I remember the day I fell in love with the Internet. It was sometime around 1990 or 1991 (okay, so maybe I remember the circumstances of the day but not the exact date), and I was in San Jose, California, hanging out with one of my cousins at the home of one of his friends. We were watching the Cincinnati Reds play the San Francisco Giants on TV, and about 20 minutes after the game my cousin’s friend emerged from his room with the box score from the game that had just ended in his hand. I was amazed – life would never be the same.
As a lifelong sports geek, I have a love for box scores, statistics, and records. One of the cherished daily rituals of my youth was picking up the morning paper and looking at the box scores from the previous day’s action and using their acronyms and numbers to try and reconstruct what happened in those games. Box scores were magical to the younger me, but they could also be a source of frustration, mostly because I had to wait until the next day to see them and I often missed out on some of them because West Coast games would end after the local papers were printed. This info that I cherished was only available to me via an imperfect system.
So on that fateful day when the friend of my cousin handed me a copy of a box score from a game that had ended just minutes ago, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. How did this happen? He told me that he had printed it via his Prodigy account, and once I understood what that meant, I knew that I needed access to this new (to me) online world. I eventually got online, and was able to take part in the information revolution that ensued, particularly in the world of sports information. I and others of my sports-inclined ilk now have immediate access to every piece of information we could ever want – instant box scores, in-game box scores and gamecasts, archives, real-time fantasy sports – and that’s not even taking into account live online broadcasts of games.
So here I am with access to more info than I ever could have imagined – but something’s missing. I don’t know if it’s just a function of getting older, or if it’s just information overload, but I don’t read box scores anymore, either online or in the newspaper (which I still get on weekends). The charm is missing – they used to look like this, now they look like this, they used to seem special, now they just blend in with the rest of the information noise. I wouldn’t want to go back to the pre-Internet days, mind you, but I do sometimes long for those days when the little bit of info that was given to me somehow meant so much more.