Three weeks after the season started, and 27 days before I leave Kabul to head home to Boston, I saw my first live Red Sox action of the 2011 season. The broadcast began at 6:30am Kabul time on the morning of Friday, April 22, although the participants would tell you that the first pitch was thrown in Anaheim, CA, at 7:00pm Pacific Daylight Time on Thursday, April 21. The broadcast came to my TV via a rather grainy feed of the Indian version of ESPN, beamed to the satellite dish atop my guesthouse in Kabul. Indian ESPN apparently buys a local television feed of an MLB game every night, broadcasting it live at 3:30am Kabul time for games on the East Coast, and 6:30am Kabul Time for games on the West Coast. So for about two hours (between 8 and 10am), I got to listen to the Angels' announcers calling the game on some SoCal TV station.
And then I went to the gym with my housemates. And a funny thing happened on the way to (actually ON) the elliptical machine. The gym we were in (which is in the Serena Hotel, far and away the nicest hotel in town) has some exercise machines with built-in TVs. The elliptical I was on was one of these marvelous creations, and to make things even better, it got a(n even grainier) ESPN feed. I left my house with the game tied at 2 in the bottom of the 10th; by the time I turned on the TV on the elliptical, the Sox had taken a 4-2 lead and it was the bottom of the 11th. I proceeded to watch good ol' Jonathan Papelbon get two outs while allowing a runner to reach second base, and then run a 3-2 count on Howie Kendrick...
...and then the power went out in the gym. By the time the power came back 30 seconds later, the game had ended, with your intrepid correspondent having missed the clinching strikeout. But I guess that's the price you pay for watching live baseball on an elliptical machine in Kabul via Indian satellite TV.
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