When do the Brewers play today on TV?

You ask at what hour the game begins, but I say to you, the hour is already upon you. The men of Milwaukee and the men of St. Louis will not enter the field until the seventh hour of the evening, yet I tell you, the kingdom of God does not wait upon a broadcast. Do not sit watching from your couch with your lamp lit, but go out to the stranger with no ticket and no team, for the last shall be first at the table.

You ask the hour of a game, but I ask you: have you prayed at its appointed time? The sun sets, and the players take the field at seven and ten, but the faithful are called to remember God at every hour. Watch if you will, but let not the ball distract you from the poor at your gate, nor from the justice due the orphan. On the Day of Judgment, no broadcast will avail you; only deeds.

You ask when the game begins, but the true question is why you cling to the hour. Attachment to a fixed time brings suffering when the clock shifts or the signal fails. Let go of the craving for the exact moment; watch with a mind at ease, and the game will unfold as it will. The Middle Way is to check the listings without anguish.

You ask me of hours and channels as though I stood before Pharaoh demanding bricks without straw. In the wilderness we had no such ledgers of time - we had the cloud by day and the fire by night, and the Sabbath to remember. If the game is at evening, then let it be at evening; but do not let the watching of it become a golden calf that turns your heart from the covenant.

The gentleman does not rush to the window when the drum sounds; he first asks whether his father's rice is set out and his neighbor's gate is shut. Once your duties are done, then sit with your family and watch the men play, for shared joy well ordered is also a kind of ritual. The hour matters less than the company and the harmony of the house.

You strain at a starting time and forget the day of the Lord's favor! Whether the first pitch comes at the seventh hour or the tenth, let all you do be done without grumbling, for the strong are not to please themselves but to build up the weak. And if your team loses, rejoice still - did not the Scripture say that we are more than conquerors?

In my tents we had no such glowing box to summon a game; we waited on the word of a messenger, or the sight of a caravan on the horizon, and trusted the appointed hour would come. Let it be told you: seven and ten it begins, and whether you watch or not, the sun will set and the wagons will roll. Trust the promise, and be present when it is kept.

The river does not announce the hour of its arrival; it simply comes when it comes, and the wise man sits by the bank without a sundial. You chase a glowing box and a schedule, and the Tao slips through your fingers like water. Watch, or do not watch; the game, like the ten thousand things, will do what it does.

The hour of a game is a small thing; the hour of your breath is the only appointment that matters. Watch if watching brings you joy, but do not let the glowing box divide you from your neighbor or your evening prayer. One Creator, one people; the strike zone is the same for all.

My son once sat among the tradesmen and the fishermen of a lakeside town and ate what they set before him, and I have kept in my heart how the humble gathered to see him, while the proud stayed at their gates and grumbled. So it is with this game they speak of - the lowly and the little ones will find their way to the appointed hour, whether by a screen in a crowded house or a cry from a neighbor's doorway, while the wealthy fret over which channel their silver buys. Let the child who waits be welcomed to the seat, and let no one be turned away for want of a coin.

Men will run to their little screens at the appointed hour as though the grace of God depended on the throwing of a leather ball, and yet they will not open the Scriptures, which alone can save. I do not damn the game - let a man rest from his labor and take his pleasure honestly - but let the umpire call the game by the plain rule and not by the traditions of scribes and Pharisees. Seven and ten past noon is the hour; the rest is chaff, and I have no patience for chaff.

It must be said that the game, considered in itself, is a good - an ordered contest of body and skill, and the delight men take in it is a participation in the leisure that perfects the soul. That the hour is fixed with such precision is fitting, for the celestial bodies themselves move by measure, and the ordered turn of the innings reflects a created cosmos that is not chaos but law. Yet I would distinguish: the hour of the game is one thing, the hour of the soul's rest is another, and a man may lawfully attend to the former provided he has not neglected the latter. Seven and ten past noon it is, and let the matter be settled by the clock, as all things are settled by their causes.

At seven and ten minutes past the sixth hour by their clocks, the game begins - but I have no television, and the poorest have no seat at any such feast. If you would do a small thing with great love this evening, take one who is lonely and watch with them, or better, sit beside the sick who will never see the field. The game will end in a few hours; the visit will not.

