by Jeff Dupuis

Spectators on blankets dotted the hills around Dominico Field. Bicycles lay on the grass. Old timers sat in folding chairs along the rim of the hill, having arrived before the national anthem was played over the PA system. Fans continued to trickle in throughout the first few innings, searching for a free patch of grass, ready for a summer night’s ballgame after a long day.

It was just me; the AI was not watching the ballgame. Its software was not mapping the eyes, nose and jawline of the batter, the pitcher or the players on the field bent over in wide stances, gazing towards home plate. It was not following the ball, calculating its speed, or projecting possible trajectories. It simply “read” the data being entered into the system—balls and strikes, homers and outs, and each play as recorded by the official scorer.

“Attaboy!” I heard my father say, then the sound of clapping echoed in my ear.

The Leafs’ shortstop, boyish-looking with a golden blond mullet flowing out of his batting helmet, had just powered the ball between the right and centre fielders. A mix of confusion, speed and indecision had led the batter to second base, and left the centre fielder holding the ball, not knowing what to do with it.

Taking a can of beer from my bag, I held it between my knees, concealing it as I cracked it open. Half of the crowd on the first base side were drinking. There was no reason to think the fans in the bleachers and along the third base line weren’t doing the same. As the game progressed, a man came around with a big plastic bag to collect the empties so that he could turn them in for the deposits.

Shawn Reese, the Leafs’ slugger and first baseman, was at the plate. I expected him to dig us out of the hole we were in with a two-run homer; instead, he swung too hard at an off-speed pitch and swung too slowly at a fastball. He ignored three pitches far outside the strike zone and looked ready to take the walk. The last pitch looked as far and outside as the other three balls, but the umpire called it a strike and Reese cursed his way back to the dugout.

Dad did not sound pleased.

“Maybe you lost the strike zone in the lights, Blue!”

But the lights—towering over the field, their glow almost supernatural—hadn’t been switched on yet. The AI had no way of knowing that. It was another bug to fix, another problem in need of a workaround.

The people on their blankets near me, with their partners and dogs and small children, didn’t hear Dad yell. They didn’t chuckle at his heckling. I could hear other hecklers in the crowd, but they didn’t bring the same old-school style that Dad did.

The sun sank behind the waterslide in the northwest corner of the park and the moon was a ghostly sliver to the right of the CN Tower. It was a warm evening in Christie Pits, cooled off by the breeze rolling in from the lake and sweeping across the diamond. I rested my hoodie on my shoulders like a shawl, an idea borrowed from the guy on the blanket downhill from mine. The next batter hit a single, and although the Leafs were down 6-3, there was a chance to tie things up. The agitation in Dad’s voice turned into excitement.

“Come on! Let’s keep the line moving!” he said as the Leafs had runners on first and second and only the one out.

“Come on, Gutierrez, hit some—”

Dad’s words cut suddenly. A call was coming in. My wife’s name flashed across the screen.

“Hey,” I answered.

“Matt? Where are you?”

“At the game.”

“What time do you think you’ll be coming home?”

“It’s the bottom of the sixth, shouldn’t be too much longer.”

“Please don’t be too late,” she said, “please.”

“I won’t.”

“Are you drinking?”

The crack of the bat echoed through the park. A line drive to right field, which could have been an easy out, hit the bottom of the fielder’s glove and fell into the grass at his feet. The bases were loaded.

“One beer,” I said.

“One beer?”

“One beer,” I said again.

“Have you eaten anything?”

“I had a hotdog.” A “fib,” as Dad would call it.

“Okay, I love you, Matt.”

“I love you.”

By the time Ayesha hung up, the Baycats were calling a time-out. The manager, pitching coach, and catcher approached the mound. The home plate umpire followed slowly behind.

“Woot-did-you-see-that-swing-come-on-come-on!”

The words ran together as the program caught up with the game. The Baycats, seeing that their lead was at risk, pulled their starter. With a quick wave, the manager signaled to the relief pitcher who’d been warming up next to the chain-link fence along the first base line.
“Awww!” Dad called out, “leave him in, we love this guy!”

