what i miss, summer edition

Long ago, I blogged about what I thought I would miss when I left New York. I was seldom right.

I don't miss the Sunday New York Times. I don't miss Yankee Stadium. I don't miss the Haven Coalition.

I do miss the grandeur and the beauty of New York. I do miss my old job - it was easier, it paid better and it left me more time to myself. And I do miss seeing my mother more frequently, for shorter periods of time.

I didn't know iced coffee wasn't readily available at every street corner here, so I didn't know I'd miss it.

But did I ever imagine the thing I miss most would be an hour of commercial television? I want my "Baseball Tonight"!!

Baseball Tonight is a baseball-only highlights show on ESPN. It doesn't always have insightful analysis - in fact, it's been considerably dumbed down for the last couple of years. I didn't watch it every night, because sometimes it was on during the game. (Stupid!) But I could lie on the couch and watch highlights from all the games of both leagues, and get caught up on the streaks, the winners, the losers, the trade rumours, and all the baseball scuttlebutt.

Everything I used to get from BBTN is available elsewhere, scattered about in different forms. But the form is what I loved. With SportsCentre, I have to sit through the Other Sports, with baseball getting 15 minutes of the hour, at best. Video highlights at mlb.com are very limited. Reading all the baseball news is alright, but come on, it's a sport, you want to watch it more than read about it, and it somehow doesn't sink in the same way.

Like iced coffee last autumn, I tried not to think about BBTN in April and May. But man, it is almost the All Star Break! I am underinformed and out of touch.

It seems like we get a million channels on our digital cable, including all the American networks that I never watch. But no ESPN. Rogers SportsNet carries the Sunday night game (the "ESPN game") and TSN has the Canadian version of SportsCenter (which I call Sports Sentry), but no ESPN, and no BBTN.

Free Iced Americano to the first person to solve this one for me.