Baseball Game
“Are you coming to watch a game of American football tomorrow?” A friend of mine called me up and asked me if I wanted to witness a football match. So, I quickly thought of the things that I was supposed to do and was thinking whether it would be possible for me to go for the game the next day evening. I had a lot of work, but what the heck? If I keep thinking of work, I will keep missing such opportunities. So I agreed to go along.Next day two of my friends and I were on our way to witness our first live football match. None of us knew much about the game. We picked up another elderly American couple who were supposed to come along with us, and headed straight to Safeco Fields in Seattle. On our way we discussed a lot of things, and the couple had a lot of stories about their visits to different countries, including India. We also talked about games, when the old man told us something about baseball player. I was just confused as to why is he talking about baseball, when we are actually going to see a football match.
So finally we reached the Safeco fields after crossing the heavy traffic on the freeways. There are two fields just besides each other in Seattle downtown. Safeco Fields and Qwest Field. One of them is a baseball stadium and the other one is a football stadium. We were all excited to see a huge turnout for the match at Safeco fields. A stadium with a huge crowd of fans and I was going to witness all this for the first time. Though we Indians are cricket crazy, I was not crazy enough to actually book a ticket and to go to a stadium to watch a cricket match. Maybe I liked the comfort of my house and my TV more. So we reached our section and just got a glimpse of the ground. There was something wrong. What is it? The ground looks more like a baseball ground and not a football ground!!! You got it; we had a ticket for a baseball game and not a football game. And it was not a ‘Seahawks’ game, it was a ‘Mariners’ game. These are Seattle’s football and baseball teams. Who cares whether it is football or baseball? Both were equally new for me. I had not seen any of these games even on TV.
The match was about to start, but before that the complete audience had stood up for the US and Canadian National Anthem. It was a match between Seattle ‘Mariners’ and Toronto ‘Blue Jays’. We bought some garlic fries and Pepsi and moved to our place. The seating arrangement was such that everyone could see the match properly without anyone blocking anybody else’s view. But this arrangement made the stands very steep. Nevertheless we settled down in our places, with the beautiful stadium in front of us. We could see the players and their game properly and also had a proper view of the scoreboards. Not that it made much sense for us; but it did help us in understanding the rules of the game. Besides the view of the ground, we also had a good view of Seattle downtown, with Qwest field, all the towering buildings in downtown and Space needle of course.
The game started and seemed to have 9 innings (as we would call it in Cricket terminology). Each team bats till 3 of its players get out. And they complete one run when one batsman reaches to the original corner after going to all the four corners of the square. This makes the game low scoring, as it does not keep the ‘scoreboard ticking’. But we do have a ‘Home run’ that saves the batsmen from running all over the place and this ‘Home run’, a six in cricket, is counted as one run. The most amazing thing is when they hit a ball in the ground, they have to run!!! Now that is some problem for our cricketers, who just stop the ball after the bowler has trodden half the ground for his run-up. Wide balls are counted as ‘Balls’ and a correct ball which the batsmen cannot play is counted as ‘Strike’. And they don’t have wickets, so no chance of batsman getting out, clean bowled. So if a single batsmen gets 3 ‘Strikes’ against his name, he is out and if there are 3 ‘Balls’ from the bowling team, the batsmen can move to the next corner and a new batsmen will come to the batting position. So this is what I could get from the first 3-4 innings. There were some ambiguities about when it is a ‘Strike’, and when it is a ‘Ball’, but that’s fine, we were not going to get into those finer details. After knowing these rules we got a bit comfortable with the whole affair. That is when we started clapping with the audience, instead of looking at them with confused looks.
All the people around were really enjoying, maybe because they knew they were going to see a baseball game and not a football game. We had barely started understanding the rules, when suddenly some Japanese youngsters in front row started shouting “Ichiro…Ichiro…Ichiro…” We moved back from our ‘comfortable’ state to ‘confused’ state. Now what is Ichiro? Well the screen helped us in understanding this. They displayed the photo of this guy called Ichiro Suzuki, on their screen. He is a batsman of Japanese origin who plays with the Mariners. And man, this guy has a huge fan following. They had got placards with his name, many of them were wearing ’51 Ichiro’ shirts. It was like you would see the ’10 Tendulkar’ shirts all across the stadium in a cricket match when Tendulkar is playing. So this person, Ichiro, seems to be their star batsman. And he did play well. Seattle was leading from the very beginning. And as obvious, the home team had got a huge support. The organizers also encouraged the home team, by turning on the music, beats, and animation on the screen which made the audience more enthusiastic and noisier. All this was missing when the ‘Blue Jays’ came in to bat. They also had some time pass games on their screen, in between the innings, in those 2-3 minutes. At one point it looked like the Blue Jays were going to surge ahead of the Mariners, but a ‘Double play’ in one of the innings turned the match in favor of Mariners. Double play is like you can run out two different players, at two different corners, if your fielder is quick enough. Finally at the end of 9 innings Toronto had scored 4 runs where as Seattle had scored 7. It seems very amusing how only 11 runs were scored when both the teams batted 9 times and 54 batsmen got out. But it is difficult to score even a single run in baseball.
We all Seattlers were happy for our team. Our team had won. This was the third game in the series which was leveled 1-1 before this match. This was my first game in a stadium, and the first football, oops…baseball game that I witnessed. It is fun watching this game, which looks similar to cricket but with longer run, no pitch, and a cylindrical bat.
posted by Amol @ 7:09 PM
1 Comments:
hey good post!
i have played baseball... on computer :-p hehehe... and we used to play baseball with hockey stick during our lunch breaks in school!!
watching a live baseball match must be fun! :)
btw, after reading ur 1st para, even i got confused after reading "football" and read the title of your post once again! :)
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