Roll Out the Barrel

I watched the Mets-Brewers baseball game on the BBC Red Button last night.

In the seventh inning stretch, when the crowd normally sings Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the Brewers fans sang Roll Out the Barrel. The lyrics ("Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun") are of course perfect for the Milwaukee Brewers, and for drinking beer at the ballpark. 

They also went into the history of the song, which everyone seems to claim to have composed. I always assumed it was an English pub song (the British Film Institute once put out a DVD of short films about English pubs with that title), but it turns out to be based on a Czech polka instrumental from 1927. Czech lyrics were added in 1934, English ones by American songwriters for a hit in 1939, and then it was sung by soldiers in World War II.

Every day's a school day...

Having A Ball in London

BBC Sport broadcast both games of the Major League Baseball series between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals from London Stadium this weekend.

The MLB London Series is officially about promoting the sport in this country, but seems to be as much about giving players and fans the opportunity to experience the capital as tourists, with the chance of the league creating an expansion franchise here far more remote than that of a NFL team, with massively fewer regular season fixtures, relocating to Britain, in itself quite slim unless the other owners were willing to subsidise such a transatlantic switch, at least initially. Not that I'm complaining if it means live baseball on terrestrial TV, albeit not two games a week as in the halcyon days of Channel 5's coverage of the sport when I first got into it twenty or so years ago.

The game has also been greatly improved by the new rules brought in before the season in order to speed things up and make it more of a spectacle for spectators rather than the stats-driven tactical grind that it was in danger of becoming, including a pitch clock and a ban on the infield shift (similar to the rule on the number of fielders inside the circle in limited overs cricket) which has led to more hitting into the gaps in the outfield and advancing runners on sacrifice flies rather than just relying on walks and homers for run production. 

If only they'd get rid of interleague games and let the pitchers bat again too...

Hotel Blues

As flights to the United States began again this morning, the news reached me, via a roundup email from Jazz North West, that one of midtown Manhattan's most historic hotels, the Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue, which closed at the start of the Covid pandemic last year, is to remain shut and will eventually be demolished. The Pennsylvania, opposite Penn Station and close to Madison Square Garden, was not only a venue for live jazz in the forties, but also saw its phone number become a swing standard.

On my first trip to the United States in 2002 - a baseball tour by coach along the East Coast from Baltimore to Boston, with stops in Philadelphia, New York City and the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown in upstate New York - we stayed at another of midtown Manhattan's iconic hotels, the Edison on 47th Street, whose ballroom also hosted live music in the big band era, and drank in the bar where Luca Brasi met his end in The Godfather.

Brooklyn beer and baseball

I've just read Beer School: Bottling Success At the Brooklyn Brewery, a cheap secondhand copy of which I picked up online. It's an unusual book, a cross between a company history and a business manual.

I first drank their flagship Brooklyn Lager, an amber, all-malt brew loosely based on the Vienna-type beers produced in the United States before Prohibition, about twenty years ago. In the early to mid 2000s, I also went on three holidays to New York, each time making at least one trip out to Shea Stadium in Queens for a Mets game, and picked up in a bar at JFK Airport the Brooklyn beer mat that still sits on my desk (since the late fifties, when the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, the borough of Brooklyn has been bereft of a major league baseball team, and by the mid seventies lacked a brewery too. In the summer of 1986, as the Mets batted themselves towards their second World Series championship, Brooklyn Brewery's founders were watching on a TV set - drinking homebrew and sketching out their business plan - in the backyard of the apartment building they both then lived in. They are also linked by graphic design: the brewery's swirling logo was based on the Dodgers' iconic "B", while the Mets' combines their colours with those of the city's other lost National League baseball team, uptown Manhattan's New York Giants).

Being based at first in a still edgy section of a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn means that amongst the entrepreneurial advice are stories of hairy experiences in those early years: threatening calls from besuited Italian guys in limos befitting "business agents" of Mob-fronted construction union locals; burglars dropping through the skylight to steal crates of beer later retrieved from a neighbourhood convenience store; and armed robbers holding guns to the heads of warehouse workers before emptying the safe.

Play ball!

