Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Is Major League Baseball Y2K Compliant? (1999)


(written for the NUMB News, Oct. 1999)
It's hype, it's hoopla, it's panic, it's much ado about nothing. It is, of course, the great Millennium Countdown. "You have 67 days until you are burned to a blackened crisp. Have a nice day." All the media attention given to the impending Year 2000 has got me wondering. Will baseball get bit by the Y2K bug? The game on the field seems computer-proof, but a variety of millennium-related disasters still might, just might, befall our national pastime:
  • All payroll checks are dated 1900 and banks refuse to cash them. The players union threatens a work stoppage and demands payment in gold bullion.
  • Ball park scoreboards go on the fritz. Balls appear as strikes. Outs become runs. On the scoreboard, all games appear to end in a 27-27 tie (except in Fenway).
  • Jumbo-Trons, Mega-Trons, and all the other big-ass ballpark video boards are completely inoperable. No more racing baseballs or cartoon commands to "make some noise". (Many fans find this an improvement.)
  • Toilets in the newer, high-tech stadiums begin flushing up instead of down, dampening derrieres from coast to coast.
  • The computers at the Elias Sports Bureau crash, and their vast database is irretrievably lost and gone forever. With the few bits and bytes that remain, Elias announces that, so far as they can tell, the all-time career leader in basehits is not Pete Rose but Don Blasingame. NBC's Jim Gray immediately cornered Blasingame and asked him if was finally ready to admit to the American people that he swiped a Hershey bar at the drugstore when he was 9 years old.
  • The satellite dishes at ESPN go buggy. For months, Baseball Tonight shows the daily cricket highlights broadcast on BBC-One. Tea sales in America rise.
  • On opening day in Jacobs Field, they cue up a classic tape of Rocco Scotti, the Singing Plumber, doing his rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. Inexplicably, the tape loops and refuses to be turned off or down. The PA system blares Rocco Scotti 24 hours a day all season long. Cleveland's attendance plummets.
  • At the Fox Network, Steve Lyons' microphone goes dead. (Definitely an improvement!)
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