Summer was a wilderness and as far as I was concerned, you could keep it. Being a sports fan in Britain, at least for me, meant following football. Real football, as in soccer, not that pansy stuff with padding and pantyhose, and commercial breaks every two minutes. No, from late August until the early May, I was an avid follower of the beautiful game. However, once the F.A. Cup Final closed out the season, we were cast into the endless, bleak purgatory that was….the cricket season.
In case you aren’t familiar with cricket, and I’m assuming you aren’t, it’s a game invented for those who found the sport of watching grass grow to be too taxing on their nervous systems. Largely due to endless periods of inaction, the games stretched out for 3, sometimes 4 days and even then there was often no winner. For some reason, cricket aficionados seem to have no problem with this. Mind you these are people, who actually understand the concept of the game, which itself, tells you a lot about them. The verbiage is a morass of overs and outs, sticky wickets and short legs, slips and creases, none of which have any connection with what’s happening on the field, which is precious little if you really want to know. How anyone would voluntarily suffer through this torment is beyond me.
Which perhaps makes it all the more strange that over the last few years I have become something of a fan of baseball, a game, which pays more than a passing nod to it’s older, and statelier ancestor. There are an equal number of mystifying expressions such as ERA, RBI and pinch hitter, all designed to baffle the neophyte. Fans share an equally mind numbing passion for collecting statistics and it’s equally rare for the action to ever reach edge-of-the-seat excitement. However, they share positive aspects too. Both games have the same warm, lazy summer afternoon quality, with the smell of fresh mown grass mixed with sun tan oil and beer. And each give pleasure to fans of all ages, from the very young to the very old and all points in between. However, in my not so humble opinion, baseball is head and shoulders over cricket due to the fact that every few minutes something happens, and by the time you go home the game has either been won or lost. Maybe it’s just me but I think that should count for something.
This week marked the start of the 2004 baseball season and yesterday, our very own Colorado Rockies took the field for their home opener against another team with which I have a vague connection, the Arizona Diamondbacks who hail from my ex hometown of Phoenix. Despite the season being less than seven days old, they’ve already played three times with the Diamondbacks taking the honors in two of those games. Despite being one of baseball’s newer franchises the Diamondbacks also have a World Series championship under their belts, largely thanks to the owner’s policy of hocking the team’s future and plunging them into colossal debt when buying the players necessary to achieve this.
I was never particularly a fan of the Diamondbacks, a long and ugly political battle over the taxpayer’s role in the financing of their stadium rather soured me on them from the beginning. However, it was the fact that we had a team in town that inspired me to make the effort and figure out what the game was all about. I tried following the TV coverage, but as I’ve explained, unless you’re up on the lingo and fully cognizant of the subtleties of what you’re watching, it was kind of hard to really get involved. It took a visit to a minor league park where a friend spent the evening explaining exactly what was happening out there and why before I really started to appreciate what I was watching. Once I’d overcome that milestone I was hooked and over the next four or five years, developed what can only be described as a love affair with the game.
Upon moving up to Colorado, I was happy to embrace each of Denver’s four major league teams. Well, not so much the basketball team of course, I’m not quite ready for that level of tedium, but both the football and hockey teams have won their respective national championships not once, but twice within the last decade, a feat which Arizona’s perennial losers the Arizona Cardinals and the Phoenix Coyotes are never likely to achieve in my lifetime, or probably theirs. The transition to becoming a fan of my new hometown baseball club wasn’t quite so easy. The Rockies are, let’s be charitable, not the stuff of which legends are made. (At least, not yet.)
This isn’t entirely their fault. Denver’s famous lack of humidity causes the baseballs to dry out. This makes them lighter and allows them to fly much further, making home runs much easier to score than in ballparks in lower and damper locations. For reasons, which aren’t entirely clear to me, the altitude also adds to this phenomenon. “What’s the problem with that?” I hear you ask, “Isn’t it the same ball for each team”. Well that’s a very good question, but as someone recently explained to me, it means the games tend to be higher scoring when played in Denver. No decent pitcher wants to play for a team where his figures consistently look awful, after all, that could dictate whether or not he makes it into the hall of fame one day. So, the good pitchers choose to play elsewhere and this in turn discourages other top-notch players from making their homes in the Rocky Mountains.
It’s been a problem since the Rockies first arrived in Denver but last year they came up with a creative way to address the issue. The installed a humidifier in which to store the balls. The room temperature is kept at about 90 degrees to keep condensation from forming on the balls, and the humidity is set at 40 percent to mirror conditions at a Missouri warehouse where the baseballs are stored on receipt from the manufacturing plant in Haiti. Statistics have shown that while the Rockies haven’t been winning a significantly higher proportion of games since adding the new feature, double digit games, where one team has scored ten runs or more, have been cut almost in half. Maybe not as exciting to watch, but certainly more pitcher friendly.
