It was when the clock clicked past 3:15 a.m. that I began to doubt my very existence—not to mention my chosen profession.
It's not like I'd never seen this hour before, but in the past it usually it involved a pizza, a beer and a girl, or some combination of all three. Up until this past weekend, it never involved radio coverage of a major league baseball game. Yet there I was, hunched over the WHMP console last Friday night babysitting a broadcast of the Red Sox and some no-name Japanese team battling it out in the Tokyo Dome.
Sleep-deprived moments like this offer one a chance to ponder certain questions like, what the hell are the Red Sox doing in Japan anyway? I doubt it's to sell season tickets to the greater Tokyo business community. Is it because the game of baseball is starting to wane in the Land of the Rising Sun, and it needs a major league kickstart to get it going again? I doubt it, judging by the number of Japanese players in the game today.
Maybe the league is trying to reward the Red Sox for winning the 2008 World Series, because I know nothing would make me feel more appreciated than having to fly 19 hours to play baseball when I could have spent an extra week in the Florida sun. Some perk, although I'm going to have a hard time feeling bad for a bunch of guys who will make more on the bonus for this trip—$40,000—than a lot of people in this area will make in an entire year.
The real reason this trip happened is the same reason this league allegedly uses juiced-up balls to increase the amount of offense in a game, and looks the other way while human gargoyles beef up on steroids. It's the same reason an average fan needs to rob a bank or take out a second mortgage to be able to take the family to Fenway for an afternoon.
As Gordon Gekko said in the movie Wall Street, "It's all about the bucks, kid. The rest is just conversation."
There's only one reason for this trip and that is money. The league believes it needs to expand its product to new markets like Japan and China, and the only way to do that is to bring the product directly to them. In the process, the Red Sox management is able to acquire some positive international press coverage as well as making some extra "jing" by being allowed to do things like sell advertising on the players' uniforms, which the league prohibits in this country.
So everybody gets fat in this scenario—except the fans. Not only do we have to get up or go to bed at ungodly hours just to listen to or watch these games (kind of like with the World Series), but it's entirely possible that this little jaunt could wind up screwing the Red Sox' chances of getting a strong start to the season.
I haven't heard a single player or coach who's made this trip say it was a good experience, at least from a performance perspective. In fact, some have said it all but crippled them for the first month of the season, which is not exactly the way the Sox want to kick off defense of their 2008 World Series title.
I'm sure not everyone shares my Chicken Little view of this scenario. There are many who will no doubt enjoy the novelty of being able to listen to the Sox and A's while driving to work in the morning. And I'm sure there are a few area bar owners who were psyched at the prospect of being able to open at five in the morning to accommodate die-hards looking to toss a few back at a time when they might ordinarily be sleeping it off.
But I'm guessing those same people may not be as excited when the Red Sox have trouble winning a game at the end of April.
And if that happens, just remember what this trip was about: a group of greedy owners and league executives sticking a little yen in their pockets even if they had to cut your world champions into sushi to do it.
