2118 The Death of Clocks

There’s no clock in baseball.  The longest major league game ran 33 innings and lasted eight hours and eight minutes. The White Sox beat the Brewers 7-6 on Thursday, May 8, 1984.

Other sports DO have clocks.  But no one watches them. The clocks, that is, not the sports.  A typical televised NFL football game or college game can take four 15 minute quarters and make them last for around four hours.

In the NBA, four 12 minute quarters can last almost three hours.  In the NHL, three 20 minute periods also last 2 ½ hours or more.

Life imitates sports.  You can spend 15 minutes grocery shopping and another 30 checking out.  An Amtrak train can be six minutes late and still be counted as “on time.”

And then there are political campaigns.  The presidential campaign of 2020 began on Friday, January 20, 2017 and will last until Tuesday, November 3, 2020.  That’s 1,383 days not counting recounts and the counting of absentee ballots. That’s about 8,000 professional football games played sequentially and without interruption.

And that’s how long the professional campaigners want your undivided attention on their glorious selves, their Great Ideas and their reasons you should vote for them or at least against everyone else.  It only seems endless because it IS endless.

But don’t worry about staying awake for all those hours.  There are many sports announcers ready, willing and able to catch you up on all the thrilling action any time you turn on a radio or television or read a newspaper.

Sports play by play announcers, statisticians and analysts like Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity... and panelists more numerous than sum of singers in the chorus formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, musicians in the famously overcrowded Gewandhausorchester and commuters awaiting the 6:46 pm to Babylon on Penn Station’s infamously short track 20.

This really is Babble On.

And then, there are the survey makers.  Fortunately, you can include that in campaign time if you wish.  But examined separately, they form a whole ‘nuther level of stale baked goods and termite food.

Candidate A is leading Candidate B 38-to-20 percent among white male turnip farmers aged 25-to-49. But the number is reduced by half if you include their adult children and older parents. The margin of error is plus or minus 18%.

Oh, but that was ten days ago.  What about NOW?  And what about tomorrow.  Or the day after.

Also worth considering are the opinions of political science professors, many of whom were fired as stock analysis for getting something right.  “If Candidate A loses Central Falls, Rhode Island, he cannot possibly win the national election,” says Professor H. Plancton Cabotlodge, Ph.D. of Cartilage University, “No one who lost Central Falls has ever won national office.”

If you’re a sports fan in a hurry, you can watch all of this on YouTube, the Reader’s Digest of video and you won’t need to get a home equity loan to afford the peanuts and Cracker Jack as you might at Yankee Stadium or the L.A. Coliseum. And who needs context, anyway?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019