leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 As noted in the "Do You Read?" thread, I picked up this book recently. I highly recommend it. If the theatre and extravagance of baseball were new to me, in many other respects I recognised the game as cricket's bastard son. For a start, both games are fundamentally a duel. A cricket coach used to tell me to look at the bowler before every ball and say to myself: "This ball is a contest between you and me, and I'm going to win it." Baseball is the same. Every pitch is a direct contest between the pitcher and the batter -- a battle of wills and skills. In the final reckoning, no amount of support or teamwork can actually throw the ball for the pitcher or hit the ball for the batter. As with cricket, it is a team game played by individuals with a collective goal. But the duels in baseball and cricket -- unlike the boxing match or the rugby front row -- are somewhat abstracted. It is possible to win without appearing to be overly pugilistic. At some level, you need to be a fighter to succeed in either baseball or cricket; but not necessarily obviously so. Both games take all sorts -- from quiet, reflective types to up-and-at-'em aggressors. They are both slow, fluid games -- criticised by non-believers for being boring -- with plenty of in-built pauses for the players and spectators to think about the next moment of confrontation. Rather than breathless, non-stop games, they are "what do you think will happen next?" sports. Both baseball and cricket grow on you, seduce you, absorb you. "A good football match is a good film," as Simon Barnes of The Times put it, "a good Test series is a great novel -- that is to say, it becomes something you live with." The past, too, is omnipresent in both sports. Of all games, cricket and baseball have been the most preoccupied with their "golden ages," and a sense of lost innocence or perceived betrayal of the past. That history so informs the two games deepens their appeal; but at times their obsession with the past may have led them to neglect the present and the future. Their public images have certainly always been conservative. They also have inspired more than their fair share of writers, a testament to their reputations as high-minded and heavyweight sports somehow removed from the mass of undifferentiated sporting experience. There is lots of good cricket writing, from the West Indian C.L.R. James's Marxist theories to Alan Ross's elegant perceptions, and still more, as I would discover, about baseball. Baseball also has the same multisensory mystic appeal as cricket. The crisp crack of the ash bat on baseball hide is one of baseball's great talking points, just as cricket fans eulogise about the calming sound of willow on leather. "I'd wake up with the smell of the ballpark in my nose and the cool of the grass in my feet," W.P. Kinsella wrote in his novel Shoeless Joe, "the thrill of the grass." I, too, as a cricketer, wake up with that feeling. Even now, when I play so much, I haven't lost that boyish excitement so many of us felt as children when we smelt the grass being cut for the first time in spring. I would, I'm sure, have been a baseball player -- at some level -- if I had been born in America. I sensed that from the first few pitches I saw and the first lines I read about the game. It is cricket's spiritual cousin. Before I even went to a major league game, I was seduced by baseball's rich culture: the literature, the precision and relentless scrutiny of the statistics, the quirky articulateness of the commentary, and above all the extraordinary devotion that baseball inspires among all different types of Americans, from philosophy professors to bartenders. It is a connoisseur's game for everyone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 But nothing comes of it for the Sox... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El Zen Posted August 8, 2009 Share Posted August 8, 2009 Both pitchers doing very well to get out of tough situations in conescutive half-innings. Certainly has become the pithing-duel we expected, and I have to say a better ball game than last night's despite the lack of runs. That's not to say I didn't prefer last nights plot, btw Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lFPj8P3PpQ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 0-0 heading into the bottom of the 9th... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 Posada strikes out with the bases loaded to end the ninth! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El Zen Posted August 8, 2009 Share Posted August 8, 2009 Bases weren't loaded, men on 2nd and 3rd. Another late evening in the Bronx. Some top quality pitching tonight! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 I was half paying attention (posting in a baseball thread on another forum) I thought you had gone to bed... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B-dub Posted August 8, 2009 Share Posted August 8, 2009 So no one's watching the Mets vs. the Padres right now? What a surprise. Yeah, I'm not watching it either... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 Papelbon strikes out Jeter with a runner on third to end the 10th... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 So no one's watching the Mets vs. the Padres right now? What a surprise. Yeah, I'm not watching it either... Is Omar Minaya getting into another http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amxTBFn0YpM? Or is Baba Booey throwing out the first pitch? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El Zen Posted August 8, 2009 Share Posted August 8, 2009 I really should get to bed, but you really can't now can you? It's just not happening for either team tonight. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 1-2-3 11th inning for the Yankees... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 We're about halfway to the longest a major league game ever remained 0-0... the Mets and Astros played 23 innings of scoreless baseball in 1968. The 'stros won on a grounder that went through the legs of the Mets shortstop in the bottom of the 24th. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 Longest professional baseball game of all time The Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings, two teams from the triple-A International League, played the longest game in professional baseball history in 1981 at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The game began on Saturday, April 16, 1981, and continued through the night and into Easter morning before finally being suspended. Although most leagues have a curfew rule that would have suspended the game, the rule book that the home plate umpire had that night did not contain one. So the teams continued playing until the president of the league, Harold Cooper, was finally reached on the phone sometime after 3 a.m. Finally at 4:07, at the end of the 32nd inning, the game was stopped. The game resumed on the evening of Tuesday, June 23, the next time the Red Wings were in town. A sellout crowd and news media from around the world were on hand, partly because the major leagues were on strike at the time. On that evening, it took just one inning and 18 minutes to settle the game, with Pawtucket's Dave Koza driving in Bill McDaniel for the winning run in the bottom of the 33rd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 Junichi Tazawa appears to be the favorite atm. And he just made his major league debut... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 A-Rod up with 2 out in the 15th, Jeter on first... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 8, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 8, 2009 **** 8-2 it is... Ah well, A-Rod will choke in October anyway... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El Zen Posted August 8, 2009 Share Posted August 8, 2009 Aaaaaaaaa-roooooood!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted August 10, 2009 VT Supporter Share Posted August 10, 2009 So the Yankees sweep the Red Sox At least Ye Olde England supporters can be assured that your lot are doing better in the Ashes than the Sox did against the Yankees. WEEI runs the (rather West Coast-oriented) Fox Sports Radio overnight, but if you tune in on Monday, you might just get to hear what people jumping from the Tobin Bridge sounds like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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