There’s still snow on the ground, and a chill in the air, but from my office window I can look over to downtown bathed in early spring sunshine and I know, the boys of summer are back.
Footnote: They won!
In case you aren’t familiar with cricket, and I’m assuming you aren’t, it’s a game invented for those who found the sport of watching grass grow to be too taxing on their nervous systems. Largely due to endless periods of inaction, the games stretched out for 3, sometimes 4 days and even then there was often no winner. For some reason, cricket aficionados seem to have no problem with this. Mind you these are people, who actually understand the concept of the game, which itself, tells you a lot about them. The verbiage is a morass of overs and outs, sticky wickets and short legs, slips and creases, none of which have any connection with what’s happening on the field, which is precious little if you really want to know. How anyone would voluntarily suffer through this torment is beyond me.
Which perhaps makes it all the more strange that over the last few years I have become something of a fan of baseball, a game, which pays more than a passing nod to it’s older, and statelier ancestor. There are an equal number of mystifying expressions such as ERA, RBI and pinch hitter, all designed to baffle the neophyte. Fans share an equally mind numbing passion for collecting statistics and it’s equally rare for the action to ever reach edge-of-the-seat excitement. However, they share positive aspects too. Both games have the same warm, lazy summer afternoon quality, with the smell of fresh mown grass mixed with sun tan oil and beer. And each give pleasure to fans of all ages, from the very young to the very old and all points in between. However, in my not so humble opinion, baseball is head and shoulders over cricket due to the fact that every few minutes something happens, and by the time you go home the game has either been won or lost. Maybe it’s just me but I think that should count for something.
This week marked the start of the 2004 baseball season and yesterday, our very own Colorado Rockies took the field for their home opener against another team with which I have a vague connection, the Arizona Diamondbacks who hail from my ex hometown of Phoenix. Despite the season being less than seven days old, they’ve already played three times with the Diamondbacks taking the honors in two of those games. Despite being one of baseball’s newer franchises the Diamondbacks also have a World Series championship under their belts, largely thanks to the owner’s policy of hocking the team’s future and plunging them into colossal debt when buying the players necessary to achieve this.
I was never particularly a fan of the Diamondbacks, a long and ugly political battle over the taxpayer’s role in the financing of their stadium rather soured me on them from the beginning. However, it was the fact that we had a team in town that inspired me to make the effort and figure out what the game was all about. I tried following the TV coverage, but as I’ve explained, unless you’re up on the lingo and fully cognizant of the subtleties of what you’re watching, it was kind of hard to really get involved. It took a visit to a minor league park where a friend spent the evening explaining exactly what was happening out there and why before I really started to appreciate what I was watching. Once I’d overcome that milestone I was hooked and over the next four or five years, developed what can only be described as a love affair with the game.
Upon moving up to Colorado, I was happy to embrace each of Denver’s four major league teams. Well, not so much the basketball team of course, I’m not quite ready for that level of tedium, but both the football and hockey teams have won their respective national championships not once, but twice within the last decade, a feat which Arizona’s perennial losers the Arizona Cardinals and the Phoenix Coyotes are never likely to achieve in my lifetime, or probably theirs. The transition to becoming a fan of my new hometown baseball club wasn’t quite so easy. The Rockies are, let’s be charitable, not the stuff of which legends are made. (At least, not yet.)
This isn’t entirely their fault. Denver’s famous lack of humidity causes the baseballs to dry out. This makes them lighter and allows them to fly much further, making home runs much easier to score than in ballparks in lower and damper locations. For reasons, which aren’t entirely clear to me, the altitude also adds to this phenomenon. “What’s the problem with that?” I hear you ask, “Isn’t it the same ball for each team”. Well that’s a very good question, but as someone recently explained to me, it means the games tend to be higher scoring when played in Denver. No decent pitcher wants to play for a team where his figures consistently look awful, after all, that could dictate whether or not he makes it into the hall of fame one day. So, the good pitchers choose to play elsewhere and this in turn discourages other top-notch players from making their homes in the Rocky Mountains.
It’s been a problem since the Rockies first arrived in Denver but last year they came up with a creative way to address the issue. The installed a humidifier in which to store the balls. The room temperature is kept at about 90 degrees to keep condensation from forming on the balls, and the humidity is set at 40 percent to mirror conditions at a Missouri warehouse where the baseballs are stored on receipt from the manufacturing plant in Haiti. Statistics have shown that while the Rockies haven’t been winning a significantly higher proportion of games since adding the new feature, double digit games, where one team has scored ten runs or more, have been cut almost in half. Maybe not as exciting to watch, but certainly more pitcher friendly.
There’s still snow on the ground, and a chill in the air, but from my office window I can look over to downtown bathed in early spring sunshine and I know, the boys of summer are back.
Footnote: They won!
