I discovered a very late piece of mail waiting for me at the Daily offices last week. Opening it in trepidation, fearing a torrent of abuse from some disgruntled sports enthusiast enraged by something I’d scribbled down in one of my columns, I was pleasantly surprised to get a fan letter.
Though followers of my work will probably agree that I’m no expert when it comes to American sports, maybe this means I’ve actually learned something in my four years at Stanford and I’m not quite the novice I once was. Two weeks ago, I even helped reassure an American friend who seemed a little distraught over the fact that months after the college season finished, quarterback Andrew Luck still hadn’t found a place on an NFL team. Now that the draft has finally taken place, I’m sure she is relieved to know he’s managed to secure a job after graduation.
On second thought, maybe I have a ways to go.
As a couple of friends from back home across the pond were visiting me last week, I felt I needed to give them the full American college experience and drag them along to a varsity game. With football and basketball both on hiatus, the natural choice seemed to be baseball (Stanford versus BYU on Tuesday, April 24 to be exact).
It didn’t start well. Failing to account for San Francisco traffic, my friends showed up an hour late. We missed both the playing of the national anthem, the most iconic image of an all American pastime, and a five-run second inning by the Card that threatened to be the most exciting period of the whole game. Once inside, settling into our seats, I realized my most serious mistake. My knowledgeable sports journalist facade melted away as the horrible truth dawned on me: I know nothing about baseball.
Yes, of course I know what a run is and can string together some of the basic rules, but the tactics, strategy and crucial nuances upon which a game may hinge are alien to me. Hoping to impart a little bit of what makes college sports so fascinating to my friends, I was left instead grasping at straws. The blind leading the blind, we managed to extract some of the details, but I can’t help but feel that baseball could have tried a little harder, too.
On one particular play, a BYU outfielder made a clear mistake, throwing the ball to no one in particular. That much I got, until unhelpfully the scoreboard informed me that this error had the code E-7. Surprisingly I wasn’t carrying a baseball rulebook on me to translate this and, as far as I was aware, E-7 could equally as well have been some kind of technical malfunction. Perhaps I needed to be carrying the scoreboard user’s manual.
I guess this number may have been useful to the handful of folks who seemed to be filling out their own scorecards during the game, which, on its own, is an equally confusing tradition. I don’t usually go to sporting events to play bingo—I generally hope that the action will be exciting enough on its own. Does someone collect these sheets at the end of the game and grade them?
Perhaps some of you may feel that I should have done some homework before just showing up at a baseball game, but this wasn’t the classroom. I want to have fun as a fan, not feel the need to study and take notes.
Cold, frustrated and a little bit bored, we eventually crumbled and committed the cardinal sin of leaving early—ironically, as I discovered later, just before BYU’s exciting seven-run eighth inning that almost squared the contest.
Now I hope my slightly tongue-in-cheek attack at baseball hasn’t offended you because I’d much rather receive more fan mail (however late it may reach me) than hate mail, and because I do have a serious point, too. I’m not that stupid. If millions and millions of people follow the sport, there must be a good reason, even though this has so far eluded me. My message to baseball is that there must be more like me, frustrated and put off by your crypticness.
In spite of everything, including my devotion to soccer in particular, I promise I’ll give you another chance. But please, just tell me what E-7 means.
The Stanford Daily had to put Tom Taylor in a straight jacket to prevent another soccer column. Let him out of his restraints at tom.taylor “at” stanford.edu.