Touching Base

The past 10 days, I have been waking up bleary-eyed in the wee hours of themorning to watch grown-up men in smart ‘uniforms’, in another continent andtime zone, throw, hit and catch a ball. And it’s not the Australia versusZimbabwe cricketing mismatch Down Under. Rather, it’s baseball -- cricket’sdistant cousin, thrice removed, if not more.

Come October, every year, the baseball season in the US hits the homestretch, with the Major League Baseball (MLB) playoffs. The season culminateswith the finals, billed, rather grandiosely, as the World Series. It’s strangebecause all the 30 MLB ball clubs are rooted to US and Canadian cities, andabout the only relevant international flavour is the presence of player imports-- that too less genuine and more home-grown, of the migrant type -- from Japan and LatinAmerica.

The US might be, arguably, the best in the world in baseball, yet something’snot right when a country’s domestic league accords itself a global connotationsimply because it boasts the best players and commands the biggest following. It’sanother instance of just how inward-looking, yet extremely self-sufficient,American sport is. Anyway, as the Bard said, what’s in a name?

Behind such trivialities lies a game, just like so many others, tailored bythe same fabric that gives sport a life, and turns it into an enthrallingspectacle. Two teams, human beings with skills and emotions, engaged in acompetitive game. It’s a plot line that holds appeal, in varying degrees, tosports aficionados the world over. Even if they don’t have team loyalties tocling to. Even to an Indian cricket buff, who, at first sight of baseball,couldn’t help but engage in comparisons between the two bat-ball sports, anddismiss baseball as a crude version of cricket.

In the beginning, it was jarring to note that baseball is, in large part, anall-or-nothing sport, with an overriding emphasis on ‘making a play’ -- astructure that doesn’t encourage creation or reward finesse (as cricket doesso very faithfully). There’s an incredibly skewed work allocation, with thepitcher and the catcher sharing much of the load and calling most of the shots,while the others lounge around in the background for a good part of the game.And, unless you are a pitcher, there’s absolutely no worth placed onendurance, as the game demands brute strength and the occasional full-throttleburst of energy, not oxygen reservoirs.

But over the period of three years during which I’ve been watchingbaseball, sporadically at first and with some regularity now, I have come torealise that all comparisons between the two games are superfluous and academic.Baseball is baseball, cricket is cricket. Each has its own reasons, each has itsown rhythms. Over time, baseball has grown on me, to the point of offering me myown comfortable space, within which I can experience the essence of this sportand feel part of a sporting contest.

Not being an American, or never having been to the US, or never having sat ina ball park on a pleasant summer evening and heard the crack of a bat, means Iam likely to be dismissed by some as an outsider, incapable of appreciatingbaseball the way it is meant to be appreciated. Perhaps. I don’t relate tobaseball the way, for instance, a Yankee fan would, with an acute sense ofhistory, memories of buzzing New York nights spent at Yankee Stadium, localrivalries (with cross-town rivals, the Mets, or a little further away, with theBoston Red Sox), and a sense of belonging with his or her team.

The absence of team loyalties, soaring and sinking with their performance,means my involvement with baseball is, some would say, incomplete. Perhaps. Yet,I don’t feel slighted or short-changed by this position of neutrality or myoutsider status, for there are other hooks in the sport of baseball I findmyself seeking. And when finding them, latching on to them, and deriving a senseof pleasure and excitement that, for me, borders near complete.

There’s beauty in watching a good starting pitcher work his way through agame and strut his stuff -- fastballs, curveballs, breaking balls. An enduringmemory is a snake-like Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks firing inslithering, unplayable fastballs and curveballs to the Yankees in the 2001 WorldSeries. There’s beauty in watching short-stops like Derek Jeter and AlexGonzalez do darned good impersonations of Jonty Rhodes, marking out theirterritory, flinging themselves on the muddy diamond line and seemingly turningthe art of double plays into a science. There’s beauty in the home run, inwatching, say, Barry Bonds pound a travelling ball 400 feet into McCovey Cove inthe San Francisco Bay. There’s beauty in watching a team defend a slender leadin the bottom of the ninth inning. Those are my hooks, and they make for animminently watchable ballgame.

This year, in the playoffs, I have revelled in the spunkiness of the FloridaMarlins: in Ivan Rodriguez, the very caricature of a working man’s player; inthe slight, pants-in-socks Juan Pierre, who clears the infield at will; in AlexGonzalez, gifted with loose limbs, hawk-like anticipation and a fluent arm. Ihave marvelled in the battling Cubs and their throttling pitching duo of MarkPrior and Kerry Woods. I have admired the character and depth of the Yankees,who are, in so many ways, similar to the current Australian cricket team. I havesmiled for the fans of the ‘jinxed’ Cubs and the Red Sox, who, after aneternity, have a chance to go all the way.

However, much as all this invigorates me, it’s fine so long as it is theplayoffs; it just doesn’t sustain my interest through the year. A lot ofthings Americans see endemic to baseball and find oddly charming simply escape acricket-watching outsider like me. Take the baseball season, which Americanslove for the way it plays out over the summer. If you ask me, it’s tedious andlong, and wasted.

First, there’s a pre-season, which involves teams squaring off infriendlies, so as get into playing shape. Then, there’s a 162-game regularseason, spread over six months, that decides which eight of the 30 teamsprogress to the playoffs, which is basically a euphemism for the quarter-finals.Then, there’s the post-season, quarter-finals onwards. Phew! It’s anoverkill. The regular season is way too long (the contribution of each game toan outcome being 1/162), with far too many meaningless games (a bit like theprevious zonal Ranji Trophy format), and simply doesn’t do justice to itsultimate purpose of narrowing down the title contenders.

The playoffs, though, are a different deal. The concept of a five-match orseven-match series, played home and away by turn, with the loser staying homefor good, is compelling. It was why on the morning of October 8, the first dayof the Indian international cricketing season, instead of watching Ganguly andFleming babble inanities at the toss in Motera, I found myself engrossed in apulsating Game 1 of the seven-match conference series (semi-finals) between theCubs and Marlins. And will probably continue to do so through October.