Baseball

The baseball season is well underway here and I have been trying to get into it. It is a fairly simple game but curious too - shrouded in odd language and habits, as if to ward off casual observers not prepared to spend the time to understand it properly.

The game is ruled by statistics. Every aspect of a player's performance is earnestly recorded, averaged, and rated, in minute detail. Such relish is given to this data analysis, that you wonder if the actual playing of the game is a tiresome prelude to the real fun.

Complicated hand signals pass between players and coaches, wads of gum are furiously chewed, excess saliva is spat out all over the playing area. The game proceeds at a stately pace, its duration dictated by the action rather than the clock, and rarely concludes before the three hour mark. 

As with cricket, there is a nudging suspicion that baseball is a game from another era, not naturally equipped to fit into the fast pace of the modern world. The solution to this seems to be to play more baseball. 

A major league team plays six days a week from the beginning of April to the end of September, reaching more than 160 games in just the regular season. There is a distinct lack of self-confidence about this overloaded schedule, as if the American public might find something better to do if they were to be allowed out of a baseball-watching stupor.

The players may be paid $20 million a season, but 20 million also happens to feel like the number of hours that they are on our TV screens in a summer. I almost sympathize with these very wealthy people, strangers to their families, endlessly having to perform for an insatiable, hot dog wielding audience.

I'd better be going. The next game is about to start and I haven't even checked the stats about which of the teams has won more regularly at this stadium, playing on a Sunday, when the weather is over 80 degrees and both pitchers' names begin with a C.