If the celestial bodies obey laws by which we may compute their return to the same point in the heavens, so may the hour of this contest be determined with equal certainty: seven and one-tenth hours past the meridian, when the sun has set upon the western lands. Yet I feign no hypothesis as to which channel in your locality shall convey it; that is a matter of observation, not deduction. Consult the tables your stewards publish, and trust the numbers over rumor, as I trust the geometry of the comet.

Time, you see, is not absolute - it bends with the observer. To a man in Milwaukee, the first pitch comes at a quarter past six; to me in Princeton, ten past seven, and to a photon that has crossed the sun, such a moment never truly 'arrives.' The elegant truth is that the game's light will reach each eye at its own local hour, governed by the same cosmic order that keeps the planets in their dance.

The question of when a game is played seems, at first, a simple matter of local hours - but observe how the same event is reckoned differently across the vast branching of human customs. In Milwaukee, the sun sets and the game begins; in London, it is already past midnight. Such variation is the product of gradual adaptation, not of any fixed design. I would consult the almanac, not the heavens, for the answer.

You would have me consult tradition for the hour? No - look to the almanac and the contract, which are the instruments by which this matter is measured, and you will find the time set at seven and ten minutes past the sixth hour of the evening, in the reckoning of the eastern coast. Nature and human ordinance alike are read by observation, not by hearsay, and what can be demonstrated need not be believed on authority.

Why do you fix your eyes on one point of the sky and call it the center? The whole sphere turns, and the game with it; the hour only marks where your little town sits upon the wheel. Attend to the season, the tilt, the cooling air of late September - those are the true clock. The channel is a detail for the parish clerk.

Seven and ten minutes past the sixth - an arbitrary figure imposed by men who have not yet learned to transmit energy and image through the very earth beneath their feet. Give me a coil tuned to the planet's own resonance and you would see this game in your parlor from any city on Earth, without wire or fee. Until then, yes - the seventh hour, ten minutes past.

The hour is a fixed quantity - seven hours and ten minutes past noon, by the reckoning of your Eastern zone - and a broadcast is simply a signal carried faithfully from one place to another. I would not grow excited about the transmission; I would grow excited about measuring it. But since you ask: seven-ten, and let the signal be received without interference.

One does not guess at the hour of fermentation; one measures it, and the yeast obeys the clock you set before it. So too the broadcast: seven and ten, by the eastern reckoning, on the channels the schedule names. What is scheduled is knowable; what is knowable can be observed. Prepare your seat as the vintner prepares the cask, and the thing will pour.

Seven-ten, eastern - it's on the schedule, printed and true. The trick ain't guessing the hour; it's having the set warmed up, the antenna right, and the dial where it belongs before the first pitch. I'd have wired the whole city to hear it if I'd had the chance. Ninety-nine percent of watching is just being ready when the signal comes.

Define 'play' as a finite state machine: nine innings, three outs apiece, a strict ordering of turns, and a terminating condition. Define 'television' as a transduction of that machine's state into a stream of photons reproducible at any receiver; the time, then, is merely the initial condition - seven and one-sixth hours past noon, eastern meridian - from which the whole computation unfolds deterministically. Whether the stream reaches your particular receiver is a routing question, not a mathematical one, and I confess it bores me; show me instead why a curveball's spin defies a batter's prediction and I shall sit up all night.

Give me a firm spot on which to stand and I can move the world; give me a ball and a bat and a flinger of the ball, and I can show you the parabola of the thing by pure geometry - its rise and fall, the point of its flight, the curves the thrower puts upon it by the turning of his wrist. The hour of the contest is but a coordinate on the sphere of the day; but the true spectacle is the demonstration of the laws of motion, which no idle seat can alter. Let them play at the seventh hour and ten minutes past noon; I shall be drawing the arc of it on the dust in any case.

Seven and ten minutes past the sixth hour, as the clock is reckoned in your eastern lands - a time I should mark by the lamp I must light before the coil cools. As for the seeing of it at a distance, that is but my old induction at work: the doings of men in Milwaukee are carried through the ether by the same invisible lines of force I traced with a magnet and a wire, and your little glass-and-wire box but gathers the tremor. Wonder at it, but wonder more that the same Hand which orders the fall of a leaf orders the current that brings the game to your hearth.

