A whole new ball game

At the moment I'm too busy with paint, demolition, invoices and the like to think straight let alone write anything for the blog - although with the kitchen close to completion at last, an update will follow in due course. But as mentioned previously, I was in Houston recently and here's something I wrote in the dead of night but couldn't post because the hotel's internet connection was so feeble...

Baseball. Oft derided for its World Series which includes teams from precisely one continent, but a huge business. And finally after many years of longing I have seen a live game. The "many years of longing" part isn't true actually, and it wasn't much of a game either. The Houston Astros are one of the weakest teams in Major League Baseball and this definitely contributed to the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates looking like, well, World Series winners. It was 5-0 after five innings and when a three-run homer went "out of the ballpark" at the top of the seventh, that was the end of the contest. At least the Astros had the decency to score the last couple of points, but without the home run that would have sent the decorative train on its celebratory run along the top of the outfield. Final score 8-2 to the Pirates, who won 9-3 yesterday evening with seven runs in the ninth inning and who will almost certainly win again tomorrow afternoon.

So much for the game. Even aficionados - and I'm not convinced there were many at the game - didn't seem exactly gripped. But the attendance was almost 34000, which meant one Houstonian in every 70 was in Minute Maid Park on a Tuesday evening to watch two unremarkable teams (correction: one remarkably bad team and one merely moderate) play the second in a three-game miniseries. Our tickets cost $37 each and even in a foreign currency I can do the math. Someone somewhere is making a huge amount of money from baseball and I suspect it was the men singularly failing to hold the attention of the crowd. At any one time about 10 percent of those present were out of their seats fetching refreshments; no one cared that the beer hawkers in the gangways were blocking the view of the game; and there was far more excitement about the between-innings competitions (eg a Hannah Montana look-not-very-alike, trivia contests, which Hummer would win a cartoon race on the big screen) than anything that happened in or around the diamond. The infamous KissCam did catch a guy proposing to his girlfriend and she said yes although it was hard to imagine a less romantic setting.

And you know what? I actually enjoyed it. I wouldn't want to go to the baseball that often because I imagine it's always more of the same, but MMP with the roof open would be a great sight. And it's a family/social event that football in the UK could only aspire to: families with young children, teenagers on dates, middle-aged men, no segregation and the only police on duty were directing traffic. On top of that, the baseball players were among some of the least athletic sportsmen imaginable. And being a Gillingham fan, that sense of impending doom from the very start of the game made me feel right at home.