What a Tangled Web We Weave (One Sixty-Two: Day 47)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Forty-Seven: Brad Lincoln, Pittsburgh Pirates

I was tempted to turn on my laptop at 6:45 this morning to check my e-mail, my fantasy baseball, and anything else the Internet brought my way. But I decided I needed a simpler, quieter breakfast with a backdrop of birds chirping rather than electronics humming.

I glanced at Monday’s New York Times while starting my bowl of cereal, and there on Page One was a headline that seemed quite fitting to the decision I’d just made: It read “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price.” The story, by Matt Richtel, focused on technology overload, and the ways in which our attempts to multitask with computers, e-mail, phone calls, iPads, iPods and other assorted media have altered the way we think and behave. In addition, Richtel reports, scientists are finding that the media multitaskers among us struggle to focus.

It’s an article that any adult would do well to read. I was particularly taken by Tara Parker-Pope’s sidebar, titled “Warning Signs of Tech Overload,” when I noticed how many of the signs applied to me. As I think about the degree to which my girls watch and emulate my behavior, this concerned me even more.

But the thrill of information everywhere is so difficult to discard. It is the most tantalizing byproduct of this technological revolution – if we want it, we can find it. And the fact that we can find so much leads us to want to find much more than we would’ve ever thought to look for in generations past. And I’m not sure that helps us in the long run.

So the Pittsburgh Pirates apparently are considering a promotion for their top pitching prospect, a young man named Brad Lincoln. With all the hype over Stephen Strasburg’s debut with the Washington Nationals tonight, you might think that Mr. Lincoln would be overshadowed, with little information about him as the team considers starting him tomorrow.

But oh, how wrong you’d be. Just a quick Google search brings us the following: News stories on Brad Lincoln from ESPN.com, MLB.com, The Associated Press, USA Today and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; scouting reports and statistics from Baseball-Reference.com, Yahoo! Sports, CBS Sports and Rotoworld.com; blurbs from Pirates fan sites (“Raise the Jolly Roger” and “Bucco Fans,” to name a couple); Lincoln’s biography on the University of Houston athletics department’s site; and, of course, a Wikipedia entry.

So if you were somehow addicted to both baseball and technology (a combination that I’ve heard something about), you could literally spend hours reading stories about a 25-year-old man who has not yet thrown a single pitch in the major leagues. Hours.

He’s supposed to be a good one, it’s true. And it’s cool to have the opportunity to read about him. But, as Richtel’s story tells us, there are an awful lot of us reading an awful lot of things these days on-line – and we’re having trouble looking away.

Yet those birds, man – they’re chirping. They sounded beautiful this morning. I gave them 15 minutes, felt at ease, and then rushed off to work. The computer went on, and here it is still, 15 hours later.

Tonight, I‘ve gained more knowledge about Brad Lincoln. But what have I lost along the way?