Analysis
How does an experience change when it passes through a screen?
This summer, I opened my ChatGPT account and found baseball conversations I had never had. My eleven-year-old son, Bridger, had been using it to ask about players, statistics and baseball history. He announced each takeover the same way: “Hurricane has the mic.”
I told the larger story of that season in "The Other Baldwins: A Season With My Sons and the Atlanta Braves."
The conversations appeared during a year when our family was learning how to live across more than one home. My sons and I still went to games and played in the backyard when we were together. When we were apart, baseball often reached us through televisions, tablets, phones and the questions Bridger left inside my account.
By the end of the season, those screens had helped us build a shared baseball life that could move between homes and then follow us back into the world.
Finding Baseball
I had once assumed that if I passed baseball to my sons, I would do it the way my father passed it to me. I would take them to games, throw to them and explain the parts they did not understand.
That was not how Bridger found his way in.
His interest began with a YouTube video that sent every World Series winner moving across a bar chart. Baseball had never held his attention before. After that, YouTube kept offering him more, and he began bringing his questions to ChatGPT. He learned about players, statistics and moments that had happened long before he was born. Soon he was telling me things I had forgotten and checking things I thought I knew.
The screen gave him a route into baseball that did not depend on me.
That independence strengthened the connection between us. He came to our conversations with discoveries of his own, and I was no longer simply the father explaining the game. Sometimes I was the person answering. Sometimes I was the person being corrected.
Baseball became a subject we could investigate together.
Across Two Homes
Screens also gave us continuity when we were in different places.
We subscribed to BravesVision and tried watching games on two televisions while staying on FaceTime. The broadcasts rarely matched. One of us would pause so the other could catch up, then fall behind again. Eventually we stopped trying to watch every pitch in perfect synchronization. We called when the bases were loaded, when the ninth inning tightened or when something happened that one of us needed to discuss.
The feeds never quite lined up, and neither did our schedules. Still, baseball gave us a shared calendar and a reason to call. We could be in two houses and understand why the other had picked up the phone.
The conversations around the game mattered more than our ability to see the same pitch at precisely the same second.
The Ballpark and the Screen
What Bridger learned through screens made our time at the ballpark richer.
By the time he stood in the rain at Truist Park and watched Michael Harris II come to the plate with the bases loaded, he understood the situation before the crowd explained it to him. He had spent months studying old highlights, following current games and asking questions. He knew what might happen.
When Harris delivered the hit that put the Braves ahead, Bridger joined the roar as a fan who had learned how to anticipate it.
My younger son, Hudson, experienced the same moment differently. The noise drove him onto my back in the concourse, his hands over his ears. One boy needed room to remain near the field without me. The other needed the physical reassurance of holding on to me.
Technology had helped bring us there, but it had not made the moment the same for both boys or eliminated the need to respond to the child in front of me.
We later watched the replay, which let us see Harris pose on second base, locate ourselves inside the sequence and talk about what each of us had seen from a different part of the ballpark.
Technology did not reduce what happened in the stadium. It gave us another way to return to it.
A Different Kind of Presence
Cosm Atlanta offered something different.
The company calls it Shared Reality: a communal, headset-free form of immersion designed to bring fans closer to the action, not to reproduce the stadium in every respect.
Its enormous curved display surrounded us with the All-Star Game at Citizens Bank Park. In photographs, it looked as though we were in Philadelphia. In person, the boys and I both found the immersive, 87-foot-diameter LED display too bright and too big, and the sound too loud.
The stadium stretched around us without quite extending away from us. It had scale, but little depth. We left early.
That did not mean Cosm had failed at what it set out to do. It was not trying to become the stadium. Its deliberately different experience helped clarify what Bridger meant when he told me afterward that he preferred being at the stadium, “and everything at the stadium.” Hudson agreed, despite having complained that actual games were too loud, too hot or both.
They were responding to more than the field of view.
At Truist Park, the game emerged through the walk to our seats, the crowd around us and the possibility that the day might unfold differently from the way anyone had planned it. Cosm supplied the view before we sat down. The boys wanted the approach, the place and the freedom to move through it.
I came away from Cosm thinking less about whether screens were good or bad than about what they led us to do next.
The bar chart that first caught Bridger’s attention was crude compared with Cosm, yet it led him toward questions, conversations, the backyard and the ballpark.
What We Pass On
For our family, the useful technology kept sending us back toward one another. It helped Bridger discover baseball for himself and gave us something to share across distance. When we returned to the same couch, backyard or stadium, we arrived with more to talk about and more to notice.
Technology could also carry a moment forward in time. In 2021, when Bridger fell asleep before the Braves won the World Series, I turned my phone’s camera on myself and said softly, “We did it,” to my sleeping son. I wanted the moment to exist for him later. He did not experience the final out with me, but he could inherit my memory of it and the fact that I had thought of him when it happened.
My parents passed baseball to me largely through games, objects and stories. My father kept the birth announcement he had designed to resemble an Atlanta Braves roster transaction. By his account, Dale Murphy signed it at Piedmont Hospital. The announcement went into my baby book with the story attached. The paper endured because my parents decided it should.
My sons will inherit objects and stories too. They may also inherit recorded messages, photographs, search histories, recommended videos and whatever I publish about our lives. Some of that record is made by them, some by me and some by systems neither of us controls.
What the Screen Carries Forward
The same tools that helped our family remain connected also shape the baseball a child is able to discover. What can be found, what reaches him and what remains visible later are decisions made somewhere, often by institutions he will never see.
The screen may feel open, but the path through it has been arranged.
That gives the institutions behind those tools a quiet influence over what the next generation receives. A child who learns baseball through official apps, roster pages and digital archives encounters the version of the game those institutions choose to maintain. Player pages, photographs, highlights and histories become part of the material from which curiosity grows into attachment and memory.
If a labor dispute changes what appears there, the absence will reach beyond the negotiating table. Adults may recognize missing content as temporary leverage. A child is more likely to experience it simply as a closed door—one that may shape how he understands the game, and perhaps whether he continues toward it.
The Call Through the Screen
One season with two children cannot settle what technology does to families. In ours, screens gave my sons room to discover baseball for themselves and helped us remain present across distance. Near the end of the season, that connection became more immediate.
As I recounted in my personal essay, when I was eleven, I sat alone in a Buckhead Baseball dugout with a broken thumb, unable to put on my glove. My mother saw me from the stands. She came to the side of the dugout and called to me through a chain-link fence.
When my own son was hurting after the Braves’ season ended, he called me through a screen. The next morning, he called again. By the afternoon, we were together again, playing catch outside on the grass in the backyard where I grew up.
Playing catch outside had eased his pain. The screen was what brought us there.
Sometimes, between pitches, a young buck would appear by the creek at the edge of the yard and stop to spectate. Bridger and I would stand with our gloves at our sides, watching something wild as it watched us back.
By the time I reached for my phone to take a photo, he was gone.
