Tivo, God of All Sports

There is a perverse joy in watching sports on Tivo.

It’s not so much the ability to pause the live action on the screen when the phone rings, a virtue extolled by the product’s own advertising. Nor is it the ability to rewind, to hear something a commentator mumbled unintelligibly, or to see for the third or fourth time some amazing feat of athleticism—or even a wardrobe malfunction.

No, the great attraction of Tivo is that it lets you play God with time. The average baseball or football game has become, in the words of Yankee announcer Michael Kay, an unmanageable affair of more than three hours. But between all the commercials, timeouts, and standing around posturing, there’s at least an hour of mind-numbing tedium per contest that the sports’ producers would have you believe merely heightens the suspense.

For years, there was nothing to do but rage against the machine. That, or make a quick detour to the bathroom during these purgatorial interruptions. But with Tivo, such time sucks are a thing of the past. If I wait until about an hour after a game starts, I can usually catch all the action and skip the inertia. Even better, because I live on the west coast, I can shift the entire game to an hour more leisurely than the 5:30 pm start time for most World Series games.

No longer must I endure a Tony LaRussa three-pitcher inning. Instead, trips to the mound now go on the express track. The pause for station identification is a fly-by, not an opportunity to sneak in three more commercials. The seventh-inning stretch lasts only as long as it takes for me to fast forward through the bombastic rendition of God Bless America.

The endless speculation about whether or not the replay showed incontrovertible evidence that the receiver’s foot was on some line is decided instantaneously; justice is meted out wild west style without delay.

Halftime of a football game is over as soon as I get back to the couch with my Cheetos. The final three minutes of a basketball can be watched in something approximating three actual minutes, not the 25 that it usually adds up to when you throw in all the time outs, fouls, free throws, and high fives for missing free throws.

There’s no down time between periods of a hockey game, no break after every two games of a tennis match, no rest between rounds of a fight. And a horse race: well they call it the fastest two minutes in sports, so who needs to spend 58 minutes watching all the pretty horses as they move from the paddock to the starting gate?

There is a price to be paid for all this convenience. For one, there’s the problem of keeping yourself in the dark about the result of the event being Tivoed. It’s not enough to announce to everybody within earshot who might spill the beans that under no circumstances shall they reveal the final score of the big game. In a world where sports scores are flashed at us on computer screens, cell phones, TV tickers, and even the tops of taxis, the Tivo-ing sports fan must ignore an increasing number of media.

Then there’s the terrific temptation to peek. Watching sports “plausibly live”—a term coined by NBC for its tape-delayed coverage of Olympic events in inconvenient time zones—puts you in a special kind of limbo. What you are about to see has in fact actually happened. Unlike live sporting events, in which critical plays become magnified (and suspense actually does build), the Tivo-ed event is constantly threatened by the fast-forward button that lets you skip through the seven consecutive foul balls and go straight to the action.

What’s more, because the outcome has already been decided, fan superstitions are even more preposterous. Rally caps, lucky jerseys, and refusing to shift from certain seats on the couch never had any effect on live sporting events; they have even less impact on ones that are already over.

Finally, there is Tivo’s anti-communitarian spirit. When you view sports on Tivo, you absent yourself from the larger brotherhood that watches the event live. You can’t call your buddy in San Francisco to complain “can you believe they called that a penalty!” When a cheer or a gasp ripples through your neighborhood during a big game, you know something momentous has happened, but you don’t know what. Or for whom. As you watch events unfold, you start trying to psych out what must have occurred. He couldn’t have hit a home run here, because if he had, Mike would have called me to gloat.

Despite these drawbacks, I remain a convert to plausibly live sports. Whenever I’m tempted to go back to watching sports the old-fashioned way, it only takes a couple of AFLAC commercials to remind me why I switched.

Voluntary Testing Could Solve Baseball's Steroid Problem

When it was revealed that Jason Giambi used steroids last year, major league baseball pretended to be stunned. The club owners all professed to be shocked—shocked!—at Giambi’s admission, and pledged to get steroids out of the game. And the baseball player’s union got all contrite and made an unprecedented offer to reopen the collective bargaining agreement.

