When you’re happy about something, it’s good to share it. And when you’re unhappy about something, it’s also good to share it. But if that something is the performance of your baseball team, and you live in the UK, you’ll have your work cut out finding anyone remotely interested in your feelings on the matter. It’s a strange, lonely place to be.
If my football team let me down, there are plenty of people to talk to about this. Same if they’ve managed to win. But if I’ve been up half the night watching the Tampa Bay Rays lose 6-1 to the Orioles in Baltimore, in the morning there is nowhere to take my dismay. And it’s somehow worse if they’ve won. Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound if there’s no one there to hear it? No idea. But I do know that if the Rays have come from behind to win a game in the 13th inning, and there’s no one with whom to share the happy news, it soon feels as if it might not have happened at all.
This all started when I went on holiday to St Petersburg, Florida, 15 years ago. For some reason, the Tampa Bay Rays play in St Pete’s rather than the city of Tampa. I suppose it’s like Grimsby Town’s ground being not in Grimsby but in Cleethorpes. Just with better weather. I’m not sure why the Rays’ ballpark isn’t where it logically should be but, then again, there’s lots of things about baseball that remain mysterious to me, none of which get in the way of me being hooked to it. And I’ve been hooked since that first Rays game.
Since it’s a somewhat unfashionable team, the place was half empty. Being somewhat unfashionable myself, this suited me down to the ground. Also, at the time they had an inspirational coach called Joe Maddon who I liked the look of. And they won that day, which was nice, too. Before I knew it, I had a team I could call my own, a team I suddenly cared about, a team hardly anyone in the UK has even heard of playing a sport in which no one here is interested.
It’s not just my team I’ll watch. I’ll travel a long way to sit in a ballpark, any ballpark. I once dragged my daughter to Milwaukee for the opening game of the Brewers’ season. Even though it was snowing, the tailgate parties were in full swing. A lot of alcohol was taken. Not by me – I was only there for the baseball. I sat there engrossed, while my daughter declared she was bored out of her mind. Then some kid just in front of us vomited everywhere, which was the last straw for my companion, who demanded we leave forthwith.
If I lived in the US I would never get anything done. All I’d do is watch baseball, usually sitting at a long bar of darkly polished wood, sipping beer, nibbling nuts, near-hypnotised by the slow rhythm of the contest unfolding on the screen. And when it finished, I’d spend the rest of the night talking about it with no shortage of fellow devotees.
The really odd thing about our zero-interest in baseball in the UK is that our language is nevertheless littered with references to it. The list is long. The word “ballpark”, for a start. Most Britons haven’t even been to one, yet will understand someone’s meaning if they describe a suggested number as a “ballpark figure”. Furthermore, do something well and you’ll be said to have hit it out of the park. Why “park”? Cricket is played in grounds, but I’ve never heard anyone congratulated – metaphorically – on hitting something out of the ground. We never, literally speaking, suggest to anyone that they play ball with us. So metaphorically, when we want someone to cooperate with us, why do we ask them to play ball?
American football and basketball are both wildly popular here, certainly in comparison with baseball. Yet words related to them rarely pop up in our discourse. In fact, I can only think of one for each sport: American football has given us the notion of the hail mary pass, and from basketball we have the idea of the slam dunk. But from baseball the list goes on and on. If you’re a cautious type, you may well be in the habit of covering all bases. Then there’s the idea of touching base. Not to mention the disappointment of failing to progress a project even as far as first base. Then again, the project might have been a bit too left-field for the client’s liking. Perhaps, among the questions they pitched at you about your big idea, you were unable to deal with the odd curveball? Or perhaps they played hardball throughout?
How many chances did they give you? Three strikes before you were out? Or just the one? There’s only one thing for it: try again. Go on, just step up to the plate and have a swing at it. See? You did it! Great! Home run! And I’ll leave it there, lest you think this is all a bit too, well, inside baseball.
So how come we speak pretty fluent baseball without knowing or caring a thing about baseball? There’s a theory that when corporate America really went on the march early in the last century, baseball was the dominant sport. And for this reason it was baseball lingo that sneaked into American business English. Then, through management literature and the pervasive creep of US corporate cliche, it spread far and wide. I suspect baseball, being turn-based and procedural, also conforms to how business likes to see itself – ordered, waiting for opportunities, moving forward stage by stage etc.
You’d think this process might have worked both ways. The Americans are clueless about cricket but, as we’ve shown with baseball, that needn’t be a barrier to the adoption of the language. It’s to be hoped that even now someone in Sioux Falls, South Dakota might be struggling to field a trick question: “Jeez, you sure bowled me a googly there, sir!” Or let us imagine some errant teenager in Casper, Wyoming being chastised by his parents for his poor performance at school: “You’re on a sticky wicket here, son.”
Oh, by the way, while I appreciate you couldn’t care less, I do want you to know that, even having lost three games this week, the Rays remain the best team in the American League this season. Just in case anyone asks.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist