I saw “Interstellar” over the weekend. I’m not going to give away any important plot points or anything like that, but I did want to share one amusing part of it.
The scene, set up from the very beginning, is an Earth in which dust storms and any manner of other bad happenings have basically crippled the world. Everyone lives on corn, as all other crops have failed, there are no more armies and scientific inquiry and optimism and all of that has, apparently, disintegrated due to apocalypses large and small. Life still goes on in a lot of ways -- people have cars and jobs and there are schools and stuff -- but it’s definitely a leaning-toward-a-dark-age scene.
One of the extraordinarily small yet extremely vivid bits of the scene setting is a baseball game. It’s on what looks like a small, minor league field in the middle of a farming community. One team is a local nine made up of what are presumably amateurs. The other team: the New York Yankees. Which still exist, but have been reduced to a barnstorming, probably semi-pro situation. They have a banner on the wall welcoming “The World Famous New York Yankees,” for example.
I’m trying to get my head around all that would have to happen in society for Major League Baseball to truly die like that. Yet what would not be so bad that the New York Yankees could still exist, in however a diminished form. And I can’t decide if seeing them diminished like that should be a joyful bit of schadenfreude for non-Yankees fans or if, alternatively, we should be concerned that not even a freakin’ world-threatening apocalypse can kill the Bronx Bombers.