But it’s hard to imagine that anybody outside the cocoon of major league baseball was surprised. Everybody who has watched the game over the past 10 years knew that something was amiss. ESPN Classic is full of reminders how skinny players of the 1980s and even the early 1990s were in comparison to today’s bulked-up Hummers.

The fact that everybody within the game refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room is a good indication that even the latest steroid bombshell won’t cause much change. The new steroid policy has already caught a few careless infielders, but it’s just as toothless as the old policy. And that’s because neither the players nor the owners have any interest in putting any muscle behind it.

The players have too many reasons to cheat--120 million reasons, to be specific, in Giambi’s case. And the owners will remain complicit in the skullduggery because they profit from all the home runs hit by juiced-up players. People don’t pay $40 a pop to see guys who can bunt. George Steinbrenner may not have known for sure that Giambi was using steroids when he signed him, but I doubt he went out of his way to find out.

But fans don’t have to sit still for this charade. Not if individual players are willing to take the initiative. To that end, I suggest a policy of voluntary steroid testing.

In an interview on ABC’s 20/20, BALCO founder Victor Conte said he would “guesstimate that more than 50 percent of [baseball players] are taking some form of anabolic steroids." Even if his guesstimate is twice too high, an accusation of that magnitude casts doubt on the achievements of every player in baseball. To remain above suspicion, players who aren’t cheating---pitchers, infielders, catchers, and Neifi Perez—should line up to be tested for steroids.

Voluntary testing skirts the privacy issue. Any player who volunteers for steroid testing isn’t giving up his Fourth Amendment rights. He’s pleading his innocence to fans who already presume him guilty. There wouldn’t even be any punishment for refusing to take the test, or even for taking the test and failing. Except in the court of public opinion.

To prevent cheating, a voluntary steroid test would have to be administered as often as once a week. And there’s no reason to test players for recreational drugs. The issue isn’t drugs; it’s cheating. Do fans care if players smoke a little weed or snort something so passé as cocaine, if it doesn’t affect their play on the field? Judging from their embrace of Doc Gooden, Steve Howe, and Darryl Strawberry, the answer is a resounding no.

But they do care if players are using performance-enhancers to shred the record books. To many fans, the expanding crowd of players in the 500-homer club is more offensive to baseball than Pete Rose’s gambling was. If players like Rafael Palmeiro really want people to believe they haven’t been shooting up, voluntarily submitting to a steroid test is a much better way to prove it than protesting their innocence before Congress.

Since steroid use wasn’t against the rules of baseball until 2003, the achievements of players suspected—hell, even players convicted--of steroid use can’t be discounted. It would be no more fair to asterisk all those home run statistics than to disqualify Burleigh Grimes’s victories because he threw a spitball before it was banned.

Even voluntary testing wouldn’t disqualify any home runs hit henceforth, though it might make fans, MVP voters, and Hall of Fame voters think twice before rewarding any player who refused to be tested. And it would validate the performance of players who proved they did it legally.

And in a perfect world, the players volunteering for steroid tests would reach such a critical mass that even slow-footed Hulks, first basemen, and designated hitters might be shamed into giving up the juice.

Would some players be so crass as to volunteer for testing all the while continuing to take performance-enhancers they knew the tests couldn’t catch? It would be naïve to think otherwise. Even the most lauded steroid-testing policies, the ones used by the NFL and the Olympic Games, are “like taking candy from a baby,” according to Conte. “In short, the Olympic Games are a fraud.” And as far as the NFL goes, just look at all the pituitary cases on the sidelines. The Raiders’ defense does a better job stopping the running game than the league’s testing policy does at stopping steroid use.

But it would be even more naïve to adopt a mandatory steroid-testing policy that sticks the onus on the owners to catch the cheaters. Voluntary testing, by contrast, allows the players to take responsibility for their own actions. They’ve been sneaking around the clubhouse for long enough. It’s time for them to step up to the plate.