First Person: Baseball for Brits – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It started on a frozen and snowy April morning this year. Our flight from New York was desperately late. Our friend met us at the airport, engine running. She gunned the car down the freeway.

My son and I had just 20 minutes to make it to PNC Park for opening day. We made it to our seats as the early afternoon sun at last began to spread some warmth in the stadium. Five minutes later, the Pirates had driven in their first run of what was to be a somewhat disappointing season.

Baseball 2016 ended at 3 a.m. London time early this month. Jet-lagged from a business trip, I woke to see that Game 7 of the World Series was reaching a joyfully bonkers extra-innings climax. I stumbled to the sofa to see the crucial 10th inning and the Cubs finally break the curse of the billy goat.

This is what happens when an Englishman gets hooked on baseball, as this one has been for almost 40 years.

It was 1977 when I first made it to these shores, besotted by all things American but totally ignorant of the summer game. First explained to me by the executive editor of this fine newspaper, baseball hooked me in by the head and the heart. Raised on the peculiar rituals of cricket, baseball for me was both comfortingly familiar and bafflingly strange.

Two sports divided by a common language, it was the shared rhythm of the two sports that must have done it for me. It’s a simple but lovable recipe. Watch pitch (ball in cricket); read newspaper/​drink beer while things reset; repeat continuously for three hours or more, preferably in warm sunshine.

Obsessed by the (then) endless failure of the (then) hopeless Red Sox, and infuriated by the swaggering arrogance of the perennially successful Yankees, it wasn’t hard to pick a favorite team to follow. While, as a city, New York was sans-pareil for a star-struck undergraduate, Boston was the team for me. The team’s endless glorious failure I found utterly charming, as I did the down-home sweetness of Fenway Park.

Baseball came to me in many layers. The basics were easy and the more complex wrinkles revealed themselves — from infield fly rule to ground-rule doubles — as I devoured whatever books I could take home every visit from Barnes & Noble.

From there, it was a short step to being entranced by the game’s rich history and literature, throwing up tales of cruelty and sheer daftness, from the barnstorming days of the Negro Leagues to Bill Veeck’s once-at-bat midget. Writers such as Roger Angell and Thomas Boswell were my guides here, painting vivid tableaus of cursing, tobacco-chewing pitchers, bench-emptying brawls and twilight double-headers played at bug-ridden minor-league grounds in the rural backwaters of Texas.

England was not the easiest place on earth to keep track of baseball in the 1980s. The papers here recorded the scores (a day late) in the smallest font size and maybe broke out a paragraph or two to record the outcome of the World Series. Broadcast coverage was confined to sporadic and static-filled coverage on the American Forces Radio Network.

Two developments from the mid 1990s improved matters considerably.

The first was the unveiling of the Internet, bringing baseball news on demand. By 2004, with broadband at home, I was able to watch live video as the Red Sox broke their own barrel-aged curse to win their first World Series since 1918.

The second was that I managed to transmit my passion for the sport to my son, Ben, whose predilection for baseball’s arcane regulations meant that he could soon explain to me just how a play that involved a hit and an error should be scored. Having turned into another hardcore Red Sox fan, he and I made plans to do a baseball road trip in 2013 just after his 17th birthday.

Planned like a military campaign and blessed by fine weather, we got to see games in Boston (of course), New York (both teams) and Chicago (ditto), from where we hit the freeway for some minor-league action in Indianapolis and a trio of games in the beauty of PNC Park. We came back for more this year, albeit being greeted with the chill of one of the coldest opening weeks for years, adding Washington and Baltimore to the checklist of grounds visited.

And then back home to see how the never-ending season unfolded. So long is the baseball season that each individual game scarcely seems significant. Instead they stack up like toy building blocks, each team blowing hot and cold as the summer waxes then wanes, until a pattern emerges sometime during September of who seems likely to make the post-season.

And there the clock resets, with teams victorious over 162 games tossed out ceremoniously after just three more (I’m looking at you here Red Sox). How did that happen?

From there it’s a slippery slope to the sofa at 3 a.m. as one of the greatest-ever World Series comes to an end and the Chicago Cubs –— like the Red Sox 12 years previously — bring an entire city to its feet and bathes it in poignant nostalgia for the generations of citizens who went to their graves without ever tasting victory.

I’m missing it all already. I shall return. Next year.

Richard Lander is a media executive living in London (rlander@citywire.co.uk).