I watched the two games in Major League Baseball's London Series this weekend, broadcast on BBC iPlayer from the former Olympic stadium in east London.

There have been a few complaints by players and others about the event: the aerodynamics of the stadium allegedly affecting the pictchers' abilty to throw breaking balls; glare off the white seats making it diffcult for outfielders to pick up fly balls; the extent of the foul territory behind home plate and along the base lines causing problems for the catcher and infielders; and most spectators being American tourists or expats (not to mention the sky-high prices of some of the tickets, many times that of those for an equivalent match-up in the US, and for food and drink at the game, with two foot-long hot dogs £25 and the 330ml bottles of Heineken being hawked in the stands £6.50).

Despite the logistics of flying the two teams three and a half thousand miles across the North Atlantic and transforming the football ground where West Ham now play their home matches, including importing North American soil for the pictcher's mound and infield dirt around the basepaths, I think MLB will count the event as a success, albeit an expereience to learn things from, especially given that the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox of the American League East Divison served up the big home run-hitting that most fans seem to want to see at the ballpark, rather that the National League-style "small ball" of pitchers' duels, base-stealing, bunts, groundouts, double plays and pitchers batting that I prefer myself.

I first watched baseball in the 2001 MLB season, when Channel 5 showed two live games a week, ESPN's Sunday and Wednesday Night Baseball (actually broadcast in the early hours of Monday and Thursday morning here, which is why, like most fans I suspect, I used to record them, and then watch them when I got in from work). In 2002, I went to the United States for the first time, on an organised coach tour along the East Coast, stopping at ballparks in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston for Orioles, Phillies, Yankees, Mets and Red Sox games with my workmate who got me into the sport, followed by independent trips to New York in 2003 and 2005 for a Mets double-header and weekend series against Arizona and the Los Angeles Dodgers at Shea Stadium and to Chicago in 2004 for a Sunday afternoon Cubs-Pirates game at Wrigley Field as part of a blues pilgrimage to the city with my brother-in-law. After Channel 5 stopped broadcasting baseball in 2008, I watched ESPN's games on Top Up TV through a card decoder that slotted into the back of your set, until that too finished in 2013.

I still follow the fortunes of my favourite team (the Cincinnati Reds) online, and watch video clips of highlights from their games (insert joke here), but it's not really the same as watching a whole game, with the pitchers making adjustments as the batting lineup rotates through nine innings, series or season, getting to know the idiosyncracies of each ballpark and the players on each team. For the serious fan, there's a multitude of stats to have fun with, from WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) for pitchers to RISP (runners in scoring position) for batters, and many, many more (the fact that the scoreboard at the London Stadium spelt out Runs, Hits and Errors, rather than just the RHE columns that you'd see at a US ballpark, was mentioned more than once in this weekend's commentary).

I like to think that I still know the rules of baseball pretty well (including the supposedly impenetrable infield fly rule that I've never had any problem understanding, or explaining to others, and which was invoked in Game 1 on Saturday), although I had to dig out my pocket-sized rulebook yesterday afternoon when Aroldis Chapman came in from the bullpen to close out the game for the Yankees in the ninth inning to check on the conditions for a pitcher to qualify for a save.

It seems that you can now watch BT Sport's baseball coverage by downloading their app to your phone without being a broadband customer, so I may check that option out for continued regular viewing after getting my two game fix these last forty-eight hours.

New balls, please

I can't quite bring myself to welcome or join in the crowd booing and general opprobrium currently being directed at the Australian cricket team after their captain and star batsman Steve Smith and another member of his squad were found guilty of tampering with the ball in a Test match against South Africa.

Yes, ball tampering is against both the spirit and laws of cricket, and yes, it's right that those found guilty of it face some kind of sanction (the one Test ban and loss of match fees from the one in which the incident occurred in this case seems sufficent to me), but all teams have at one time or another done it and it strikes me as a tad hypocritical for the English press in particular to lambast Australia for it.

There's also the idea that cricket, being supposedly a gentleman's game, should be above such chicanery - "It's just not cricket" - and, again hypocritically, that ball tampering is something that might happen in Britain's former colonies but not here.

