The Mets are taking advantage of the 30-year anniversary of the 1986 World Series team. In addition to wearing 1986 throwback uniforms on Sunday home games, the team is holding pre-game celebrations throughout the year. One promotion took place a few weeks ago on the radio. On May 26, WOR re-broadcast Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. NJ.com prompted its readers to “travel back in time” to either re-experience the game or, for fans younger than 35 years-old or so, experience it as it took place for the first time. WOR broadcaster Howie Rose implored Mets’ fans to “allow yourself to escape to a moment in time when every pitch and every play would define the Mets season, providing proper context to a comeback that somehow seems even harder to believe today than it did thirty years ago.”
The Mets’ official Twitter account played along, composing a series of unconvincing live tweets from the night of the rebroadcast. As opposed to a relic of the past, the Mets’ account treated the game as if it were taking place at the moment with the outcome undetermined and unknown. The use of the present tense indicates this pretense. It might have been an effort to create drama around the game in a fashion similar to a historical re-enactment, but it missed. Tweets like this …
Bobby Ojeda toes the rubber, Boggs steps in, and we are underway in Game 6 of the 1986 #WorldSeries! #Mets #YGB pic.twitter.com/NorStieEAz
— New York Mets (@Mets) May 26, 2016
… were met with responses such as “is it on TV or on Internet?” and “what the hell is a radio?” Rather than adding context, as Rosen suggested it might, live-tweeting the event as if it were happening in the moment took everything out of context. Twitter is a lot of things. Among the good things, Twitter caters to the immediate by providing a space for communities to interact with events in real time. Rather than taking advantage of the new technology to engage with the past, for three hours on May 26 the Mets’ official Twitter account simply relayed basic information that could have been gleaned from any newspaper in 1986 or a quick trip to Baseball Reference in 2016. The communal interaction doesn’t work with pretense.
The attempt to engage missed the mark because Twitter’s community engagement doesn’t work with pretense. To help explain why, it’s useful to consider another example from the Twitterverse. In December 2012, the Twitter account Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) appeared and quickly took off. The premise of the account was to give 140 character plot summaries of the sitcom Seinfeld if it existed in the twenty-first century. Most of the tweets focused on the exploits of Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer within contemporary technology and media. The account’s inaugural tweet reads: “Kramer becomes obsessed with another Cosmo Kramer on Twitter who has thousands of followers. Newman gets lap band surgery. It fails.” While this and other tweets are chuckle-worthy, the stars of the tweets are really the things that didn’t exist in the 1990s, such as Zip Car and iPads. The characters from Seinfeld are mere ornaments. The response to Modern Seinfeld is the account Seinfeld Current Day (@Seinfeld2000). As opposed to sterile plot descriptions, this account offers snapshots of Seinfeldian events and is abound with intentional misspellings of characters names (the stars are Jery, Krame, Elane, and Gerge), poor grammar, and absurdist engagement with contemporary popular culture. A sample:
What if Senfeld was X Men gerge go on blind date with jenifer lawrence JERY: How was date? GERGE: Shes BLUE pic.twitter.com/RHNJ4pgZ1h — Seinfeld Current Day (@Seinfeld2000) May 22, 2016
The humor can also be dark and discomfiting:
JERY: so u MURDERED her?
GERGE: ya
JERY: Becase she didnt turn on your POST NOTIFICATIONS??
GERGE: so
JERY: all u post is calzone pics!
— Seinfeld Current Day (@Seinfeld2000) March 28, 2016
In other words, the account does a much better job of accessing the spirit of Seinfeld, which was so popular, and so funny, because it was so deliciously irreverent. Rather than updating plots for the twenty-first century, Seinfeld Current Day tells stories that would never have happened on Seinfeld, but that are uncomfortably funny—just like Seinfeld.
Similarly, a mere rebroadcast of Game 6 of the World Series, in May, and a series of dry tweets conveys the body of the improbable victory, but it does not capture the soul of it. The tweets elevated bits of information as the implicit basis of historical knowledge. History, however, is not a list of facts. Instead, history is the interpretation of the past. It cannot coexist independent of an interpreter’s imagination, and if the artistry of the mind is used only to pretend that the outcome is unknown in an attempt at dramatization, it’s a failure.
An effective example of using the tools of history to engage with the past can be found in ESPN’s the “Diary of Myles Thomas” about the 1927 Yankees. In brief, authors fictionalized a diary from Thomas, who pitched for the Yankees from 1926 to 1929, as a point of departure for discussing baseball in the context of 1920s America. The website accompanies the diary entries with essays written by John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, as well as contemporary commentary by figures such as Ford Frick. The least compelling aspect of the history project is, unsurprisingly, the tweets from Thomas. Myles Thomas tagging Bryce Harper is as limp as reading “Marty Barrett extends Boston’s lead to 2-0” on Twitter in 2016.
That is not to suggest that the Mets should go all in with a project as demanding as ESPN’s venture. But there are ways to celebrate 1986 using contemporary media and technology while capturing the spirit of the time as well. In fact, live tweeting is a great venue to engage with the past, so long as everyone admits that we know what happened, and not just for the specific game. Organizing viewing times for games from 1986, whether famed or forgotten, would be an intriguing exercise in community engagement. How different is the viewing experience? How different is the game itself? We know that there weren’t as many strikeouts, but is that even noticeable while watching a game from 30 years ago?
Another option would be to view the game not through the lens of modern technology, but through current day baseball statistics. For instance, when Keith Hernandez led off the bottom of the tenth with an out in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, it pushed the Red Sox’ win expectancy to 99 percent:
Baseball-Reference
Now that’s dramatic.
Photo Credit: Andy Marlin-USA TODAY Sports