The program was my idea, but my childhood friend Pete, a software designer, made it happen. First, we needed to connect to the Intercounty Baseball League’s site with an application programming interface (API) so that our software had a direct connection to the league’s real-time stats. Then we needed an optical character recognition component to read the data. Once the box scores, stats and other data were collected and “understood,” we had to teach it to “comment” on the data the way my dad would have. We used a large language model fine-tuned on a log of my dad’s heckles cheers, as well as other heckles and cheers used widely during the years he watched the game so that we could introduce variation and, maybe, some novelty. We used another API, this time a text-to-speech program that we’d fed samples of Dad’s voice: his answering machine message, audio tracks from old home videos, cellphone videos taken at my wedding and when he first met his grandson. The earliest version of the program produced only flat heckles and lacklustre cheers. Pete not only added feeling to the voice, varying the intonation, but also expanded the program to compile the necessary data to make observations about individual players based on their career performances. Dad could now say “watch this kid’s swing” with tinges of admiration in his voice. Or “lookout for his fastball” with a breathless anticipation. The software, however, couldn’t replicate Dad’s laugh, the way it filled a room.

Vito Tomaso, number nineteen, stepped up to the plate after standing on deck and using the bat to stretch out his torso and shoulders. He hadn’t done much that season, three homeruns and seven RBIs. But we weren’t into the dog days yet—the long, hot afternoons where the breeze only brought with it more heat and the droning of cicadas. There was still time. He took two big swings, both at breaking balls, both strikes. The third connected to a fastball and hit it halfway to Etobicoke.

“Talk about a moonshot! There was a daddy hack if I ever saw one!” Dad called out.

Tomaso pointed at us as he jogged towards first base, a smile on his face that you could see from the other side of the park. The three runners ahead of him rounded the bases and waited for Tomaso at home. They high-fived him, hugged him, smacked him on the ass.

Adrian, my son, won’t ever hear the passion in Dad’s voice when a grand slam changes the entire ballgame. How his grandfather, a grown man who had more skepticism than excitement left in him, could suddenly turn into a boy again, hooting and hollering when a ground ball almost magically slips through the legs of a visiting shortstop. Cricket has been the soundtrack for Adrian, playing with his train set on the living room carpet. He doesn’t lift his head or react as his Nana-jaan comments on the game with his characteristic soft-spoken dignity, but I know Adrian hears and absorbs it all. One day, maybe, the program, my father’s voice, will interest him. It will be a time capsule, an oral history, a chance to connect with a man he barely knew. But that’s not why I made it.

Pete and I imagine a visual component for later versions. One where I can turn away from the game and look and see Dad sitting next to me, having a beer, or a Polish sausage, a little pimple of mustard on his chin. He will look as he did in his mid-sixties about to embark on retirement, before the surgeons took his skull apart and a mortician put it back again. The current VR technology doesn’t really support what Pete and I have in mind, but these things are constantly evolving.

The Leafs held their lead for the last few innings. Their closer had pitched for the San Franscisco Giants only two seasons ago, but chronic injuries bounced him from the majors all the way down here. Still, watching his windup and his control on the ball was like watching a violin virtuoso or a prima donna. There was a mastery there that few people could achieve in any pursuit. The ninth inning ended as though preordained: three up, three down, the batters only at the plate as a formality to watch the balls zip past them.

“What a ballgame.” Joy, exasperation, the release of tension—all in Dad’s voice as the rest of the crowd began to stand, looking around their feet and blankets for their possessions.

And with that, the program shut off.

I could have had him say more, but that wouldn’t be real. What could we have talked about besides baseball? Pete and I realized, early on, that we could make “Dad” say anything. Small talk before and after the game, or his thoughts on his grandson, or me and the man that I’d become. There really was no limit. But I could not, would not, program him to say things he couldn’t say himself, any more than I could make him hear things I should have said but didn’t.