Mike O'Connell

Like digging up a relic from the past, mining the vaults of mikeoconnelljr.com brings genuine surprise from time to time. The following piece, which should have been published on October 18, 2019, I found last night in the “events” folder of the site, not the “posts” folder. Whoops. It reads like something from another time (it is), back when people used to, you know, drive their cars around and go places. Let me take you back to those pre-corona days…

Phantom traffic

A traffic light near my house was “decommissioned” last week.

Decommissioned.

That means they turned it off.

Actually, I’m not sure whether it’s off or not. There are giant black garbage bags over the lights, obscuring the fixtures themselves and whether or not they are in fact functioning. The cross street is now closed, giant orange barrels blocking would-be turn-offers and turn-oners. Genius.

Presumably this should cut 30 seconds or a minute off my average commute time. But there’s one problem. People still slow down as they approach the erstwhile light, thinking, perhaps, it might turn red. You know, after the bags fly off and the barrels simultaneously disappear.

Psychologists call this condition “phantom traffic.”

I call it #smh.

Still looking for useful things to watch on Hulu. Well, there are a few, but they can easily be seen elsewhere.

What Hulu lacks, of course, and Netflix lacks, and Amazon lacks, is anything from The Walt Disney Company. Disney got its own service, you see.

Last night I watched a movie on Disney+ I hadn’t seen in at least a decade…  Return to Oz. Released in 1985,  Return to Oz is one of a thousand “sequels” to The Wizard of Oz, and on a very short list of sequels actually worth watching. It’s also terrifying, and I have no idea why I was allowed to watch it as a kid, let alone watch it 300 times. Thirty-five years later it’s still fantastic. And it’s great to hear the word “TikTok” without meaning a stupid Internet video.

I keep finding ways to relive my childhood. It’s actually pretty great.

In this otherwise sportsless world you’ve got to take it wherever and whenever you can. But I draw the line at UFC.

To get my sports fix this weekend I started rereading John Feinstein’s Play Ball: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball. A detailed account of the 1992 MLB season, Feinstein gives a picture of the era and a recap of the previous half dozen seasons or so, the exact period I took an interest in the game. “Troubled times” is one way to describe them… Giamatti/Rose, Giamatti’s death, Fay Vincent’s ouster, labor struggles, Steinbrenner, Bonds when he was just a skinny jackass instead of a bulked-up cheater.

God I would kill for any of those so-called issues now.

An amusing aspect of Play Ball–and this seems to be the case in nearly all of Feinstein’s 30+ books on the subject of sports–is how true it is today. As in, Feinstein recognizes a problem, and three decades later it’s still there, probably worse. Inflated pro salaries, owner/labor squabbles, the farce of “amateur” athletics. Mostly it comes down to money. It is a business after all.

But in 1992, when I was 10 years old, the game was just a game. And getting to relive it in the pages of a 28-year-old book is exactly how I want to spend my quarantine.

Remember when the Pittsburgh Pirates were good? When Ken Griffey Jr. was still the Kid? Tony Gwynn had an off year and hit .317. A young Gary Sheffield flirted with a Triple Crown and Greg Maddux won 20 games for a Cubs team that finished 18 games out of first.

I could go on.

Wait, I will, because it just feels so good.

Puckett, Winfield, Larkin, Eckersley, Strawberry.

Clemens, McGwire, and the aforementioned Bonds when they were just… good players.

Kenny Lofton, Mickey Tettleton, Lance Johnson, Brett Butler, Andy Van Slyke.

The Braves had Glavine, Smoltz, and Steve Avery… then added Maddux in ’93.

And Deion Sanders led the league in triples.

Ninety-two was Buck Showalter’s first year as Yankees manager and began the resurgence of that storied franchise (the franchise of my youth). It was the debut of Camden Yards and the beginning of the downtown-retro-ballpark era.

Major League Baseball had 26 teams. I could recite the starting lineups and probably the entire 25-man roster of each. (I think I had half a dozen of every player’s baseball card and spent hours memorizing the backs of them.) This is what I miss. Not winner-take-all divisions, not intraleague-only play. I had time to engross myself in the sport.

Well, now I have the time but I don’t have the sport.

But I’ve got Feinstein. And that book, like the backs of those cards that never update, is there for me forever.

And I kind of like being 10 years old again.

If you were watching Jeopardy! last night or the night before you were treated to something unusual.

Ken Jennings in the middle.

First, Monday…

Re-airing an episode that was originally broadcast on June 2, 2004, Jeopardy! went old school, showing the first time Jennings appeared on the show. Appeared human too, missing questions and betting only $2,000 on a Daily Double.

I think the most amusing scene was Ken’s contestant interview. Rather than telling a story about his wife or kids or anything silly like that, he took time to thank the anonymous strangers who had rescued him along a Nevada highway some unknown time ago.

If that had been the only time he’d appeared on the show it would have been a pretty weak story. Good thing for Ken he had 75 more times to chat with Alex about, well, Jesus, by the time they were done they were like old friends weren’t they?

Last night  Jeopardy! pulled one from the vaults as well, this time going back only a few months to its million-dollar “Greatest of All-Time” challenge.

Ken, though positioned in the middle, looked like the Ken Jennings we know.

Damn that guy’s good at Jeopardy!

Funny, before a month ago or so I assumed the people of this world (myself included) were just moving toward more and more physical isolation from one another. We walk around with our eyes glued to our phones, we text people sitting across the room, and we conduct business without ever speaking to a human being.

Yet when we’re faced with actual isolation (“social distancing” is what we’re calling it–in case I’m reading this years from now), there’s a definite backlash.

Good, I guess. No?

We’re not in the Twilight Zone or a Bradbury novel just yet. All those years we were running home from work just so we could get to our screens and connect online… looks a lot different now that we don’t get to do the go-to-work-first part doesn’t it? Amazingly I miss that part, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Well, some day we can go back to just fantasizing about a world without going to work.