This article is all about the historical context of the upcoming National Baseball Championships, specifically with regard to the top-tier level that is the National Baseball League. We now know which four teams will contest the finals, and their rosters are being frantically finalized behind the scenes as I write, but what is at stake from a historical angle?
So it all kicked off on Sunday at Hemel, in the double-header between the Harlow Nationals and the Herts Falcos, but that was no surprise.
The Nationals were formed in 2011 when a core cluster of Falcons decided to break off from the cast. While I can’t find fault in the professional way in which the reigning champions were set up — particularly by the standards of an amateur sport — some unhappiness was almost inevitable.
Augmenting the rivalry, in terms of both personnel and competitiveness, is the fact that the Herts team has now added major players from the old Richmond squad, who might still feel aggrieved at their semi-final championship loss to Harlow last season.
All that was needed to spark a bench clearance yesterday was something as seemingly minor — to those not in the know about baseball’s deep-running rituals — as “pimping” a home run; that being the modern parlance for showboating.
I know my writing focus is normally on the top tier of British baseball, but sometimes the story is so good that a deviation from the norm is justified. Moreover, there was a need to smooth out the British baseball karma, and so after my look at “Frustration” from one game on 29 May, here is a consideration of “Patience” from another on that date. Continue reading
If a physicist was to create an equation to predict the chance that a fair fly-ball would hit the top of the perimeter fence and bounce back into play, then factors that would probably feature in the modelling include layout of the field, trajectory of the ball, velocity on leaving the bat, air pressure, and wind speed and direction. She (yes, not all physicists are men) might want, for extra credits or some other perfectly valid reason, to tailor the formula for British baseball, in which case the existence of fencing in the first place would need to be established, as indeed would the material used. Continue reading
You don’t have to reach too deeply into the bag of diplomatic sports interview responses before you uncover the above gem. A sacred and universal tradition among interviewees dictates that it should be left close to the top of the bag, owing to the frequent need for its retrieval. In football, the unwritten code instructs one to return the phrase by nestling it between “they played a great game” and “they made it difficult for us early doors.”
The question of whether the statement can be substantiated from metaphysical first principles for a zero-sum game with only two possible outcomes, Â such as a baseball match, Â rarely gets the consideration that it merits. In other words, it’s bullshit — unless the game was in the infinitesimally small pool of contest in which the two teams were exactly even in their performance level.
But how about the phrases “neither moundsman deserved to lose” or “neither twirler deserved to lose”? (Both of them, incidentally, are making their debut on the Internet, or at least the portion of it accessible by the Google search engine. Try / it.) If the duellists both put in solid efforts that would on an average day get them a win, then it makes sense to say that neither deserved to be charged with a loss.
All of the above represents a circuitous way for me to say that I’m not being silly in writing the following:
In the opening game at Northbrooks Playing Fields last Sunday, neither pitcher deserved to lose.
Jamie Ratcliff twirled a shutout as the Harlow Nationals bested the Bracknell Blazers. The 18-year-old Brit gave up his first and only hit of the game when he was just two outs away from a no-hitter. It would be extremely difficult to make a case that he deserved the loss. His opponent, Henry Collins, also went the distance but gave up a run. You would feel irked in the Major Leagues if you gave up a solitary tally and still lost, but in British baseball it is almost unthinkable. A past victim of the “almost unthinkable” was Nic Goetz, whose one run given up in a complete game for Herts against Croydon on 30 May 2010 was one run too many.
In the game last Sunday, Collins — the only British born-and-bred winner of the Most Valuable Pitcher award in the past 10 years — gave up a pair of hits, a walk, and a run in the first inning, but over the next four frames the only damage to his pitching line was a bare single. In the sixth, he gave up a lead-off hit but seconds later erased the blemish with a well-executed pick-off play. Deeper into the inning, he gave up his only extra-base hit, to Edwin Alcanatara. It could be argued that he made a mistake with that pitch, but to the batter in question anything that doesn’t bounce (and even some that do) could potentially end up being branded a “mistake”, such is the unorthodox and ever-thrilling interpretation of the strike-zone by the Dominican gentle giant, last year’s triple-crown winner.
Perhaps I have missed the point. I should not have become involved in lamenting the unjustness — the losing pitcher and his squad-mates were capable of looking after that themselves. Instead, I should have been celebrating this rare scoreline. But I felt like throwing a pitch in the dirt myself, and as a fan of this marvellous sport I am sure you had little trouble in blocking it.
I can derive great joy from uncovering details of an important but long-forgotten British baseball clash in a newspaper library. The enjoyment has much to do with the respect I have for the history of baseball. This is an appreciation that extends to other sports. As an example of this, I have my cycling computer set to kilometres instead of miles, not to cheer myself up by the greater rate with which the digits tick over, but to pay a small kind of homage to the land of all things metric and so many great two-wheelers, including the late Laurent Fignon. His gruelling battle with — and eventual 8-second loss to — Greg Lemond in the 1989 Tour de France is probably a singularly important factor in the development of my love for sport. (Eight seconds is an infinitesimal amount in the context of a 3-week stage race; if the action was condensed into a 10-second dash, the cyclists would not have been split by the naked eye or by a photograph).
I also get excited by baseball that happens in front of me, in three dimensions, using the full spectrum of colour and the entire range of audible sounds. Only last Sunday, instinct lifted me from my seat (and sent my head on a treacherous journey into the internal spidery mechanism of my ground-rooted fishing umbrella) when the Harlow Nationals’ first baseman Jarrod Pretorius threw himself over the fencing marking the edge of foul territory — his intended domain — and came up with the ball for the out.
If you tried to weigh up these two types of enjoyment using a pair of scales, the measuring aid would vapourise out of the space-time continuum because they are incompatible as far as making comparisons is concerned.
In the same way, I gained orthogonal enjoyment from writing two previous BaseballGB columns, one on current reflections (Roundshaw Hop) and the other featuring historical snippets (the Cobbettes). If, with your replacement set of scales, you tried to make another comparison of enjoyment levels here, you’d again find yourself heading out to the hardware store with your hand in your pocket.
Fortunately, I don’t need to make a choice between the two areas. Project COBB (the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball) has the dual purpose of preserving details of baseball today and restoring the happenings from yesteryear. And my new semi-regular column on BaseballGB will consolidate the themes of my two previous serials in alternating between the current and the realms of history: One from the Present; One from the Past.