The audio was distinctive enough to register for me instantly. It was only a scrap of background noise—the kind of sound that exists to be ignored—but the cadence was so particular, so familiar, that I couldn’t help but listen:
“With two on and two outs, runners at the corners, Gentry looks in for the sign, and the pitch—and that one is low. Ball two. He missed that one, and Baker had to pull it out of the dirt,” says the play-by-play announcer. “He did a great job of blocking the plate so that pitch didn’t get away from him,” replies the color analyst.
It was, of course, a baseball broadcast—in the middle of the Sex and the City revival series, And Just Like That…, on HBO. In the episode, which was released Jan. 20, the game is playing on a television when Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) enters the living room for a serious discussion with her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg). Almost immediately, Miranda asks him to turn it off, and the baseball audio disappears after just a few seconds. None of which is unusual: Lots of shows and movies include snippets of fake sports broadcasts as background noise. Yet this one had sounded conspicuously real. Instead of simply rattling off a score, the broadcast had included just the right level of specificity, all the textured banality of a random at bat. There seemed to be a whole booth involved instead of a lone announcer. And the rhythm was dead on—clearly, indubitably baseball. It was hard to imagine that the clip was fake. With all that attention to detail for just a few seconds of background sound? No way. Yet it was just as hard to imagine that the clip was real. With a cursory sweep of Baseball Reference pulling up no box scores that fit, not to mention the idea that the Sex and the City revival, of all programs, had invested in jumping through the necessary hoops to license big league footage for such a tiny moment? No way.
