Baseball is starting up again this week, and it's got me to thinking
about the respective erstwhile magic of baseball and the Mac.
I came late to both baseball and the Mac. Famously unathletic, I
avoided stick and ball sports as much as possible through my childhood,
teenage years, and young adulthood. What eventually hooked me on
baseball (in my early thirties) was the 1985 pennant race, in which the
Toronto Blue Jays looked like they had a reasonable shot at the
American League championship.
I am not a rabid Canadian nationalist, but the novel prospect of a
Canadian team (albeit manned by mostly American and Dominican players,
with nary a Canadian among them) making it to the World Series of that
iconic American game piqued my interest. For the first time in my life,
I sat down in front of the TV to watch a baseball game.
Hooked by Major League Baseball
I was instantly smitten. I'd never paid any serious attention to
baseball before, but this was wonderful! I had never imagined that
baseball, of all things, could offer the spectacle of such poetry in
motion; such drama; such suspense. It was magic. I watched every game
of the 1985 League Championship Series, and even after the Kansas City
Royals beat the Jays in seven gladiatorial confrontations, I switched
my allegiance to them and went on to watch KC pull off an underdog
victory over the mighty St. Louis Cardinals in that year's all-Missouri
World Series. A particular pleasure was watching Kansas City closing
pitcher (and part-time philosopher), the late Dan Quisenberry,
with his mesmerizing submarine delivery.
As I said, I was hooked. I actually went through withdrawal when the
1985 Series ended. I wanted more baseball! Never one to do things by
halves, I jumped into baseball with both feet and begin to read books
about baseball seasons past, particularly the lyrically literate
documentaries by Roger Angell. I immersed myself in baseball lore. I've
watched Field of Dreams more times than any other movie since I
was a kid.
In April 86, I was tuned in for the first pitch of the Jays opener
and barely missed a game all season - which culminated in
long-suffering Boston Red Sox fans' hearts being broken again when Bill
Buckner let a slow-rolling grounder pass between his legs at first base
unhindered, allowing the New York Mets to rally and go on to win Games
6 and 7. High drama! BoSox fans would have to wait until 2004 for their
loyalty to finally be requited.
For the next several years, from April through October, baseball
became the background music to my life. I discovered that I liked
listening to baseball games on the radio as much as - or even more than
- watching them on TV. Summer evenings were accompanied by the sounds
of baseball games on often distant and staticky AM stations with the
volume turned down low, but not so low that I couldn't keep track of
what was happening by the sound of the crowd, while I read or wrote or
did other things.
I have to admit that there were times I would have the radio tuned
to one game and the TV tracking another with the sound turned off. I
was besotted by baseball. It was magic. I loved it. Each game was an
adventure - unpredictable, with so many potential variables. It was
like a novel unfolding before your eyes and/or ears. Sometimes it was a
gripping page-turner; sometimes slow and tedious, but never really
boring. And then there was all that tradition; the statistical minutia.
It was, to coin a cliché, a rich tapestry. I loved the
deliberate contemplativeness of it, with the action interspersed by
long periods of strategic anticipation. Baseball was and is the
thinking man's game.
The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of both Yale
University and the National League, and briefly Baseball Commissioner
for a short time prior to his tragic and sudden death, wrote: "I've
been a lover of baseball, I've even tried to write about it
. . . I always found it the most satisfying of games
outside of literature."
Or as a philosophy professor friend of mine who has also been a
lifelong baseball fan whose family made pilgrimages from Nova Scotia to
Fenway Park in Boston when he was a kid, once beatifically observed:
"It's a beautiful game."
For me, the high water mark of my baseball fandom was when the Jays
actually did make it to the World Series in 1992 and went on to beat
the favored Atlanta Braves; they came back in 1993 and prevailed again,
this time over the Philadelphia Phillies.
1994: The Year the Magic Died
Unhappily, 1993 was the last really classic year of baseball for me,
and as it turned out, for a lot of other fans as well. In 1994, a lot
of the magic died along with that year's World Series, which was
canceled because of a players' strike in a year when it looked like the
other Canadian MLB franchise, the Montreal Expos, had a better than
decent shot at winning the Series for the first (and, as it turned out,
only) time.
Come 1995, I tried to rekindle my enthusiasm, but my heart just
wasn't in it anymore the way it had been, and the magic has never
returned. I don't watch baseball much any more, and the radio is silent
on summer nights now, although I do scan the box scores and division
standings every day in the paper during the season.
