Goodbye, EI

Today is the last day of the EI free trial, and I’ll miss it terribly. I couldn’t watch every game (I simply don’t have enough hours in my day), but I kept up with so many more with EI. It really is a matter of you don’t know what you’re missing until you get it, because I had been just fine “watching” games via GameDay until I was able to see the action. There are so many subtle features to a game: light, wind, precipitation, positioning, the way a batter holds his bat, the type of foul balls that are being hit (foul pop ups, foul line drives, foul grounders), a batter’s discomfort at the plate, a pitcher losing his footing on a mound, what separates a routine grounder  from a tough play, and dozens of other things. It’s impossible to get a feel for it through GameDay, and yet it adds so much to the story of a given game.

Sometime last night, I had a conversation with my mother about why you can’t just watch highlights of games. I used the example of the Colts-Patriots AFC Championship game in the 2007 calendar year. It was an epic game. It was colossal. But if all you saw were the highlights, you weren’t really getting it. There was pace to the game, a sense of inevitability in the first half that created the euphoria in the second (or horror, if you were a Pats fan). There was something about watching it from beginning to end that had you wringing your hands, sitting on the edge of your seat, entirely engrossed in it…and it’s impossible to capture in a highlight reel.

Baseball isn’t the same as a football game, but it’s pretty easy to make a quick comparison. The Braves-Phillies finale this week, where the Phillies came back from a 10-3 deficit to win, was weak sauce when stuffed into a highlight reel. So I’ll definitely miss getting the opportunity to get into the rhythm of a bunch of different games from different teams that I usually wouldn’t have the opportunity to watch.

I won’t miss the awful ads for EI, though. Seriously, they were just terrible.

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