Washington Nationals third baseman Anthony Rendon caused a slight stir when he admitted to reporters that he didn’t watch baseball on television because of its now cliche reputation: slow, boring, meditative.
The quote resonated, because despite Major League Baseball Advanced Media’s immense success, the game’s pace still lags behind society’s.
In a post for The Cauldron, Mike Plugh explained the disconnect between a “game of intervals” and a world of multitaskers and clocks.
“Anthony Rendon was born in 1990,” writes Plugh. “The year before he was born, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web. By the time Rendon was six years old, tens of millions of people were using the Web in the United States and around the world. Around the time of his eighth birthday, Google was established. Around his 10th birthday, AOL purchased Time Warner. At 15, he witnessed the birth of YouTube. It’s no wonder the Nats third baseman finds this rural game of intervals too long and boring to sit through. His entire life has coincided with our dramatic digital shift.”
Plugh lectures on media studies and communication at Fordham University.