The only real way to eliminate it would be to do as cricket's distant transatlantic cousin baseball did at the end of the so-called "dead ball era" in the 1920's and change the ball as soon as it becomes scuffed or worn, but that would radically alter the playing of a game in which the condition of the ball, and the point at which it is replaced, can, pardon the pun, swing the outcome of a match, and even then, as baseball discovered, illegal deliveries akin to spitballs would no doubt still continue to be sent down the pitch to batsmen.

Night and Day

The first Test match to be played in this country on a day/night basis, from two until nine o'clock rather than the traditional eleven o'clock until six, began between England and the West Indies at Edgbaston, Birmingham, yesterday, with a pink rather than a red cricket ball being used, apparently so as to be more visible to the batsmen under the floodlights.

In the United States, baseball games have been played at night under floodlights since the 1930's, but given the number of games in the regular season there are still plenty of day games for fans to watch on TV or go to.

Day/night games are also routinely played in Twenty20 cricket. Although I'm not a fan of that form of the game, with its emphasis on slogging and slightly predictable run chases in the final overs, I think Test cricket played in the later hours of the day is a good idea, allowing people to travel to the ground straight from work and still see most of the first innings and that, especially in hotter countries like those of the Indian sub-continent, the cooler temperatures then will make it more comfortable for both players and spectators, but I predict, and hope, that most Test matches will still be played in the hours of daylight.

Silly Little Game

I've just watched Silly Little Game, a ESPN film about the beginnings of what is now fantasy baseball.

Fantasy baseball began as the Rotisserie League, named after the French restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan where a group of sportswriters and magazine editors thought up the idea of competing against each other with teams of
Major League players.

One of the interesting aspects of the programme was how fantasy baseball drove the publication of baseball stats and even created a new one, WHIP (walks and hits by innings pitched). And even though the Rotisserie League had a pretty conventional approach to what stats are most important (RBI's and batting average rather than slugging and on base percentage), the fact that stats were being published regularly led to the Moneyball approach of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane that has since been copied widely by mid-market teams drafting players.

Young man's game

At Scarborough yesterday, Yorkshire seam bowler Matthew Fisher became only the third fifteen year old to have played first class cricket.

In 2008, fifteen year old Barnsley winger Reuben Noble-Lazarus became the youngest player to turn out for a Football League team and left-hander Joe Nuxhall was also that age when he first pitched for the Cincinnati Reds in 1944, still a Major League Baseball record. In contact sports like rugby and American football, the youngest ever players are, as you'd expect, a bit older, in the 18-20 age range.

Twelve seems to be the youngest age anyone has competed at the top level of a sport - in golf and chess - and there have also been one or two fourteen year old tennis players. At the other end of the scale, I doubt we'll ever again see a fifty year old professional footballer like Stanley Matthews or a fifty-two year old Test cricketer like Wilfred Rhodes.

Super Bowl Sunday

In the last ten years, I've done the same thing on the first weekend in February - gone round to one my mate's and watched the Super Bowl with beer and pizza.

Last night was no different (apart from the floodlights failing). The Super Bowl is pretty much the only time I drink lager - it just seems to go with pizza and American football. If I were more organised, I'd get something a) American and b) decent, like Brooklyn Lager, instead of Stella.

American football is actually my second favourite US sport (on a list of two: I can't get into ice hockey and find basketball ridiculous). The end of the NFL postseason can only mean one thing. As Shelley might have said, if winter is over, can baseball spring training be far behind?

Take Me Out to the Ballpark

As usual, I spent a large part of Christmas with my head in a book someone bought me.

Take Me Out to the Ballpark by Josh Leventhal is an illustrated guide to major and minor league ballparks of the past and present. It also has sections on things like ballpark food, souvenirs and how the architecture of baseball's cathedrals has changed over the decades. There are basically three generations of ballparks: the idiosyncratic wood and brick "jewel boxes" built in the early twentieth century, the indentical, concrete, doughnut-shaped "cookie cutters" that largely replaced them in the 1970's and the "retro ballparks" that have sprung up across the major leagues in the last twenty years incorporating many of the features of the originals.