Of course, the Internet probably has had something to do with this,
but not entirely.
Indeed, baseball had fallen on hard times in general, with
half-empty stadiums (on good nights) in many major league cities and a
severely eroded TV audience. Major League Baseball resorted to gimmicks
like inter-league play in the regular season and the post-season
wildcard, as well as unwarranted team expansion, in attempting to keep
the money machine primed, this all further adulterating the game's
traditions and diluting the quality of play.
Money, especially TV money, along with free-agency and owner
arrogance, ruined baseball - a victim of its all too ephemeral pre-1994
bonanza of TV revenues and temporarily renewed public enthusiasm for
the game.
I still love the game. I'm just turned off by the mercenary
crassness and arrogance of the people who organize and play it at the
major league level.
Late to the Mac
So what do these musings have to do with the Mac?
Well, I bought my first Mac, a used Mac Plus, in 1992, more than eight
years after the first Macintosh debuted. Like my latecoming
introduction to baseball, that little Mac with its tiny, razor-sharp 9"
1-bit screen was a revelation. Upgrading from a command line driven
Wang word-processor, the Mac metaphor of the Graphical User Interface
and mouse allowing the user to virtually reach inside the machine
seemed like magic to me. I was hooked.
As with my baseball enthusiasm, I immersed myself in Mac lore. I
read books, subscribed to Macworld magazine, and fell in love
with the machine. In addition, being a Mac user was like joining a
club. It reminded me of the days back in the 1950s and 1960s when
owners of British sports cars (another of my preoccupations) would wave
and flash their lights at each other when meeting on the highway.
Even through the dark days of 1996/97, I kept the faith, even buying
a new PowerBook at
about the nadir of Apple's corporate troubles. The Mac community pulled
together with organized efforts like Guy Kawasaki's "Evangelist"
project and lots of freelance personal advocacy as well to help keep
the flame lit. [Editor's note: This was also the period during which
many Mac websites were launched, Low End Mac among them. dk]
Then came the return of
Steve Jobs and the start of Apple's Phoenix-like recovery from its
corporate near-death experience. It is difficult to gainsay Mr. Jobs'
handling of Apple's revival. The hardware became arguably ever more
appealing, and he's kept it up for more than a decade now. The Mac OS
is better than it has ever been as well, with OS X taking us into
another galaxy performance-wise, and the Mac's market share is almost
back to where it was in Apple's early
90s heyday.
The Magic Has Been Fading
And yet, for me at least, some of the magic is gone. This is not a
new epiphany. I can't put my finger precisely on when the light began
to fade - perhaps it was the deal with Microsoft that Steve Jobs
announced at Macworld Expo New York in 1997, when there still was a
Macworld Expo New York, or Apple Legal's bullying of the Mac rumor
sites and Simon
Jones's erstwhile MacCards web site, or the fact that Macs are
mostly (perhaps entirely?) made in Taiwan and China now, rather than in
California.
I expect it's been a cumulative effect of all these things and more,
which leaves me with conflicted feelings about being an Apple
advocate.
Please note well that I am not saying that the actions described in
the previous two paragraphs were not sound business moves, at least in
the short term, but what I am talking about here is how I, and on the
basis of considerable evidence, a lot of other veteran Mac fans feel
about them.
I still love the Mac OS and Mac hardware; I am just turned off by
the sometimes mercenary crassness and arrogance of the company that
manufactures and sells them.
Yeah, I know: "Apple is a business." So is Major League Baseball.
And I expect that from an MBA perspective, the Major Leagues' big money
TV deals and the players' concomitant salary demands made perfect
business sense.
Except for one thing: They killed the magic, and to some degree
killed the game, or at least a lot of the magic of the game at the
major league level, which ultimately had to be bad for business.
This article poses an inexact analogy, because so far Apple has not
experienced any notable negative consequences business-wise from its
hard-nosed, no-nonsense corporate policies of the second Jobs era. On
the contrary, the company has gone from strength to strength,
increasing market share, and is fairly rolling in cash.
However, these days it's more and more like just another computer
company, and its computer hardware an awful lot more similar to PC
machines (by dint of the fact that internally they're now pretty much
the same), which puts a damper on the sort of magic distinctiveness of
Macs of yore that engendered traditional enthusiasm and loyalty of Mac
aficionados.
That's Apple's prerogative, and so far it's been a good ride for
stockholders, which I hope will continue. And the Mac OS is definitely
still special - I just miss the fun of the old days.