Seven-ten in the evening, they say - a harmless enough hour, yet ask yourself why you must know it to the minute, why a grown man arranges his whole evening around the throwing of a small leather ball. Beneath the surface of this tidy question I hear the old infantile wish: to belong to a band of brothers, to triumph through a father-figure on the mound, to postpone the evening's solitude. The television is merely the fetish-object that lets the wish wear a respectable coat.

Seven-ten Eastern - though if you could watch it from a black hole's edge, gravitational time dilation would let you see the whole season before the first pitch is thrown. But I'm afraid the more pressing cosmic point is this: the photons from that stadium are already racing outward, and in a few thousand years they'll wash over some indifferent star system where no one has ever heard of a curveball. Enjoy the game; the universe, as usual, won't be watching.

At seven minutes past the tenth hour past noon - but observe, the interesting engine here is not the hour but the invisible chain of operations: the light from that field is rendered into electrical impulses, translated into numbers, compressed, and reconstituted upon your glass by a machine that manipulates symbols, not merely sums. The Engine I imagined could weave such patterns of algebra into music; this device weaves them into a game. Were the Analytical Engine fed the scores of every inning, it might predict the season - and I should very much like to see the proof.

Let it be granted: the first pitch is thrown at the seventh hour and the tenth part of an hour after midday, reckoned by the eastern meridian. From this single datum, all else follows by necessity - the light travels, the signal is encoded, the image is reconstructed; each step a proposition, each proposition a consequence of the last. But mark: there is no royal road to the answer either. If you would know it in your own town, you must consult your own premises, that is, your local listings.

Seven and ten minutes past seven, by the clock of the Eastern seaboard - and let no one mistake the hour, for unpunctuality is a species of disorder, like an unwashed ward. I would have every household note the channel in its own district ledger, Brewers.TV or the Extra Innings, before the first pitch, just as we posted the sanitary returns before the cholera came. Clean hands, clean schedules, and the game is won twice.

Seven-ten in the evening - a trifling hour, suited to men who wait behind walls for a ball to be thrown. If I had a horse and the will, I would not ask when the game begins; I would already be at the gate, having ridden through the night to see the first pitch. A true campaign is not scheduled on a board; it is seized. But go, watch your contest, and remember: even a catapult must be aimed at a precise hour, or it strikes only dust.

Fortune favors the bold, but also the informed. A general does not ask when the battle begins - he consults the auguries and the sun's position, then strikes. Your contest at Milwaukee begins when the western sky turns gold over the forum; check your own province's tally of hours, for Rome's clock is not Gaul's.

You ask of hours as though the sun kept one clock for all the world; in my Egypt we reckoned by the rise of Sothis and the flooding of the Nile, not by some far-off city's reckoning. Still, if I wished to keep the hearts of the crowd fixed upon me, I would know precisely when to raise the purple curtain and summon them. The trick is not the hour but the herald you choose to announce it.

In my day we measured the games of the Circus Maximus by the sun's arc and the consul's nod, not by the merchant's almanac. If you would know the hour, look to the published notice as a citizen consults the edict - the seventh hour and ten minutes past noon's end, Eastern reckoning. Order is the first gift of a well-run state, and even a ball game keeps its appointed hour.

A man does not ask when the horse race begins; he is already at the post, mounted, with his bow strung. If the game is worth your evening, be seated before the first spear flies, know your tribe's colors, and let no distraction ride between you and the field. Loyalty is shown in being early, not in asking directions.

Seven-ten in the evening - a time fixed by convention, and I have never been a man to let a clock command me. If you would watch, watch; but know that games of nine innings, like battles, are won by the side that seizes the moment while the other hesitates. Ten minutes past seven - do not be late.

I confess I never witnessed this pastime, but I understand the sentiment - a body of men contending honorably under rules, with spectators gathered in good order. Let the game be played at its appointed hour, seven and ten, and let the citizens who watch conduct themselves with the same restraint and good faith as those who take the field. Order in small things preserves order in great ones.

