sidelined

This is kind of long, but the rugby league season is still a month away so what else are you going to do?

If I do say so myself, I was a gun tee-baller as a kid for the Toronto Tigers. Modesty does not prevent me from mentioning I was selected as 1st base for the Newcastle region in the Under 12s NSW Championships (which we won if you don’t mind and I the only girl in the team) in the late 80s. This was the peak of my sporting career. In high school I played cricket batting at first drop, but my highest competitive score was 4 leg byes. Our comp was knockout and, as by this time we were in the northern New England area, we always played an Armidale high school first up which had a State rep fast bowler in their ranks and thus it was, for every year I played, we only had that one competitive game before being eliminated. I can’t pin point where my attraction to baseball started, probably its a mix of general inability to resist the insistent cultural demands of Americana-philia with a misty nostalgia about my derring-do on the playing fields of Hawke-era Lake Macquarie.

I’m a Chicago Cubs fan, and I’ve seen a Major League Baseball game live exactly once, in July 2001 in New York City when the Cubs played the NY Mets at their (former) home ground of Shea Stadium. Shea was near La Guardia airport and I clearly remember looking at the low flying planes coming in thinking, geez those look very close to hitting things. Now I can’t think of that day without it being entwined with events later that year in NYC. On my last trip to the States in 2009 I was in Chicago but the Cubs were on the road so I missed them. I did half think about going to see the Chicago White Sox just to taste the MLB atmosphere again but for various reasons didn’t, and of course the night I decide NOT to go is the night Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle achieved the rare feat of pitching a perfect game. Bah, typical! “A perfect game” means basically through nine innings no batter even got on to first base and this has only happened 18 times in the last 110 years of Major League Baseball. Anyway, that same trip I later went to Memphis and did have the delightful experience of a Triple A (the highest level of the minor league, one rung below MLB) game between the Memphis Redbirds (affiliates of the big league St Louis Cardinals) playing across state music capital rivals, the Nashville Sounds (affiliates of the Milwaukee Brewers). I sat next to an elderly couple from St Louis who had taken the trip specifically to see the Redbirds – lower leagues, probably because of the relatively greater difficulty of getting out of them, are a much bigger deal in baseball than they are in any other sport.

My first MLB game was more than 10 years ago and I’d considered myself a fan before that but the MLB is a league that takes more dedication than most. It’s not like football codes where your team plays one game a week and you can glance up and down the scores on the internet to get a view of what’s happening. The MLB regular season (not including play offs, World Series etc) is 162 games long, 30 teams play multiple games a week. So many players, so many transfers, so many stats.

Last year I watched the epic (20 hours) documentary series Baseball by Ken Burns. When I was watching it I was enjoying for its own sake, its effortless joy and insight, but also couldn’t help thinking, damn I wish someone would do something like this for cricket. To be honest, my desire for such has lost urgency since Roebuck is no longer with us, as Burns has perfected the cultural-artefact-as-profound-epic which his style was made for. Anyway, the series reinvigorated my active devotion to the sport and made me promise that 2012 would be the season I made a bigger effort to be a better fan.

Since 2010 I’ve been to quite a few Australian Baseball League games. There have been various forms of a pro-level baseball league over the years in Australia, but this one is actually majority owned by the MLB which hopefully provides stability and resources. It’s in its second year and has not been without bumps but is good quality and deserves support. The season is basically over unless you’re in Perth but they make a great effort to entertain and the prices for entry and food (at least in Sydney) are more than reasonable so give it a thought when it starts back up in November.

I’d be there much more often if the mighty Sydney Blue Sox didn’t play out at Rooty Hill which is a 3 hour round trip on public transport for me ( I hope this isn’t breaking a confidence, but David Balfour Blue Sox GM told me they had looked at Henson Park in Marrickville, home of the Newtown Jets, for an alternate venue. That’s walking distance from me, I’d be a season ticket holder in that case. Judging from the geographic distribution of actual baseball clubs in Sydney though, they are probably wise to stick to greater western Sydney whatever the other disadvantages.) The league is a mix of Australian based, Australians who play professionally in the US and elsewhere, Japanese, Koreans, American minor leaguers looking to keep sharp or get noticed in the US off season and some former major leaguers also working their way back to the top. A good example of the latter is Jason Hirsch, former Colorado Rockies starting pitcher who got injured, and who has an informative and entertaining blog about his experiences. His team the Melbourne Aces are playing the Perth Heat in the grand final series of the ABL this week – I understand ABC Grandstand (digital?) will be broadcasting the games live. I kind of hate the Aces after some disrespectful time wasting antics at a Blue Sox game I went to in November and Perth have been the best team all year but … eh, I guess I’m going for (one Americanism I will NEVER adopt is the verb “to root” for anything other than .. well, you know) Melbourne. Oz MLB PLayers is a great site to follow (also on Twitter) for the fortunes of Aussies in the MLB and minor leagues. There’s also The Australian Baseball Digest and ABC Grandstand Digital now has a baseball programme called Strike Zone.

I recently read Right Off the Bat a book (also a website) written by an American baseball fan and and English cricket fan who try and draw out the similarities and differences between the two distant, fractious cousins. It occupies an odd place in that it needs to introduce fans of exclusively one to the other, while appealing to fans of both so if you are knowledgable about both you may not learn a whole lot but the enthusiasm of the fan comes through the tone, the intimacy of why sport is important to us. For me, Test Match cricket is still the peak of human endeavour to date, but I’ve been thinking about how to discuss cricket and (not “versus”) baseball together.

Finally while surfing YouTube the other night the best connection I could make appeared in front of me. Specifically I was watching videos relating to Chicago Cubs legend Ron Santo. Santo was a great, great player (hey, he’s even in The Simpsons) – here’s Keith Olbermann excoriating the Hall of Fame voters for not electing him in before his death in late 2010. He finally was voted in posthumously in 2011. Here’s a really good overview of his career. The club retired his number 10 and there’s a statue of him outisde Wrigley Stadium, that should tell you how much he means to Chicago (the north side, anyway).

So from the 1990s Santo was the colour commentator for Cubs games along with the granite-voiced straight man Pat Hughes on WGN radio. I downloaded the Baseball Voices disc of some highlights of his commentary career, and that’s when it came to me: Ron Santo IS Kerry O’Keeffe. Of course Skull wishes he was half the player Santo was but I’m talking as commentators. I was so struck by the resemblance between them in this role, my mate Phineas who is responsible for me going from a generic baseball fan to fully in the tank for the Cubs described him as being, on radio, “delightfully bonkers.”

In the end this is I think the most fitting place to link the two sports, for me. Like many, my major experience of cricket is via the radio. During the day with the sound muted on the telly or in the middle of the night drifting in and out of sleep while listening to Australia on tour in England or the West Indies. Even if I didn’t know anything about baseball, I think the rhythms of the commentary would be familiar and comforting to me as a cricket fan. This is the thread you can grab on to to find my way through the labyrinth of baseball,which like cricket is not just about rules and stats but about history and culture and the sound of a bat hitting a ball on the radio and the visions of that you build in your head in the dark.

Here’s a couple of the Ron Santo highlights I mean.
An occasion he tried to help Pat Hughes sell the aforementioned Baseball Voices series.
Munsters or Addams Family
Damn Hankies.mp3

Be Sociable, Share!

•