Live Sport 8: The Ball Game
I only recently remembered this one, which fits perfectly into my plot and provides a good bit of variety. New York Mets vs St Louis Cardinals at the old Shea Stadium, or, as they bizarrely do it in the USA, St Louis Cardinals vs New York Mets. I'll try to avoid too many uses of the phrase "as they bizarrely do it it the USA", but I suppose that's what I'm writing about. America wins film, it currently wins music, but, hell, it does not win sport.
Does it win global cities? Tough one. I watched my first baseball game on my first ever full day in New York City - a good, long, cliched day.
New York lived up to expectation (apart from the first thing I saw, as I've said before, in a cab through Brooklyn, being cricket). I arrived on the Sunday night to my friends' apartment on Bowery and we went straight out to have lovely corn and Mexican beers at a street cafe, and Morgan Spurlock was there, and, ignoring jetlag, went to bed late and woke up early on the Monday. Joyce, my host, went to work, Alex and I just started walking north - a guy stopped us and said he'd lost his hamster (I think it was a hamster) who had some weird anthropomorphic name and there was some other weirdness to the story I can't quite remember which made it believable, we walked and walked even though it was baking, we went up the Empire State Building (told you it was cliched), and kept on walking, up past all these legendary streets along these legendary avenues, I'm 98% certain I saw Jake LaMotta (not even kidding!), we walked all the way up to Central Park, then we got the call from Joyce to meet her downtown at her work as she's been able to procure some tickets to the ball game, so we got the subway and suddenly we're in the financial district, on Wall Street, Ground Zero etc, and this is a small place and it's not like London, and then we get a couple more subways and we're on the way out to Queens, and Queens is a lot more like London, specifically like the Piccadilly line between Northfields and Hammersmith, which no one knows better than me, and we're out in the Burbs on a balmy evening and we see Flushing Meadows and right next to it we see Shea Stadium, legendary venue for the most legendary of Beatles concerts, home of the New York Mets (the less renowned of the New York MLB teams, though I must say I prefer their logo). Shea Stadium was due to be demolished a year or two later, so it felt like a marvellous place to be.
Baseball stadiums are rather weird. Shea Stadium was huge but didn't go all the way round. It's circular, but it's little more than semi-circular in terms of spectators. I was impressed, it was a Monday night but it wasn't far off full, despite the fact that a season contains more than 100 games.
And then the game, which was a good game, I believe. Of the four American sports, baseball is the one I'm least attuned to, probably because it's just a reductive bastardisation of the greatest sport of all. I mean, who, how, what, could ever prefer it to cricket ... now there's Twenty20, it doesn't even work for people that like their sport short.
There's only a tiny number of "scores" in the game and you sit there waiting for them to happen but there's no variety in the waiting, it's not like football or even American football, where the ball moves up and down and around, different moves are tried, everything contributes, it's just a succession of roughly the same thing happening over and over again, and when the explosive event does happen, ok, it's mildly thrilling, but as a spectator, you don't, in that moment, know exactly why it has happened this time and not all the other times.
And it's so limited. One guy (well, a few different guys, who get swapped) is really good at hurling it (yes, I know there's some variety in how they hurl it, but not all that much), and everyone else is good at using a big glove to catch it and then throwing it fast.
They use a glove! The ball doesn't bounce! Everyone just chucks it. There's no overarm or underarm. If you talk about the various great bowlers and batsmen of cricket, there are so many different ways to describe them - a batsman can be a a great front foot player, or backfoot player, a legside player, an offside player, an accumulator, a craftsman, a powerhouse, he can be a lovely cutter but a dodgy puller, he can have a lovely leave and soft hands, he can be vulnerable early on, vulnerable in the 90s, he can have a different gear or no gear change, more and more. Great sluggers? They've got really good eyes, massive arms (most likely steroid enhanced), and they whack it a long way in the air in front of them proportionately more often than less great players. Tell me that's not basically it. Go on, tell me.
But it was fun, the game. They played that "Ball Game" song, the atmosphere was generally pretty chilled although some well-to-do fellers in front of us had an irrational hatred of one of the pitchers from the bullpen who they hurled abuse at, and there's that wonderful thing where vendors come round with drinks and snacks for you and you feel like a king. This is awesome, you think.
But, then, here's the thing. It was a close, interesting game, as it goes, and the Mets grabbed a late run to make it 3-3 (I think there'd been one home run for each team thus far) and so it went to overtime. Overtime, awesome, you might think. This is when it gets really exciting. It's good the way it can't be a draw, you think. Except, nearly all the crowd fucks off home and, just when you fancy a beer, all the vendors have also fucked off home, and Shea Stadium is ghostly when, finally, some dude from the Cardinals cracks a beautiful homer to hand the Mets defeat.
And the thing that makes New York awesome also means no one's got an excuse for pissing off just when it gets interesting apart from that they don't actually give a shit and baseball is a hollow, heartless edifice. New York's got 24 hour subway! It's gone to overtime! This is fun! Just get the next train, it's fine. Do you really not actually care that much?
So that was baseball for me. There was a famous guy called Pujols playing and one or two others who are moderately famous and there were a couple of really good whacks. I'm not saying watching some mid-season county championship game at Tunbridge Wells is any more thrilling, but it's certainly a lot more graceful and varied.
But I went, and the experience was wonderful, and we got the late night subway home across Queens and back into Manhattan and that rich first day set me up to take on New York head on for the rest of the fortnight.
