SPEED THRILLS

Once unthinkable, eye-popping pitching velocity has become the norm

- J.J. COOPER

The first time I purchased a cell phone, it wasn't by choice.

Thad taken a new job in a new town in a new state. My work hours could be described as almost endless. But even if I left the office, my new job meant that I had to be reachable at pretty much any hour. So I was required to have a cell phone.

At the time, it seemed like an imposition and an adjustment. If my boss or anyone at the newspaper needed me, I was always available. Those days of hopping into my car for a two-hour drive and being in a cocoon of my own with the radio were over.

Within a decade of that first cell phone, I got my first smartphone. Today, I, like everyone else, cannot imagine the idea of being without the device that serves as my connection to the internet, camera, camcorder, recorder, email inbox, book, TV and, yes, even an actual telephone.

But if you think back, it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when we went from the era where no one had a smartphone to the time where everyone did.

Watch a sporting event from the early 2000s. You’ll notice no one is looking at their phone.

Watch a game from a decade later, and the faces in the crowd are recording key moments ona tiny screen.

If you picked any of us out of 2002, popped us into a time machine and dropped us into 2025, our 2002 selves would be blown away by how smartphones have utterly altered all aspects of our lives.

But there wasn’t one specific day when I realized that the world had changed forever. I didn’t buy my first smartphone and think that my life would forever be altered.

Dramatic change happens sneakily, one day at atime.