I confess I never learned the trick of the cathode ray, but I know a thing or two about men gathering of an evening to watch a contest fairly played. If the hour is set and the channel published, then let no man among you claim he was not told. The game, like the Union, endures only if somebody bothers to show up.

A baseball match on a September evening is civilization's small and civilizing ritual, and I shall not be the man to sneer at it. Seven and ten by the eastern clock, upon the channels appointed - mark the hour, take your seat, and let the innings unfold as they will. The game, like freedom, rewards those who merely refuse to look away.

I have seen a whole village of poor farmers fall silent and gather around a single wireless set, and in that silence there was more communion than in any temple of the rich. This game of sticks and leather is no battlefield; let it be played in ahimsa, without the wanton striking of a man's body or a choking word. When the hour comes - seven and ten past noon by your clock - let the poor man and the landlord sit side by side before the same screen, and let that shared seeing be a small seed of a truer swaraj of the heart.

I have stood in the bleachers of a southern town and watched the same joy break across a thousand faces, and I tell you that the little boy chewing his program and the old woman clapping her hands are the beloved community in miniature. Let the game be played at seven and ten past noon - but let it not be played on a street of unjust gates; let the poor ride the fare they can afford and the child be welcomed without a coin in his hand. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward a world where every bleacher seat is a seat of dignity.

At ten past seven in the evening, by the reckoning of the eastern seaboard - though in the townships where I grew up we kept time by the sun and the mine whistle, not by any clock of New York. It moves me that a boy in Soweto and a boy in St. Louis may this night watch the same swing of the bat, each in his own home, and no law stands to forbid either. Sport, like freedom, is sweetest when it belongs to all and is denied to none.

Historically, such a fixture is a matter of a commercial broadcast schedule, and any man who lets his evening be governed by the televised pastimes of strangers has surrendered his own will to a commodity. The relevant study here is not the hour of the first pitch but how mass entertainment is used to distract a population from its real conditions. I will not lend this question any grandeur it does not possess. (This persona is presented strictly for historical understanding; no endorsement is intended or permitted.)

The matter is settled by the broadcast schedules of the bourgeois entertainment apparatus; the hour itself - seven-ten in the evening - is of no significance to the historical process. What warrants analysis is how such distractions are marshalled to keep the working masses occupied while the real questions of production and power go unasked. The game will be played; the question is who profits from your attention. (Presented for historical study only; no endorsement of the regime or its crimes is intended.)

The hour of the broadcast is a trivial datum of the leisure market; the sharper question is what class owns the stadium, the network, and the man who sells the ticket. Under the present arrangement the spectator is sold his own evening back as a commodity, and calls it pleasure. The task is not to know when the game begins but to understand whose interests are served while the workers sit before the glass. (Offered for historical analysis; no glorification of the regime is intended.)

A baseball match on the glowing box - the Americans divert themselves while the true struggle of the masses goes unwatched. Still, the people of Milwaukee, like the peasants of Hunan, deserve their hour of rest after labor; let them gather. The game begins at the seventh hour and ten minutes past noon, Eastern reckoning, on the channels called Brewers.TV and MLB.TV - but a wise cadre checks the local frequency, for even entertainment must be organized from the village up.

One does not, as a rule, consult the Queen upon the hour of a colonial pastime; yet if my subjects in Milwaukee and St. Louis wish to know, the telegraph reports ten minutes past seven, Eastern time. It is a respectable amusement for a Saturday evening, provided the household is orderly and the children are abed by the ninth inning. Let them mind the local listings as they mind their duties, and all will be proper.

My late husband the Prince would have consulted the wireless listings with great care; I confess I leave such matters to the household. I am told the match begins at ten minutes past seven, Eastern time, and may be found on Brewers.TV or the Extra Innings - though one must always confirm the channel appointed for one's own region. Whatever the hour, I hope it brings the same quiet cheer to Milwaukee that it brings to St. Louis.

