I can still recall every detail of April 7, 2062, Monsanto Opening Day for the Mets presented by DraftKings at the Polo Ralph Lauren grounds.

It was magical to walk into the stadium and study each team’s nine designated hitters before Dad and I made our in-game bets. We picked the wrong winner, but I scored some credits by correctly predicting that my father would whiff on his wager that the AmazonMetaAlphabet Mariners’ lead-off hitter, Machine Gun Kelly III, would draw a walk. As it turned out, Mr. Kelly missed his at-bat waiting for a delayed drone delivery of curly fries.

That’s a quaint inefficiency you don’t see anymore, but even then such things had already started to vanish from the game. Pops became frustrated when crew chief Umptron 9000 called an automatic triple play because the bottom of the third had taken more than thirty seconds. He cupped his hands to his mouth and made himself heard. “Unplug the umpire!” Dad shouted, and was immediately arrested for Conduct Detrimental to the Game of Baseball. I can still picture him getting smaller and smaller after the mechanized baseball commissioner’s gigantic steel hand reached out, clasped him in its inescapable grip, and flung him into the distance. I learned an important lesson that day: the computerized umpire is infallible and omnipotent.

I never saw Dad again, but I was having too much fun to dwell on his disappearance for long. “Program!” a push notification shouted. “Get yourself programmed! Your spectator experience cannot be optimized if you’re not programmed!” The smell of beer and peanuts wafted through the air, thanks to an H.V.A.C. system pumping out a synthetic beer-and-peanut scent to create a baseball-stadium-like aroma.

I’m sad that my own son won’t get to have the same experience. Back when I fell in love with baseball, N.F.T. tickets cost a modest nine hundred thousand dollars—or a million nine hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, adjusted for inflation. Extra-innings rules designed to end the game sooner placed just three runners on base, instead of putting all fifty in their cars, on their way home. The commissioner was a real, physical cyborg, not a holographic simulation of a robot. Players weren’t like today’s mercenaries, who are motivated only by fear of shocks from the electrodes that pump voltage into their genitals every time they make a mistake. No, in my day they played for the pure love of money. Things were so much simpler then. ♦