Take Me Out To The Ballgame

I’m not sure how I ever got into baseball. Or why? I’m not really a sports guy. Or at least I wasn’t. My dad, an avid fan of Bury Football Club tried to get me to love his favourite sport for most of my childhood and I doggedly resisted. Even as he took me to amazing high profile matches, such as England vs Germany in the semi-finals of Euro ‘96, while the rest of the world watched Gareth Southgate miss a penalty, I had my eyes more on the crowd than on the game. I remember the Mars Bar I ate at half-time, the painted faces, the flags, the chants, but the only reason I remember the historic loss was because of my dad’s disappointment as we walked back to the car.

I used to blame it on England. As a half-American with an American mom, I just found football a bit too British. It was alienating to me. Everyone at school not only loved football, but seemed born with a complete built in understanding of the rules and the skills of how to play. I felt like someone from another planet when I had to ask basic questions everyone else seemed to know intuitively, and my asthma added a further obstacle to ever really enjoying that sport or any other.

My parents occasionally played tennis, and our little village had a wooden shack and two courts it rather grandly called a “tennis club”. I, like all the other kids, was made a member, but I wasn’t any good. I attended the summer training camps if mom and dad needed me out of the house. I proudly wore the weird little plastic tag in the laces of my trainers. But when I actually stood on the courts with a racquet in my hands, I could barely get the ball over the net and had little interest in doing so. My overriding tennis memory is of being entered into some summer tournament one year and drawing a first round match against the former guitarist from our band who we had only recently fired. He brought his mum to watch as I, alone, lost straight sets to him without putting up any kind of fight.

I don’t remember playing at the “club” ever again after that?

Dad took me to a few cricket games but, again, I didn’t get it and preferred to use his binoculars to look for strange characters in the crowd during the game rather than see what was happening on the pitch. I remember liking “tea-time” the best because I usually got bought an ice cream, but to this day I couldn’t tell you how to score a point in cricket. Likewise, rugby. Despite living in the rugby Mecca that is Cardiff for seven years and watching the streets shut down regularly as the whole city gathered to watch the latest match in every available venue, I somehow managed to avoid ever watching a single game. My journey with rugby ended the day it started: a PE lesson introduction to the sport when I was about thirteen which started with our first scrum and ended minutes later with a student having his ear torn off. Rugby was not for me! The only rugby I have ever seen since was the day my school and my wife’s school’s teams both reached the respective finals of some schools cup that was important enough to be live-streamed. As my school’s team contained members of my form, I watched it, not really understanding what I was seeing but enjoying the bit where they randomly lifted people up in the air. I congratulated the players the next day still not really sure how the scoring system worked?

In the meantime, in 1991, I watched my first wrestling match as I caught a few minutes of WWE SummerSlam while on holiday in Wales. The following April I watched all of Wrestlemania 8 and became hooked on professional wrestling. While real sport held little interest, this fake spectacle appealed, and maintains my interest today. As my love of wrestling with it’s fabricated storylines and custom-built excitement grew, the legitimate sports competing for my attention as a child - football, tennis, cricket, rugby - just didn’t stand a chance. Part of what I loved about the wrestling was how American it was. It connected me to that side of my culture and heritage in a way the British sports didn’t. Yet when I tried to get into other American sports to get that same feeling, neither the NFL nor the NBA seemed to spark that same excitement. It was weird, because so many of the wrestlers I loved seemed to have backgrounds in American football, and the smash-mouth contact of the sport seemed so theoretically similar? Meanwhile the high octane athleticism of a basketball match should have appealed to the same part of me that loved watching the high flying wrestlers take to the air and dive from the top rope, but didn’t.

I just wasn’t a sports guy, I was a wrestling guy.

Except…

Except there was this one sport I didn’t really understand either, but this one somehow still always appealed. Maybe it was because my grandmother and other family and friends from New York kept buying me Yankees merch from an early age? Maybe it was because when we visited family in the States during the summers, the baseball always seemed to be on and whenever I watched my favourite American TV shows there was always some sort of mention of little league, the World Series, or some loose metaphor about it being “the bottom of the ninth” and “bases were loaded” when things got tough? For some reason baseball appealed, and it was the one sport on either side of the ocean that, if it was on when we visited America, even though I didn’t understand it, I would watch without feeling bored. We even bought me a glove and softball bat one summer and for one glorious week on Long Island I felt like a kid in an American sitcom, throwing a ball around in the front yard.

One summer afternoon I remember watching a Yankees game with my uncle and finally asking him what the rules were. He gave me a masterclass as we watched and my excitement grew as I, for the very first time, followed the game with true understanding of what was happening. The battle of wits between the pitcher and the batter. The importance of certain hits; the tragedy of certain misses; the stakes of every throw. But unfortunately this was pre-internet and my new knowledge was useless as I brought it home to the UK and could no longer apply it to anything, allowing it to wither and die. I liked baseball, I understood baseball, but I couldn’t actually watch baseball, so the knowledge faded away.