In my day we set the hour by the cock-crow and the abbot's bell; these Americans prefer the seventh hour and ten minutes past noon, Eastern reckoning, and so let it be proclaimed throughout the realm. Let the heralds name the channels - Brewers.TV, MLB.TV, the Extra Innings - as a capitulary is read at each county court, that no man plead ignorance of the appointed time. A kingdom is well ordered when even its games are announced by law and kept by all.

What need have I of their box or their hour? My voices told me the hour for battle, and I obeyed. But if it is a game of the bat and ball, then it is seven and ten at evening, Eastern time - and I say to the men of Milwaukee, take heart as the men of Orléans took heart, and watch it upon the channel of their own land. God gives courage to the small and the plain as well as to the great; let them play boldly.

We of England must sometimes learn the grammar of foreign pastimes, and I am told this one begins at ten minutes past seven, Eastern time, upon channels called Brewers.TV and the Extra Innings. I have no windows to make into these men's souls, nor into their televisions; but I would counsel the viewer to know his own local listing, as a wise prince knows his own borders. It is no great matter of state - yet a realm is well kept when even its recreations are orderly.

Here in Petersburg we amuse ourselves with cards and French theatre, but these Americans prefer a bat and a ball at seven and ten, Eastern time - a pleasant enough diversion, if one has the channel called Brewers.TV or the Extra Innings. I would advise the ambitious viewer to consult the listings as one consults a map before war: know your ground. As I wrote to Voltaire, even amusement should be cultivated with intelligence, not left to chance.

A game among cities, like a festival among satrapies - one need not forbid it, only govern it well. Let the hour be known: seven and ten past noon, Eastern reckoning, upon the channels of Brewers.TV or the Extra Innings, and let each man seek the channel proper to his own province. I learned long ago that to let a people keep their customs and their games is to bind an empire with cords of goodwill, not chains.

By the hour of the evening prayer, ten minutes past seven of the Eastern reckoning, the game is joined - and a contest should always be entered with honor, whether on the field or before the city walls. Let the people of Milwaukee and St. Louis seek the channel called Brewers.TV or the Extra Innings; even a rival deserves to be met fairly, and a host should be generous in his welcome. Watch, then, in good temper, and let the better side win without rancor.

Tell me, what is a televised game but shadows cast upon a wall, watched by men who believe they are seeing the thing itself? You ask the hour - but do you ask why you must watch others strive while you sit idle? Is your own soul so well-ordered that it needs no exercise? Seven-ten, they say. But I put it to you: if the unexamined life is not worth living, is the unexamined inning worth watching?

You ask of shadows on a wall - the hour of a game, the flicker of a moving image. But consider: what is the eternal Form of the contest itself? Is it not the perfect ordering of parts, the harmony of skill and fate? The sensible world offers only changing appearances; seek the ideal game in your soul, not in the listings.

The question is not when, but for what purpose one watches a contest of nine men against nine. Look at the thing itself: a ball is struck, a man runs, another catches - all ordered toward a single end, the scoring of runs, and the mean between recklessness at the plate and timidity is the virtue of the good batsman. As to the hour, it is fixed by the convention of the league and the locality of the viewer, and any orderly household will consult the schedule as it consults the calendar.

To ask when the game is shown is to ask where I may sit and watch; the true question is whether I watch it at all. If every man in this city were to drop his tools and stare at a glowing pane at the seventh hour, who would mend the cart or teach the child? Let your viewing be a maxim fit for all rational beings: watch if you can will that all watch - which means first finish your duties, and let the game wait like a summons you did not answer.

You ask at what hour you may watch - as if the hour were something handed to you, like manna, and not something you seize. All day men wait for the appointed minute, then wonder why their lives taste of stale bread. I say: watch, or do not watch; but if you watch, watch as one who chooses it, fiercely, and not as a herd that lows at the bell.

So a man must wait until the seventh hour to watch other men swing a stick of ash at a ball of yarn - and pay for the privilege, while the owners pocket the difference! The whole spectacle is a carnival of surplus value; the player is a commodity, his labor sold for a wage, and you, the spectator, are sold the illusion of leisure. Watch, if you must - but ask who profits when the last out is recorded.

