A message from the Queen

I should damn well hope so too!!

But describing mitts is not explaining why they are worn. I suspect it is to make the ball easy to catch so that Moms are spared the humiliation of seeing their athletic sons drop one and be labelled "butterfingers" and given the bird by the crowd as happens in cricket quite often. Until a proper explanation is provided I will continue to maintain this suspicion.

I tried to watch a baseball game last night and the batter either let go or missed about 8 pitches and then jogged, in as dignified a manner as his dress permitted, out of camera shot to what I assume was first base.

Why did the crowd start having paroxysms of joy?

A good eye is hard to find, my British student...

(one must overcome his desire to swing at bad pitches outside the zone, no matter how enticing they appear.)

They sell beer at these games. It is central to the experience. Many stadiums are even named after breweries. My own regional team is the Brewers.

That's it, in a nutshell.

Also what he said...

beer

Do you mean that all the crowd are pissed?

I wondered what the attraction was.

How come there's never any crowd trouble?

Perhaps because huge groups of American skinheads don't organize behind sports teams?

(except the raiduhs)






also the beer ends before the game, so everyone can be sober before heading safely home...

Do you not do Long-life beer then?

no, and my tongue was rather firmly in my cheek as well...

(an hour to sober up for a bunch of the bozos is a joke.)

Usually heavy enforcement after games, and public transport available in most major league cities, KC excluded...)

I tried that once with a Yoga instruction manual but I couldn't reach.

I'd say when you've gotten the Chavs to speak the "Queen's English," you can start on the the rest of us . . . bit of hypocrisy, innit?

I cannot avoid seeing the obnoxious eggy thing on the TV from time to time.

The rabbit doth contradict herself. Unless she draws a distinction between "seeing" and "watching," but that would be reprehensible.



Howdy, set.

When a baseball is properly hit by a batter, it is traveling in excess of 100 mph. For anyone to try and catch this missile barehanded would be to risk, at the very least, having to sit out the rest of the game as one's fingers would then have splints on them.

I do, and it is perfectly logical and reasonable.

Splitter!

I don't buy that. Cricket provides the same sort of thing and often the fielders are close to the batsman. The wicket-keeper (back stop) wears gloves but he is continually having to catch the ball everytime the batsman leaves it or misses it. Often 200 times in a day's play and maybe more and he also has to catch throws from fielders which regularly bounce just before reaching him. Hand injuries are common. As they are for batsmen.

No other fielder (10) wears gloves.

And the ball not being allowed to pitch in baseball is another method of making the game "soft".

There are many aspects of baseball which seem to me to be designed to show players in the best possible light and to avoid them taking much risk to life and limb and to their dignity. What I mean is that they look more like poseurs than sportsmen. Basketball, which is nowhere here, is ridiculous. It's like girl's water-polo only without the cheesecake. Ice hockey I can watch.

I am quite willing to be persuaded otherwise. In fact I would welcome it.

What happened to your wonder horse? Got pissed on with a jet-lagged nag of our's I saw.

Pshaw. What of football (what we call soccer), if you want to discuss the effete in men's athletics? Having someone step on your heel apparently is a life-threatening injury to a footballer.

As to horse-racing, it's a rich dilettante's "sport" in the States, and the vast majority of the populace couldn't give two wet turds about it. If it actually is a sport of general regard in Merry Olde (among other than the addicted gambler and the extravagant fop), I will have to consider it alongside a continued indulgence of inbred royalty and the tradition of innocent pre-buggery among prep school lads as evidence that the once rugged isle has gone soft for good, and I can only wish that the Scots conjure up some distant memory and sack the lot of you.

Excellent little rant I must say.

Funny you should bring up "buggery" in a discussion about sport though.

But I have long held a complex theory in my mind about American sport. I took to wondering why I found it unwatchable. I had tried because I love all big money sport. When there's big money there's ladies to consider. Shopping.

The male mating display being tested by regulations designed to prevent bloodbaths before the gaze of ladies whose interest in big money is too well known for me to need to provide any links or evidence in a short post such as this is intended to be.

But look how often the TV producer finds a shot of a batsmen's wife or live in squeeze when he has just gone to a century after a grinding five hours at the crease during which he's had treatment twice and his mind's almost gone and there she is in a print frock acting as if she had done it and she'd never shown the slightest interest in cricket until our hero chatted her up at a dance. It's more scientific than 2+2=4.

Your sports don't test all that much. Nobody ever looks absolutely exhausted. It's should be real torture. Highly refined.

The USA should be in the top three test match sides and be serious contenders for the World Cup. I'll never live to see it but I support all those who are working to bring it on.

I think sport is the best ambassador for peace. And think of the advertising if the US were playing Italy or, dare I say, even England, in a World Cup final in Paris.

Baseball, it is true, is not a test of endurance, nor is it meant to be. Basketball, which you are loath to consider and I am sure have never had enough exposure to to gain a true appreciation -- it is the closest "American" sport to football in terms of its demands on endurance, intellect, teamwork, and athleticism -- which may account for its exploding popularity worldwide, Great Britain excluded -- lends itself to heroism in the face of injury and exhaustion. And it never ends in a shootout.

Our football players, in spite of their armor, battle through injury to such an extent that their lives, relative to the average American, are shortened by over a decade. True, they are a testament to technology and pharmacology as well as to brute force of will, but that too is a reflection (for better and for worse) of American notions of masculinity.

For my part, what I know about cricket could fit in a matchbox with all the matches left in, so I'll bow to your experience in saying that it is in fact a grueling test of character. I'm supposing it just might be, given the way you Brits are continually dominated by various of your former colonies. Still and all, it looks to me like some sort of group men's cotillion...