British Baseball

I am beat.

This weekend was the Nottingham baseball tournament, a five-school, school-organized series of games played in Nottingham. Our team, the Oxford Kings, took three out of four games, each by pretty large margins. I caught three of the games, and pitched the fourth (except for the final outs). So now I’m beat.

British baseball is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. The translation, I suppose, would be a very small group of American boys avoiding football, baseball, and every other national sport, in favor of cricket. Weird, right? I doubt there is such a thing. I would have doubted British baseball as well, had I not seen it. These guys all follow the MLB, even though games are only broadcast two days a week at two in the morning. One Nottingham boy (that’s how the Brits refer to team members) told me he “pretty much eats, drinks, and breathes baseball”--remember, in England! That same dedication—or maybe addiction—was evident in most of our opponents, and in the two Brits on our team. However, it seems like they learned the sport by watching it two days a week at two in the morning. There is little general understanding of mechanics, least of all in their pitchers. In this league (and how many more can there be?) there are, as far as I could tell, no coaches. And no umpires. And no diamonds. Where these guys found proper bats and mitts is beyond me.

But gosh is there spirit.

As I mentioned, our team had only two Brits. There were additionally four Canadians (an odd lot, despite being four) and at first four, then three, Americans (one went home on Saturday). As the least English team, we were heavily the favorites to win the tournament. Saturday especially, when all four Americans were present and not sore, the games felt a little unfair. In our second game, our American pitcher no-hit the Brits. Their pitching, by comparison, was batting practice. In fact, similar to the White Sox’s trouble with knuckleballers, we weren’t way-too-overly successful against the slowest pitcher because he threw too slow. We also didn’t see too many strikes.

I can’t remember the scores now. The first game was something like 14-[something low], and the second was 11-1 (I think we might have scored more). The third game, Sunday’s first, was a terrible game on all sides, but more so on ours. The umpire was bad (he was a member of another team, with little consistency, thus little credibility, thus little confidence), the other team’s attitude was bad, and our fielding hemorrhaged runs during the second inning. We came back to within two, losing 14-12 (I know, I know). The fourth game was...I lost count of our runs. Maybe 14-4? Something like that. I gave up three runs in the first, as I found the strike zone and my release point. One more scored on a very confusing play in the final inning, and he was my runner. (Sorting out that play was a bit of a mess, but us Americans did the bulk of it--in fact, a Brit standing near me, after I explained the play to him, said, "Well, don't ask me, I don't know the rules." I think he was a new recruit.)

We suffered badly from the elements, one that I don’t think I’ve ever faced before this: Wind. The two diamonds were chalked out on a four-square of football pitches, next to a tilled corn field. That is to say: There were no natural or artificial barriers anywhere near us. No dugouts. No walls. No corn. So there was, for all four games, a constant—CONSTANT—biting wind out of the west. It put me on edge and off balance. It carried fly balls god-knows-where. It stiffened arms and legs, deafened ears, and generally readjusted gravity on the fields. Bloody awful.

Anyway, I’ll have a few pictures of this event soon. One of the Canadians brought a camera. I took a few pictures of Nottingham city center Sunday morning, including a mandatory shot of Man Ho Restaurant, which sold Chinese food before it closed.