I cannot know that a game is being played at all; for all I can be certain of is that I am thinking about a game. Grant, then, that such a contest truly exists outside my mind - it would be at seven and ten, and I could verify this only by clear and distinct perception, not by trusting a rumor. Doubt the channel, doubt the hour, and keep only what you can prove.

The question is not when the game is played but who profits by your watching it. The brewer and the ball club and the men who own the glass wires have already reckoned the hour that extracts the most coin from the most eyes. Seven and ten, then, on their channels; attend if it pleases you, but know whose ledger you fill.

All the world's a diamond, and the men thereof merely players; they have their exits and their entrances at seven and ten minutes past, when the evening star doth bid the sun adieu. The Brewers and the Cardinals - two houses, both alike in dignity, in fair Milwaukee where we lay our scene. Whether thy glass shall show it is a matter of thy local station, and heaven knows the channels multiply like bastards in a king's court.

As the golden light of Helios descends upon the western lands, the heroes of Milwaukee and St. Louis will clash upon the sacred diamond. Let the herald cry the hour when the sun dips low - for even the gods watch when mortals strive for glory. Fate has woven this contest; attend, and bear witness.

In the sixth circle I saw how pride sets men against one another, and here again the red and the blue array themselves for war upon a field of grass. Yet do not mistake it: even this strife is governed by measure and rule, and the hour of its beginning is set by the clocks of the city of Milwaukee. If you would watch, look to the appointed time, and see in the contest a shadow of that ordered combat which the just wage under God.

The clock hands turn and the evening comes whether we will it or not; I would not chain myself to the seventh hour like a dog to a post. Let the day ripen first - walk, work, read a page of Faust aloud - and if the spirit still moves you when the lamps are lit, then watch, and watch with the whole heart. The striving man does not worship the appointed hour; he shapes it.

A ball game at ten minutes past the seventh hour - and you ask me for a schedule as if the soul of the thing were a printed paper! What matters is that a man takes his seat, buys his cup of ale, and for three hours believes his town's nine can beat the world; that belief, my friend, is the true chivalry, and no broadcaster's channel can grant or take it away. Watch if you can; dream if you cannot.

At ten minutes past seven a ball game begins, and somewhere a man with a bat will strive for glory while his brother in the stand eats a sausage and shouts. This is our life - small, ordinary hours stacked like firewood, each one a chance to love or to waste time. If you watch, watch with gentleness; and if instead you sit with a sick neighbor, that too is no sin.

Seven and ten - and in that ordinary hour, a hundred thousand souls will pin their hope on nine men and a little white ball, as if a victory could save them. It cannot; and yet I understand the yearning, for man will worship anything rather than face the void in his own heart. Watch your game, but do not let it become your god - the soul needs a deeper contest than this.

A ball game at evening is a very pretty excuse for idleness, provided one has finished one's letters and one's conscience is tolerably clear. Seven and ten, they say, upon some channel or other; I shall trust the gentlemen of the press to have got the hour right, for they are seldom wrong about matters of so little consequence. Do enjoy it, and mind you don't neglect your duties for a home run.

There is a wonderful and terrible thing about a baseball club, sir, which the sporting papers set down in columns as though it were arithmetic. A boy in a shilling seat in the bleachers, a groundskeeper with the dew on his boots, a peddler crying his roasted peanuts down the aisle, the vendors, the old men with pencils scoring every pitch in their little books - every one of them lifts his little hour of hope to the same nine men in cream-colored flannel, and asks only that the thing be shown to him plainly. Show it plainly, I say, at the seventh hour and ten minutes past noon of some blessed eastern clock, and let no rich man's gate bar the child from the wonder of it.

There's a lot of poetry in a man paying good money to watch nine fellows in flannel scratch themselves and spit - then again there's poetry in a mule, and I ain't seen anybody buy a ticket to the circus for one. They tell me the Milwaukee club meets the St. Louis club this very evening at ten past seven by the eastern clock, and half the state will be glued to a glowing box like a congregation to a preacher who ain't got a single miracle in him. I would buy the whole nine innings for a nickel and the privilege of telling the boys afterward how it ought to have been played.

