Reese Kaplan -- Finding the Needle in the Haystack

For many years all of us have regularly congregated with friends and frenemies to discuss the pros and cons of what the Mets must do in order to become more competitive.  Whether it’s over a pizza with your buddies, a selection of microbrews at the local watering hole or around the water cooler in the office when you should be working, the fact is that baseball fandom creates the need for social interaction.

Nowadays, of course, we are doing quite the opposite -- practicing social distancing and spending way too much time alone with our family and pets in order to avoid the likelihood of spreading the coronavirus.  While obviously it is important to stay safe and healthy, but at the same time people need to embrace the solutions available during this pandemic.

Towards that end, a long term group of fellow Mets fans were kicking around how to reinitiate the old days of camaraderie which the global health crisis is preventing from happening.  Finally one of the members said, “Why don’t we have a video conference like we do in the office multiple times per day?”  

Ummm….yeah!

I’m not here to debate the pros and cons of the various tools available.  We happened to use the oft-maligned Zoom not because we advocate the platform, but free for groups for up to 40 minutes.  It was available for phones, PCs, Macs, iPads and Chromebooks with minimal technical knowledge (which is the proficiency level of a great many people).  We set it up for last Thursday and didn’t quite know what to expect.

After logging on we probably squandered the first 10 minutes or so just getting acquainted with the technical options available to us.  We learned how to present the cameras in a video matrix of 9 users’ images spread across the screen at once.  You could tell looking at the images which were from phones and which were from webcams (larger and clearer).  For the newbies, learning not to perform a Cyclops move with pretty much a single eyeball hyper zoomed on the screen was a major accomplishment.  For others, it was a matter of balancing light and dark between sunshine, indoor lighting and positioning of the camera.

After the ice breaking period, we went onto the topic d’jour -- the ongoing discussion about the Mets.  Yes, we could have used a somewhat more formal agenda to dictate who spoke first since it was conceivable for everyone to try to be the predominant voice simultaneously.  Eventually we got to a point where we could talk in something of a sequence which gave a greater air of organization and civility to the discourse.

As our time came to an end we all quickly realized what a great approach we’d taken to reclaim some stake of baseball normalcy.  We were able to argue the best way forward for the club and for a precious 30 minutes or so we were able to forget everything about the virus and the lockdown.  In fact, it went from there to a quick reunion on WhatsApp where we immediately decided to schedule round two a week later at the same time on the same platform.  All week long people have been exchanging happy messages with great anticipation of round two taking place.  

I’m not trying to minimize or belittle what’s being done in the interest of controlling the potential for the spread of COVID-19.  However, let’s use the technologies available to us in ways we hadn’t before anticipated.  Try to find the best out of your own individual circumstances.