here is a beautiful piece about an information-age phenomenon that is quirky and weird and yet, as @xwaldie slyly shows us, revelatory of our new condition.

newyorker.com
The Rapture of Listening to a Fake Baseball Game
Nine innings of made-up balls, strikes, and ads is enough to put you to sleep—or bring you to life.
3:11 PM · Jul 14, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-rapture-of-listening-to-a-fake-baseball-game

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archive site is down... If anyone needs a no paywall link, let me know and I'll try again.

Even though I know that there’s no cure for insomnia, the same part of my brain that believes the polar bears might be O.K. in the end keeps me trawling the Web for miracles. Recently, bleary-eyed, I stumbled across “Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio,” a podcast from the mysteriously monikered “Mr. King,” a humorist in Chicago. (On Spotify, Philip T. Hunter, Corrbette Pasko, and Beth King are listed as the show’s co-producers.) Episodes, which run around two hours, are full-length fake baseball games. The players have names like Lefty Thorn and Hiroki Nomo, and the fictitious sports commentator Wally McCarthy narrates their progress through a gently interminable, pleasingly varied dance of strikes, balls, and hits. It’s minor-league elevator music, honeyed with a small-town nostalgia. Pauses are filled by the crowd’s muted cheers, and, every few minutes, a man with the voice of a relaxed, grandfatherly robot reads ad spots for made-up businesses—Ted’s Fishing World, Big Tom’s Shoe Repair—over the faded brightness of Muzak.

I had come to the podcast as an insomniac, but I was intrigued as a consumer of weird texts. On the show’s Web site, www.sleepbaseball.com, you can browse sweet, possibly fake testimonials (“This takes me right back to those hot lazy Chicago summers of my youth, dad turning on the Cubs game in the Chevy Nova, while I dozed off, a fish in the sound-waters of baseball”) or subscribe to “Wally’s World,” an “infrequent and possibly entertaining newsletter.” A brief description of the podcast promises no yelling and “no weird volume spikes”—a hazard if you’re trying to fall asleep to the actual Cubs. The site also stipulates the existence of a genre, “baseball radio A.S.M.R.,” for which it suggests a slogan: “You don’t listen to it, you listen through it.”

I was puzzled, and beguiled. It’s true that no other sport carves up time quite like baseball. In a 1973 essay, Philip Roth discussed the game’s “longueurs,” “spaciousness,” and “peculiarly hypnotic tedium.” Mr. King goes farther, stripping his subject of everything but rhythm—pitches and swings, runs and outs, inning after inning. Athletes inch around the bases like light across a sundial. Time—how it’s apportioned, and the inner experience of it—seems to be the show’s main character. The series could be a sendup of Americana, the aesthetic’s essential boringness, or a love note to memory, with the hazy, preserved glow of a scene unburied from childhood. There is, too, the story of an audio landscape in which creators of white-noise podcasts can earn as much as eighteen thousand dollars per month. Baseball A.S.M.R. shares source code with ambient TV, chill-core playlists, and the sort of gauzily frictionless Internet content that you only half notice you’re looking at. The popularity of such products shouldn’t surprise us. Modern bandwidths swarm with stimuli; in this context, culture that aspires to deflect attention can scan as wholesome, benevolent, even virtuous.

Yet, as tempting as it is to sweep “Northwoods” into a broader trend, the podcast also feels sui generis. I’ve sweated bullets through my share of relaxation content. A lot of it bears the traces of market logic—let’s trundle you off to sleep, so that you can be shiny and productive tomorrow! “Northwoods,” by contrast, doesn’t seem optimized for anything—even if listening produces an agreeably lobotomized sensation. A palpable care and attention to detail ignites the league, softly, with life, or at least with a sense of autonomous purpose. Even the newsletter carries this hint of surplus. “Wally’s World” exists to alert subscribers when new episodes have dropped. But a recent edition also included a koanlike statement from the pitcher Hiroki Nomo: “I am melting snow, washing myself of myself.” The author of the newsletter writes that the quote makes him feel “kind of tingly and a bit freaked out!”—a fair response, incidentally, to the entire “Northwoods” experience, in which a ballgame’s sunstruck torpor never seems far from the somnolence of the dead.

*snip*

[Pantagruel]

1. For your enjoyment:

"The Great American Novel "

April 11, 1995
by Philip Roth (Author)

"Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a home run sober. If you've never heard of them—or of the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history—it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.

In this ribald, richly imagined, and wickedly satiric novel, Roth turns baseball's status as national pastime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with heroism and perfidy, ebullient wordplay and a cast of characters that includes the House Un-American Activities Committee."

[Haggard Celine]

2. Thanks for posting this!

I sleep infrequently, but when I do decide to sleep, I like to have some sort of sound going, something rather monotonous. It seems like I sleep more deeply when I put on sound. I've always thought baseball was a snorefest, to watch, play, or anything. Can't stand it. But I'm going to try this next time. Bet it'll put me right to sleep.

[flying rabbit]

3. imma check this out

Not even a baseball fan.