My first trip to the US in 2002, a baseball tour along the East Coast, took in games at all three types of ballpark, the retro Camden Yards in Baltimore, the "cookie cutter" Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia and the ultimate "jewel box", Fenway Park in Boston. Fenway is still my favourite ballpark notwithstanding a later trip to Wrigley Field in Chicago - its small size gives it a wonderful intimacy, like watching a baseball game in your front room. I also have a lingering afffection for the now demolished Shea Stadium in New York which despite being a "cookie cutter" had a lot more atmosphere than Veterans Stadium, mainly because the outfield wasn't enclosed by seating and you could practically wave to the pilots of planes landing at nearby La Guardia Airport.

As well as Shea Stadium, Veterans Stadium and Yankee Stadium have also been bulldozed since that 2002 trip and replaced by retro ballparks. I might have to add the US East Cost to the list of places I need to go to again.

Franchise football

I suppose it had to happen. AFC Wimbledon will play MK Dons in the next round of the FA Cup.

AFC are the club set up by fans in 2002 when Wimbledon FC moved to Milton Keynes. The boycott of what was dubbed "Franchise FC" continued until 2007 when MK Dons gave up their claim to Wimbledon's historical record, including winning the FA Cup in 1988. AFC Wimbledon also helped Manchester United fans set up FC United, a similar community-run club, after the Glazer takeover at Old Trafford in 2005.

While clubs moving cities is almost unknown here, in North America lots of NFL and Major League Baseball "franchises" have relocated thousands of miles away, in some cases more than once. Like the people who run the Premier League, the owners of US sports teams are more interested in TV viewers than the fans who go to games. You might think this means that US sports teams are less rooted in their communities but that isn't always the case. When the owner of the Cleveland Browns NFL team relocated the "franchise" to Baltimore in 1995, fans succesfully fought for a new team in the city that retained the original team's colours and historical record. And I still remember on my first trip to New York in 2002 talking to baseball fans about the bitterness in the city after the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers left for the West Coast in the late 50's. Like MK Dons, the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants should be seen as new clubs. The storied legacies of the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers - the team that broke baseball's colour bar by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 - belong not to them but to the New York Mets, the team that replaced them in the National League in 1962 and deliberately combined their colours.

Keeping score

I watched the final game of the World Series yesterday, the twelfth Fall Classic that I've seen. This year, I scored the World Series as well.

The first time I filled in a baseball scorecard was at a Phillies game in the now demolished Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia in 2002. I think we got them going through the turnstile and I made an untutored stab at completing it.

There are two reasons to score a baseball game. The main one is to keep track of at-bats, what batters did in their previous trips to the plate, who's on-deck and the pitcher's record of walks, strikeouts etc. But it's also fun. As well as being creative, using your own symbols and adding a "!" for an outstanding play, I also find jotting down the K's, L5's and 6-4-3's adds to the rhythm of watching a ballgame with its three outs in the top and bottom half of each inning.

Play ball!

The World Series between the two league champions of Major League Baseball, the Detroit Tigers of the American League and San Francisco Giants of the National League, starts later today.

This will be the twelfth World Series I’ve watched. I got into baseball through one of my mates who’s also a fan. In 2002, we travelled along the East Coast of America, watching games in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. We also spent a day at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York where I took my first and last swing in a batting cage.

I tend to support National League teams in the World Series but more importantly ones that are original members of their league and haven’t switched cities. The San Francisco Giants began as the New York Giants playing at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan before switching to the West Coast along with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1957 so that rules them out. Detroit on the other hand have played in the American League since its inception in 1901. Go Tigers!

Simplifying the playoffs

Two of the sports I follow, baseball and rugby league, are approaching postseason playoffs that will determine which teams contest the World Series and Super League Grand Final respectively.

Playoffs are nothing new in either baseball or rugby league, having been used for over a hundred years in both to determine the champion club, but each of their postseasons has become more and more complicated over the years.

For most of the twentieth century, the baseball postseason consisted of a World Series between the winners of the American and the National League. Now ten teams qualify (the three divisional winners and best two runners up, known as "wildcards", in each league). My ideal would be what existed in the 70's and 80's: two divisions in each league with a league championship series to determine who goes on to the World Series. And definitely no interleague play during the season which takes much of the shine off the postseason for me.

