There are certain moments in life where you wonder if it can get any better.
You may be immediately thinking of the birth of a child, perhaps because you’ve lived through that yourself. And it’d certainly qualify.
But there are other moments in life serene enough to warrant that response, like enjoying a cold beer that’s been chilled in an alpine lake at the summit of a long hike. Or a picturesque round of golf on a vacation you’d been looking forward to for months.
That isn’t to say stuff like that is better than or even on the level of life’s more foundational moments, but there’s a threshold one can reach, even regularly, that underscores what life on this plane of reality is all about.
I’m looking forward to another one of those tonight.
The Mariners are the Mariners and we’ll write more specifically about them soon but tonight, Friday in the city (and elsewhere), I’ll bike with my wife down to the ballpark for Game 1 vs. the Cubbies.
When we’re all settled in, Value Drafts acquired from the back bar and seats located, we’ll split a pair of old wired iPhone headphones plugged into a handheld radio we got off Amazon.
She’ll get her scorecard going, I’ll start working through a bag of kettle-roasted Giants sunflower seeds (dill pickle flavor) and we’ll spend the next few hours watching the ballgame with our good friends Rick and Gary.
That’s as good as it gets.
What about the delay, though?
What about it.
While it’s definitely there and borderline unworkable on the well-known public station, 710 AM, there is another way. My wife stumbled across it when she had the small sliding switch on the side of our device inadvertently set to FM.
Down toward the very end of the FM dial—opposite end from 107.7 THE END—there is what I can only assume the in-house radio feed they play out on the concourses.
And the call goes straight from Rick’s lips to your earhole, just as fast as if you were sitting next to him in the booth doing color.
It is heavenly.
There are parts of the ballpark where reception is not so great, blocked by the seating bowl or something, but it is oh so good when you make it work.
Seriously, you will be watching the play—the real, live, actual play in reality—right in front of you and the audio arrives in your brain as fast as Rick or Gary can describe it.
“Fly ball to left, it’s playable, Randy ranges back a few steps and catches the ball at the brim of his cap…”
The story is written as you watch it.
Of course, as people often complain, the ball isn’t in play all that much in baseball and that’s where the broadcast really shines. Between every pitch, it’s the conversation, the background, the anecdotes—the romantic waltz that is a baseball broadcast.
Did you know George Kirby has the highest ground ball rate of his career this year? Now you do.
It probably says more about me or at least my generation that it’s also the exact right amount of stimulation—read: a lot of it—to actually quiet the mind and allow one to be present.
It’s like a TikTok with Subway Surfer beneath a long podcast clip about how the CIA killed Kennedy, except it’s one of the greatest baseball broadcasters of all time narrating exactly what you see in front of you and the backstory behind it.
That’s the other thing, we’ve only got so much Rick left.
And if you haven’t noticed, he’s not working a lot of road games—if any. At home though? There’s Rick, still doing the damn thing like Edgar in 2001.
If you’ve never done this, never listened to the radio at the game, do it now while we’ve still got our guy.
It’ll be every bit as good when, hopefully, it’s Gary Hill taking over the main chair next year and seizing the mantle of the next great Mariners broadcaster like he was made in a lab to do it.
For now, you get this beautiful interplay between the two—a couple dudes who know and love this team so damn much, practically sitting there beside you as you watch the game.
I’d lend ‘em some seeds but don’t think they’d be great on the broadcast.
Eventually, I hope the Mariners look at doing what some ballparks do in running real-time radio over WiFi. The Kraken used to have it but don’t anymore—though not because it didn’t work as advertised. If they can do it in a sport as fast-paced as hockey, it should be more-than-doable in baseball.
For now though, there’s old school radio—beamed to you from right there in the park.
Grab a cheap radio from the store, dig one out of a closet full of junk or check eBay for a cool old one and split a pair of headphones with someone you love.
You’ll be happy you did.
Go M’s.