We Are Officially Hardcore Baseball Fans

Last year around this time I got an email message from MLB.TV with a very baseball-like thing: viewing stats for the 2022 season. Having been an MLB.TV streaming subscriber since the 2019 season, my wife and I have become voracious baseball viewers. The stats back that statement up: we watched 227 baseball games in total 107 of those being Milwaukee Brewers games.

Living in the Pacific time zone, we also have taken to watching teams in Southern California. I think we’d watch more Seattle Mariners games, but because of the Byzantine rules surrounding media markets and blackouts, we’re not able to. The Bay Area is also “in” our media market even though that notion strains credulity.

(On that point of media markets and blackouts, I understand that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has been making moves to break up this system and open up access to fans everywhere regardless of what media market they are in. We have already seen MLB take over production of San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks broadcasts, and I hope that trend continues.)

In keeping with last year, I got another email message today with our viewing stats for the 2023 season. We—actually, my wife far more than me—blew last year’s numbers out of the water. We streamed 285 games 117 of those being Brewers games. We must have been good luck for the Brewers: they won 72 of those games. As they did last year, the Dodgers and Padres also had a prominent presence on our TV.

In sum, we are, dare I say, in the elite echelon of viewers: we ranked in the top 7% of overall viewers and the top 1% of Brewers fans. Say what you will, but we get good vale for the money we pay for access to MLB.TV.

With the short days of winter upon us, I miss watching baseball. It makes me reminiscent of our trip to Southern California this past April to take in two games, the Brewers at San Diego and the Cubs at Los Angeles. We’ve been to two other Brewers road-trip games, both in San Francisco (one in 2021 on a spur-of-the-moment trip and the other more planned in 2022). At all three of those games we were definitely the odd ones out cheering for the visiting team. At Dodger Stadium, though, it was nice to cheer for the home team. That it was the Chicago Cubs they were playing made it all the easier... and sweeter, too, considering that they walked it off in the bottom of the ninth inning.

On that trip to Southern California this past April, I shot the entire trip on film, the first time since the 1990s I had done anything like that while traveling. With one of my trusty Nikon Fs and a 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens, I used either Kodak Gold 200 or Fujifilm 200 film (the latter, as I understand it, is now being made by Kodak).

While we were at both of the baseball games we attended, I tried to capture a sense of the experience that one doesn’t or can’t get watching a game on TV.

I shot these two at Petco Park in San Diego before the game between the Padres and Brewers started:

And I shot these images at Dodger Stadium which, I must say, was much more interesting to photograph (sorry, Padre fans):

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more baseball in 2024!