Then, in around 2003, after years away from the place and living life as an independent adult who did my own summer thing, my mom bought a house in America and we started spending summers there again on Cape Cod to visit her. In 2004 I realised I could watch baseball again and watched in awe as Derek Jeter made an amazing save which saw him dive right into the crowd. The image stuck with me over the July 4th weekend and I enjoyed a few more games that summer. I noticed the passion people on the Cape, and all around Massachusetts, seemed to have for the Red Sox too and wanted to be part of it. I had always been a Yankees “fan” by default simply because my family came from New York, but now we were becoming a Massachusetts family (and after a lifetime of reading Stephen King and being a longtime Cheers fan) I decided, controversially to some, to make the switch to Boston.

It was just a casual thing. A few games here and there if and when I was in the States. But the more I watched, the more I liked it. I began to understand the game, the nuances, the highs and lows, the players, the managers. By 2012 I realised I had been keeping a “casual” eye on the Red Sox now most summers for eight years! That year we went to a local game of the Cape Cod Baseball League as just a fun thing to do one evening to take our minds off mom’s ongoing battle with cancer; my first live baseball game. As we returned to the UK and I repeated my now annual lament about how annoying it was that we couldn’t watch baseball at home, this time I also did a little searching online and discovered the MLB At Bat app now had a feature where you could subscribe to MLB TV and watch every single game even internationally. A total game changer that had somehow passed me by!

I gave them my money immediately and suddenly, through the miracle of technology, found myself able to watch the rest of the season on my side of the ocean. In 2013 I wasn’t just sweeping up the end of the season but was fully paid up and ready from opening day. Being in New York for Wrestlemania 29 that April I finally saw my first live Red Sox game, albeit at Yankee Stadium, as the Sox faced the Yankees. They lost, but I had a blast despite the freezing unseasonable cold. (Fun Fact: the only thing I have seen live at Fenway Park is Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band; I have seen Red Sox play the Yankees twice, once in New York, and again last year in London).

The Sox had a killer season in 2013 and I watched every game I could. They were in the postseason and clocking up the victories when we got the call that mom had died. We were therefore in Cape Cod for her funeral when they got to the World Series. I remember that strange sense of normality and feeling that life would go on as we, her survivors, watched the Red Sox win the Championship a few days after her funeral (and the guilt I felt at the wish I’d made, earlier that Autumn, that I could somehow be in Boston to see it if they did).

The next year baseball brought normality again as my stepdad came back to Britain to help sort through mom’s things at their old home here. Amidst the sadness and weirdness we would sometimes get together to watch a Red Sox game.

The more years went by watching baseball, the more I began to understand and enjoy other legitimate sports. My wife is a tennis fan and suddenly tennis made sense to me in a way it never had. Last year we even went to a few tennis matches to watch it live and I had a great time at each one.

I would do duty on the playground at work and see students play football and realise that I was actually invested in the matches I observed. When the World Cup came around a few years ago, I watched the England games and was on the edge of my seat. I started to realise it may not have been that I hated football, but merely that I hated Bury, and that my difficult relationship with my often absent father was perhaps the real thing that put me off giving football a chance? I began to watch Match of the Day every now and again instead of just turning it off and started to look into ways of watching the Premier League.

By the end of the 2019 baseball season (disastrous for the Red Sox following their triumphant 2018), I realised you could call me, quite unexpectedly to my younger self, a sports guy. So one of the bigger oddities for me of this bizarre new Covid 19 world we have been living in since March was the cessation of sports. The year I had even toyed with paying to watch some football became the year that all sports shut down!

Not wrestling, of course. The promoters of wrestling already happily put their performers at risk every time they let them smash their bodies around for our entertainment, so they just closed the set to audiences and continued anyway. But real sport, sport that cared about the health of their employees, that all just went away. And it really did leave a hole.

I didn’t realise how much I was missing baseball as a part of my Spring and Summer ritual until it came back this weekend. Two games in and suddenly a key ingredient had been added to the Summer. An important seasoning I hadn’t noticed was absent until I could taste it once again.

Whether baseball’s back for the full 60 game season they’ve planned or not, while we’ve got it I’m happy. The whole thing might be a foolhardy and dangerous experiment. Like the Stanley Cup during the Spanish Flu it all might come undone in a month or so and our beloved MLB teams may all fall sick with Covid. But while it’s there again, even if it’s just for a little while, I’m taking from it what I can. I don’t have a football team I support, a cricket team, a rugby team, a basketball team or an NFL team, but sticking on the Red Sox and seeing what’s happening at Fenway somehow magically connects me to something ineffable but unmistakably good that life is made all the better for having in it.

Play ball!