Baseball

So, I went to watch a sporting event on Thursday.  Hands up who thinks I am now a huge baseball fan?

Well maybe not, but it was an entertaining evening.

We began by going to a pre-game drinks event at the baseball ground called Oktoberfest, themed of course around the Munich beer festival of the same name.  This was a bit of a poor do.  A group of us from the office arrived together expecting that our tickets would afford us entry to some sort of party.  We queued for ages to get into the "fest"' then queued again for even longer to get our one free drink.  In fact we all bought a second drink at the same time as our free one rather than face the queue again.  In the meantime we were entertained by a family dance group dressed in Bavarian costume. The teenage boys in the group looked very much like they'd rather be anywhere else.  It must be hard to be born into a family business of being "professional lederhosen wearing Germans" .  (Available for weddings, christenings and bar mitzvahs, although probably on reflection not many of the latter).  So Oktoberfest was generally reckoned to be not as good as the real thing, although it did have the advantage of getting us slightly drunk, which in my experience makes baseball more enjoyable.

The baseball itself was a long drawn out affair, which I couldn't really follow.  It does not flow terribly well, lots of stopping and starting, but that does make it a very sociable occasion when you are in a large group.  People get up and go to the bar, and to the food stalls, talk about all sorts of non- baseball matters, so it wasn't that different to being in a bar with a group of friends whilst sports were shown on the TV.  And by the end I was beginning to get the hang of the baseball and even enjoy it a little.
 

They aren't as musical as we are in the UK.  Consider the range of songs sung by soccer fans in the UK: the creative chants targeting the opposition, the traditional local songs with no apparent connection to the team or town (e.g.  Theme from Z Cars or I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles), the rapid adaptations of old songs (Nellie the Elephant for Torres at Liverpool) or classic hero chants like "Ooh Ah Cantona".  There's none of that at baseball games.  Instead somebody kept playing a four note refrain on what sounded like an organ (I imagined a Würlitzer being played by a determined little old lady), and everybody sang along "Let's go Giants".  I believe that same chant is used both here for the football ("Let's go Niners") and elsewhere for other teams (Let's go Dodgers" for instance).  If the opposition's star player was dating a Spice Girl, nobody here would think to sing about her sexual tastes.  Which may be a good thing: there is generally a good humored rivalry between fans, no segregation and a family atmosphere.  Giants fans do chant "Beat LA" mind you, which sounds so like DLA that I initially wondered if the firm was sponsoring the game.

 

There was also a team mascot dressed as a seal, who waved at me at one point but seemed disappointed I didn't scream and whoop at him.  Sorry Lou Seal, I am British and we don't do that kind of thing once we pass puberty unless we are much more drunk than I was on Thursday.

The game lasted about two and a half hours, but the time didn't drag like I had feared it might.  That was mainly due to the company who were entertaining.  So what did I learn about baseball and at the baseball?

(1) In American English, "poop" is the noun and "poo" is the verb.  Don't ask me how it came up in conversation, just store the knowledge away in case you ever need to sound convincingly American in a conversation about defacation.

(2) American culture is at its best when it is not attempting to be German.

(3) The Giants' best player is known as the Panda, and a lot of fans wear panda hats in his honour.

(4) Don't Stop Believing by Journey is a local anthem (Journey are from San Francisco) so people play it and sing along to it a lot.  Blurred Lines is a popular song with no local connections so far as I am aware and lyrics which appear to justify rape, however it has a very catchy tune so it too gets played and sung along to a lot.