A CALL TO PRAYER:

It had been a month or so since I heard a droning baseball player interview on my car radio. It's a media ritual that hauls out certain pre- or post-game tropes with aplomb and a reliable repetition almost soothing to the ear. By accident on Saturday, I hit the MLB Radio tab on the satellite radio in my Volkswagen. There was the drone. It was former Detroit Tigers pitcher Ryan Carpenter being questioned by the host. Carpenter was in Taiwan, where the Chinese Professional Baseball League had been playing its opening week of games inside empty stadiums. I was driving to a somewhat distant wine store just for the heck of it, having spent 60 hours a week behind the wheel of a taxi for most of the past decade, and since the taxis have been parked for a month now, I needed to feel some mileage. And there on that radio was the ballplayer drone. And as I gleaned the fact that Carpenter is now a pitcher for the Rakuten Monkeys of the CPBL, I was also pleased to learn that the league's games were being streamed live, online. Suddenly the drone became a call to prayer.

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