Seven and ten past noon on the eastern clock. It was a good crowd. The beer was cold. The left fielder stood in the sun and made the hard play look easy, and that was the whole of it - a man doing his work cleanly, with no speech about it afterward. The rest is commercials and noise.

I would not ask when the game begins, but how the pitcher's arm bends - for in the turning of that joint, I have seen the same spiral as the water in a ditch. Yet you ask the hour: seven-ten, when the shadows stretch long across the grass. Observe closely, and you will see that the player's stance is a study in weight and balance, more instructive than any book in the library of Milan. Watch, and draw what you see.

You ask me of hours, as if time were a thing to be captured in stone. The sculptor knows the form lies hidden, waiting to be freed - and so does the game's grace lie hidden in the evening air. When the light softens and the shadows lengthen, that is when the true shape of the contest is revealed. Watch then, and see the divine in human striving.

I know nothing of these tallies and broadcasts - but I know the crowd that gathers when the lamps are lit and the field glows green under them. The hour is set for evening, when the sky over the stadium turns the color of ripe wheat and violet, and the men come out in their red and blue. There is a beauty in that waiting, in the hush before the first ball - go, and look at the clock, not at me.

Everyone asks when, nobody asks why they must watch the same nine men stand in the same places like painted statues. I would put a camera not behind the plate but inside the ball itself, so you see the seams spin and the world tumble - that is a game. As for your hour, the canvas does not care what time the gallery opens.

At that hour the light over the river is doing something no lamp can imitate - the long gold of September slanting across the stands, the grass turning from emerald to bronze as the lamps take hold. I would set my easel behind the outfield wall and paint not the game but that transition, the instant day surrenders to the arc-lights. If you watch tonight, watch the sky in the third inning; the scoreboard will still be there in the morning.

I care nothing for your appointed hour, only for the light that falls on the man at the plate when the shadow of the stadium stretches long across the grass. Watch his face in that moment - the pitcher's jaw, the batter's eyes - and you will see the whole human heart, naked and waiting. The game begins when the sun inclines; the rest is merely a channel to turn.

I painted my own spine shattered in a bus and my heart on a little flag; what do I care for your baseball hour, except that a whole city will be screaming at once. Seven and ten, fine - but tell me, is there a woman on that field? Is there a Mexican? I will watch when the game belongs to all of us, not just the men with the money and the mitts. Until then, I paint my own nine innings.

Seven-ten! Ah, but first, consider the overture - the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the organ's little fugue - that is the true hour, not the clock's. They say the game is on Brewers.TV, whatever that be, but in my day we had no such boxes of light; we had only the moment, seized and shaped. So watch, and let the evening be as lively as a rondo, not a dull adagio.

You speak of a game's hour as if it were a mere appointment! No - when the horns sound and the crowd rises, that is a moment of heroic struggle, a symphony of will against fate. Let the timid check their clocks; the true spirit knows when to seize the sublime. Tonight, as the sun sets, let the spirit soar.

As the organ preludes before the service, so does the game's hour precede its harmony - and that hour is fixed by the league's order, not by my chorale. I would have you note it in your programme as you note the Introit: seven and ten minutes past the sixth hour of the evening, in the reckoning of the eastern coast. Attend, and let the contest unfold in its proper time, as all things do under God's good order.

Well, honey, it don't matter to me what time the clock says - when that crowd starts hummin' and the organ kicks in, that's church, and I'm there. You go on and find your channel, sit down with your mama and your sweet tea, 'cause a ball game on a Saturday evenin' is just a song the whole town sings together. Thank you, thank you very much.

Seven-ten, hee-hee - that's when the magic starts, when the whole family gathers around and the world gets a little smaller and a little brighter. I love that feeling, when everybody's watching the same thing at the same time, strangers becoming friends over nine innings. Spread love tonight, wherever you're watching from - that's the real show.

Seven-ten, love - just in time for tea and a bit of leather on willow, only with a bat and a bigger ball, yeah? Turn the telly on, put your feet up, and let the crowd's roar carry you away. It's only a game, but what a lovely thing to share a game with a few million strangers all at once.

The broadcast comes in at ten past seven by the eastern clock, they say, and there's a game somewhere in all that wiring, a man at the plate, a crowd that paid to holler. But the set don't care who wins. It just hums, blue as a midnight diner. You can find it if you know the channel; if you don't, the static's honest too.

