Baseball vs. Britain

Dave Paisley

It's been a quiet holiday season on the baseball front with just the ancient free agents left. Baltimore and Arizona seem to have finally run out of money, so someone else should get a chance at the rest. If any team is in the market for a complete rotation overhaul, allow me to recommend an all-geezer lineup of Doug Drabek, Dennis Martinez, Bob Tewksbury, Jimmy Key and Orel Hershiser.

Meanwhile, I'm quite happy about the quiet holiday season, as I had my parents in town for a few weeks from England. It was their first visit ever to the U.S., so I finally got to see U.S. culture through their eyes for a change.

Of all the big four U.S. sports, baseball is the most mysterious to Brits, and so I did think at some point that I'd get to introduce my dad to the joys of baseball.

The British sport that most resembles baseball (if we don't count the schoolgirl game of rounders) is cricket. Both games are castigated in their home countries for being slow-paced and seemingly interminable. But where baseball games have no time limit, cricket does. That might be a good thing, you'd think, but you might think otherwise if I tell you that an international match has a time limit of thirty hours over five days of play. And you thought baseball was slow! Not only that, over half of these five-day matches end in draws because they run out of time. So let's hear no more bitching about three-and-a-half-hour baseball games, hmmm? (All right, I'll allow some, but reserve most of it for games over four hours.)

The bowler/batter confrontation of cricket is very similar to the pitcher/batter matchup of baseball. Ball size and speed, and the separation distance are all comparable. There is the matter of the ball usually bouncing before it reaches the batter in cricket and the fact that the cricket bat has a flat face, but overall there are more similarities than differences.

There are even similar categories of pitcher. In cricket, there are fast bowlers who can take a run up of forty yards and deliver the ball at about 100 mph, very comparable to baseball's fireballers. The next group is the mid-paced swingmen, who rely on a combination of speed and ball movement to fool batters. This would approximate to the majority of pitchers with moderate fastballs and a variety of pitches for deception. Finally, there are the spin bowlers who just lob the ball up to the batter, but who can get incredible movement as the spinning ball bounces off the pitch.

In fact, for those budding etymologists out there, the term "sticky wicket" refers to a cricket pitch that is "taking spin". It's a mysterious combination of damp grass and heat that allows a spin bowler to make the ball dance so mysteriously as to render it unhittable. If a wicket isn't taking spin, though, watch out. These guys can get hammered. I'd liken this group to the knuckleballers and finesse pitchers, a small but select group who get by on guile and, maybe occasionally, sandpaper. And yes, there is such a thing as illegally doctoring the ball in cricket.

Regardless of the different nature of the games, though, cricket and baseball both lend themselves to kicking back on a warm summer's day, sipping an adult beverage of one's choice. The action unfolds at its own pace, unlike the hurry-up-and-wait nature of football, or the frenetic rushing around of basketball and ice hockey.

So it was fun watching my dad watch a U.S.-Japan all-star exhibition game, trying to figure out how baseball works. I knew when he figured out that a foul ball was a strike, but that it couldn't be strike three that he was hooked, because that's exactly what got me hooked sixteen years ago. There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but it's a good first step. So I've had fun over the holidays, despite the lack of action in the player market.

Before I go, let me give you the Dave's-eye-view of the rest of U.S./British sport comparisons.

Basketball is played competitively in Europe, although many teams are populated with second-tier Americans, particularly British teams.. The quadrennial destruction of the rest of the world at the hands of the "Dream Team" does indicate that the rest of the world isn't quite as adept at the game as the U.S., but at least Europeans know what the game looks like.

American football has become something of a novelty in certain parts of Europe, but it's not drawing fans away from real sports. The game is quite alien to most Brits, despite the similarity in the shape of the ball to a rugby ball, although the lack of subtlety seems to make the game accessible to the casual viewer. So far the European league is proving to be useful mostly as a farm system for the NFL.

Ice hockey is another fringe sport in England, primarily due to a complete lack of ice rinks. And even when you can find an ice rink, there are always some budding Torvill and Dean wannabes getting in the way. The game does get that quadrennial exposure at the Olympics, though, and last year, the U.S. team managed to really put the sport on the world map by trashing their Olympic village "homes". It helped to reinforce the ugly notion that if a U.S. team can't win, they don't want to play.

Now for the other British sports - "real" football (soccer) and rugby.

Soccer is very popular here in the U.S., it just can't make any money as a professional sport. Pundits blame the slow action and lack of advertising break opportunities, but none of that seems to bother the rest of the world, so I'm not buying those excuses entirely. Of course, the rest of the world is usually watching while blind drunk or beating the crap out of opposing fans, if not actually shooting them, so maybe it's not a fair comparison.

It has been said that football is a gentleman's game played by ruffians, while rugby is a ruffian's game played by gentlemen. True enough, for while the brutality in soccer is in the stands, in rugby it's on the field. Mostly, however, it just seems to be an excuse for a bunch of guys to spend an hour and a half sniffing each other's butts in what they call a "scrum" and trying to make each other hurt badly enough to bleed. Curiously enough, it's mostly played by the hoity-toity in Britain, but never having gone to a hoity-toity school, the game is almost as much a mystery to me as it is to the average Texan cowboy. But apart from the fact that it doesn't feature helmets, padding, forward passes, large amounts of money or front teeth, rugby does bear a passing resemblance to American football.

So there it is Dave's guide to British/American sporting relations. Please fell free to quote me liberally if you're ever traveling in the homeland, especially the rugby part. Just make sure your medical insurance is paid up.

 

about the author

We're hoping to one day send Dave Paisley to Australia so he can compare baseball and Aussie Rules football. Offer to send him a funny hat and a white lab coat at drdjp@strikethree.com.