A baseball exhibition game between the US and Canadian army teams leaves some spectators struggling with the rules
One cannot say that Manchester took very kindly to baseball at first sight. The transatlantic experts agreed that Saturday's match between the United States army and the Canadian teams was a good exhibition game. But for the great bulk of those who made up the 8,000 spectators it was completely baffling.
It was not that they went in any critical spirit to vaunt our cricket and football over a variation of rounders. Their mood was rather of humble curiosity about this strange manner of thing that has moved the Americans to ecstasy. Trained in the deep science of our home games, they found themselves in the toils of an even more subtle and intricate science.
It was soon clear that baseball is much too sophisticated to be picked up in a few moments as the game goes along. If one sought help from the score-sheet, the eye was lost in a maze of diamond squares and strange abbreviated initials. Resigning oneself to inference from observation and settling down to appreciate what seemed to be the points of the game - a smart boundary hit, a clever catch, a neatly stolen run, - one found that the few people who appeared to know the rules did not take things in at all the same way.
They were indeed just as interesting as the players. There is evidently a quite peculiar psychology of the baseball crowd. Its language is a savage gurgling yell, not intermittent and surging like the roar of the football field, but running in snappy, piercing comment, in a dialect of noise unrelated to any British sound. And the noise rarely seemed to be about the things which by all familiar analogy one could understand. An American rose on the stand and bellowed unintelligible abuse at the umpire for a ruling which left the rest of us unmoved. Waiting players stood on their heads and jumped wildly about when their "pitcher" (or bowler) sent down what one thought were impossible balls.
But recondite and obscure as most people came away feeling the rules of baseball to be, they are not really very hard, but of course, as in football, refinements of play obscure them. For the next match in Manchester one hopes someone will write a dozen lines of explanation on the back of the programme. He could give the method of scoring (no one seemed to know that points are counted by the number of men who run right round the square field), the rule determining the length of an innings, and the distinction between a no-ball (or "ball") and a "strike." A little clear identification of the opposing teams would help to clear the fog which hung over a great part of the crowd until well on in the match.
If one approaches baseball with these few rules in mind, it straightens itself out as an extremely subtle and rapid game, calling for extraordinary quickness and skill in fielding, and a whole art in "pitching." Perhaps if we took it up on this side of the Atlantic we might make it another of the deadly realities of life. In the hands of the Americans it preserves a good deal of humanity- there was a pleasant humour in the capering feints of the player sneaking a run and the feverish telegraphing of the "catcher" or stumper, - and the quick alternation of innings - each side has nine in a match - precludes any monotonous stone-walling.
The match itself was very keenly fought. The U.S. team won by 8 points to 7, and were lucky at that. At the eighth innings both sides were level. In the ninth the Canadians scored three, but lost their lead by two mistakes in the last few minutes of the game.