Last night’s first game of the American League division championship between the Red Sox and the Angels was a classic post-season game that began at 10 pm and ended around 1:30 am, insuring that I only got two-third of my required allotment of sleep. Today will be a long one.
Following the Game through Twitter and the “#redsox” hash tag (twitter is a 140-character “microblogging” system, think of it as open instant messaging) was an unrewarding experience. Keeping an eye on the laptop and an eye on the television made me miss some important plays, and none of the tweets, or comments, were particularly insightful or hysterically funny.
I’d rather read a live blog account from Red and Denton at Surviving Grady, or hang out with a bunch of smartass friends at a local dive, get messy, and call in sick the next day. The virtual bar of #redsox, while occasionally funny, had just enough lag to make it unfun. Then the volume of baseball chatter overwhelmed the usual Twitter torrent of Palin and Obama talk and the system started to lag. By midnight on the east coast, the Red Sox was dominating the Twitter buzz, but the content was … well, making fun of the color of one guy’s salmon colored sport coat, simultaneously cheering good catches and homeruns, and making fun of television ads for Viagra.