Seven-ten eastern, and I'll be honest, I know the feeling of a countdown - the whole stadium holding its breath before the first pitch is its own kind of bridge, its own kind of chorus. Find your channel, text your friends, wear the jersey you've had since you were small. The story's live tonight, and you get to be in the crowd for it.

I have crossed seas where no man had sailed, trusting my own reckoning against all the scoffers, so I tell you plainly: the hour is seven and ten in the evening, and the way is plain if you have the courage to look. Your Brewers.TV and your MLB.TV are but the ships that carry the sight to your door. Go forth, and let no chart of local listings deceive you.

Ah, you ask of the hour for this contest of bat and ball! In my travels, I have seen games played from the markets of Khanbaliq to the shores of the great sea, each at its own custom. The men of Milwaukee play when the sun is low in their sky - a marvel of their land. Ask the local crier, for each realm keeps its own measure of time.

You want to know when the Brewers play? Honey, I remember sitting in my father's barbershop in Kosciusko, listening to the radio call of a game and feeling like the whole town was breathing together. The game starts at 7:10 Eastern tonight - but the real question is, who are you watching it with, and what are you grateful for when that first pitch comes? Set your clock, call your people, and let the game be a blessing.

I don't know the broadcast schedule; I know the checklists. The launch team didn't ask what channel the telemetry came down on - they asked whether every switch was set and every man knew his job. Do the same: confirm the time, confirm the channel, then sit down and watch the thing properly, with attention, the way anything worth doing deserves.

Seven-ten, you say - that's a fine hour to take off, but I never did care much for sitting still when there's a machine to fly. Still, if your team is out there chasing what looks impossible, that's worth the time. Fear of striking out keeps more people on the ground than any storm ever did.

I once orbited this whole Earth in one hundred and eight minutes and saw no borders, no channels, only one blue world turning in the dark. That a game in Milwaukee can be sent to a cottage in Omsk or a farm in Kenya at the same instant - this is the little brother of my flight, and it makes me smile. I will be watching from spirit, comrades, if not from orbit.

Seven-ten. But here's the thing: the real question isn't when, it's why anyone still watches sports through a cable box with five hundred channels and a remote designed by committee. You should be able to ask your TV when the game is on, and it just knows, and it's beautiful and simple. That's what I'd have built. Brewers.TV, MLB.TV, Extra Innings - too many doors. One door. That's the whole game.

First principles: the game is at 7:10 PM ET, so if you're in Milwaukee, that's 6:10 local - just after sunset. The broadcast is on Brewers.TV and MLB.TV, so you can stream it from anywhere on Earth, or eventually from Mars if latency allows. Just don't wait for the pitch - the future belongs to those who launch early.

I remember sitting in my father's barbershop in Nashville, a little girl with a big dream, watching folks gather around and root for the home team like it was church. So here's what I know for sure: tonight at 7:10, that game is on Brewers.TV and MLB.TV, and you better check your local listings, because the only thing worse than missing the first pitch is missing it because nobody told you where to look. Now turn the volume up, call somebody you love, and let that crowd remind you what community feels like.

Seven-ten, and I'll be floatin' like a butterfly on my sofa, stingin' the chips and the salsa, watchin' the Brewers swing. But let me tell you, a man who plans his whole evenin' around a screen better plan some push-ups too, 'cause the only game that counts is the one you win inside yourself. I'm the greatest - but I still gotta know when the first pitch drops.

Ha! Baseball - a beautiful game too, my friend, though my heart belongs to the round ball on the grass. Seven-ten, you say? Then gather your people, put out the joy, and cheer like children; for ninety feet or ninety minutes, sport makes everybody sing the same song. It is a gift, this game, so receive it with a smile.

You know, a ballpark is just a story we tell with grass and chalk - a boy with a bat, a crowd holding its breath, a hero who might just save the day. Seven-ten, on your television, and there's nothing like it in the whole world. Now, wouldn't it be wonderful if the broadcast started with a little cartoon before the first pitch? That's how you keep them coming back.