I've watched a decent amount of baseball on TV since then and my opinion hasn't really changed, as it has a little in recent times with basketball, the ebbs and flows of which have become more interesting to me the more I've watched. American Football, or Football "as they bizarrely do it in the USA", I've always rather enjoyed, and I'll get to that soon.
Does it win global cities? Tough one. I watched my first baseball game on my first ever full day in New York City - a good, long, cliched day.
New York lived up to expectation (apart from the first thing I saw, as I've said before, in a cab through Brooklyn, being cricket). I arrived on the Sunday night to my friends' apartment on Bowery and we went straight out to have lovely corn and Mexican beers at a street cafe, and Morgan Spurlock was there, and, ignoring jetlag, went to bed late and woke up early on the Monday. Joyce, my host, went to work, Alex and I just started walking north - a guy stopped us and said he'd lost his hamster (I think it was a hamster) who had some weird anthropomorphic name and there was some other weirdness to the story I can't quite remember which made it believable, we walked and walked even though it was baking, we went up the Empire State Building (told you it was cliched), and kept on walking, up past all these legendary streets along these legendary avenues, I'm 98% certain I saw Jake LaMotta (not even kidding!), we walked all the way up to Central Park, then we got the call from Joyce to meet her downtown at her work as she's been able to procure some tickets to the ball game, so we got the subway and suddenly we're in the financial district, on Wall Street, Ground Zero etc, and this is a small place and it's not like London, and then we get a couple more subways and we're on the way out to Queens, and Queens is a lot more like London, specifically like the Piccadilly line between Northfields and Hammersmith, which no one knows better than me, and we're out in the Burbs on a balmy evening and we see Flushing Meadows and right next to it we see Shea Stadium, legendary venue for the most legendary of Beatles concerts, home of the New York Mets (the less renowned of the New York MLB teams, though I must say I prefer their logo). Shea Stadium was due to be demolished a year or two later, so it felt like a marvellous place to be.
Baseball stadiums are rather weird. Shea Stadium was huge but didn't go all the way round. It's circular, but it's little more than semi-circular in terms of spectators. I was impressed, it was a Monday night but it wasn't far off full, despite the fact that a season contains more than 100 games.
And then the game, which was a good game, I believe. Of the four American sports, baseball is the one I'm least attuned to, probably because it's just a reductive bastardisation of the greatest sport of all. I mean, who, how, what, could ever prefer it to cricket ... now there's Twenty20, it doesn't even work for people that like their sport short.
There's only a tiny number of "scores" in the game and you sit there waiting for them to happen but there's no variety in the waiting, it's not like football or even American football, where the ball moves up and down and around, different moves are tried, everything contributes, it's just a succession of roughly the same thing happening over and over again, and when the explosive event does happen, ok, it's mildly thrilling, but as a spectator, you don't, in that moment, know exactly why it has happened this time and not all the other times.
And it's so limited. One guy (well, a few different guys, who get swapped) is really good at hurling it (yes, I know there's some variety in how they hurl it, but not all that much), and everyone else is good at using a big glove to catch it and then throwing it fast.
They use a glove! The ball doesn't bounce! Everyone just chucks it. There's no overarm or underarm. If you talk about the various great bowlers and batsmen of cricket, there are so many different ways to describe them - a batsman can be a a great front foot player, or backfoot player, a legside player, an offside player, an accumulator, a craftsman, a powerhouse, he can be a lovely cutter but a dodgy puller, he can have a lovely leave and soft hands, he can be vulnerable early on, vulnerable in the 90s, he can have a different gear or no gear change, more and more. Great sluggers? They've got really good eyes, massive arms (most likely steroid enhanced), and they whack it a long way in the air in front of them proportionately more often than less great players. Tell me that's not basically it. Go on, tell me.
But it was fun, the game. They played that "Ball Game" song, the atmosphere was generally pretty chilled although some well-to-do fellers in front of us had an irrational hatred of one of the pitchers from the bullpen who they hurled abuse at, and there's that wonderful thing where vendors come round with drinks and snacks for you and you feel like a king. This is awesome, you think.
But, then, here's the thing. It was a close, interesting game, as it goes, and the Mets grabbed a late run to make it 3-3 (I think there'd been one home run for each team thus far) and so it went to overtime. Overtime, awesome, you might think. This is when it gets really exciting. It's good the way it can't be a draw, you think. Except, nearly all the crowd fucks off home and, just when you fancy a beer, all the vendors have also fucked off home, and Shea Stadium is ghostly when, finally, some dude from the Cardinals cracks a beautiful homer to hand the Mets defeat.
And the thing that makes New York awesome also means no one's got an excuse for pissing off just when it gets interesting apart from that they don't actually give a shit and baseball is a hollow, heartless edifice. New York's got 24 hour subway! It's gone to overtime! This is fun! Just get the next train, it's fine. Do you really not actually care that much?
So that was baseball for me. There was a famous guy called Pujols playing and one or two others who are moderately famous and there were a couple of really good whacks. I'm not saying watching some mid-season county championship game at Tunbridge Wells is any more thrilling, but it's certainly a lot more graceful and varied.
But I went, and the experience was wonderful, and we got the late night subway home across Queens and back into Manhattan and that rich first day set me up to take on New York head on for the rest of the fortnight.
I've watched a decent amount of baseball on TV since then and my opinion hasn't really changed, as it has a little in recent times with basketball, the ebbs and flows of which have become more interesting to me the more I've watched. American Football, or Football "as they bizarrely do it in the USA", I've always rather enjoyed, and I'll get to that soon.
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