I'd explain the rugby league postseason but a) I'm going out in a couple of hours and b) I don't really understand it beyond the fact that the top eight teams in the Super League qualify. Elimination playoffs, qualifying playoffs, "clubcalls" (allowing teams to pick their next opponent), it's far too complicated and should be replaced with the original RFL Championship format where the first and fourth-placed teams in the league played in one semi-final and the second and third-placed teams in the other with the winners meeting in the final.

Moneyball: aesthetic or effective?

I've just finished reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, about how sabermetrics allowed the Oakland A's baseball team to compete on a limited budget. Two things in particular struck me reading it.

Firstly, that those paid to commentate on and analyse the game, whether they be journalists, managers or scouts and including lots of ex-players, know no more about how to win baseball games than fans watching from the stands or on TV. And indeed cannot know just by playing or watching the game. The only people who do know are Yale-educated computer nerds who spend their lives analysing the key baseball stats on their laptops as an alternative to working on Wall Street (and those journalists, managers, scouts and fans who read what they write).

Another, for me even more disturbing, thing is that sabermetrics emphasises getting on base and not getting out. That means no sacrifice flies or bunts - giving up an out to advance a runner or drive in a run - and no baserunning or base stealing.  As a fan of National League-style "smallball", I enjoy all those aspects of the game (sabermetrics also dismisses the need for expensive outfielders whose spectacular plays I similarly enjoy).

Lewis admits that playing baseball according to sabermetrics makes a team more effective but less aesthetically appealing. There's  a poignant scene where Oakland A's coach Ron Washington commiserates with second baseman Ray Durham about him not being allowed to express his talents for stretching a single into a double or stealing a base, recalling his own enjoyment of baserunning as a player.  I accept that the stats behind sabermetrics stack up but still think it would be a shame if baseball becomes less enjoyable to play and watch as a result.

Soccer sabermetrics?

I've just started reading the book Moneyball, having watched the Brad Pitt film based on it.

Moneyball tells the story of how Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A's baseball team, solved the problem of replacing star players on a limited budget.  His approach to finding new players is based on a method of baseball analysis called sabremetrics (named after the Society for American Baseball Research).  Unlike orthodox scouting which is based on judging players on the "five tools" of running, fielding, throwing, hitting and power, sabermetrics looks for the most important individual statistics to determine future performance.  One of the most important is on base percentage, a better indication than batting average of discipline at the plate because it includes the key sabremetric statistic of walks drawn.

All this got me thinking about whether sabermetrics could be applied to football (maybe it already is).  Baseball is obviously much more stats-driven that football but could the traditional scouting methods of the big clubs be overtaken by a more scientific approach, and if so what would the football equivalent of on base percentage be?

RIP Angelo

The boxing cornerman Angelo Dundee, who had died aged 90 in Tampa, Florida, is best known for having trained Muhammad Ali.

The first time I went to the United States was in 2002. It was a baseball trip along the East Coast from Baltimore to Boston which included a couple of days in New York for games at Yankee Stadium and the Mets' then ballpark, Shea Stadium.

After the Yankees game, we were sitting on the coach waiting to head back to Manhattan when a small, elderly guy appeared from the direction of the stadium, surrounded by a group of fans. The friend who was on the trip with me is, unlike me, a boxing fan and knows everything there is to know about the fight game. He immediately said, "It's Angelo Dundee!" I must admit I didn't know the name then but he soon filled me in on who he was.

I only caught a glimpse of Angelo that day but it evoked that New York sub-culture, best captured by famed sports journalist Jimmy Cannon, of baseball, boxing, card games, trips to the racetrack, bartenders, fedoras and Cuban cigars. I'm glad that he not only got to celebrate his 90th birthday last year but was also able to attend the 70th of his greatest protege, Muhammad Ali.

Plenty of seats at the back

Thirty six thousand people were at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester last night for the first leg of Manchester City's League Cup semi-final against Liverpool, twelve thousand short of the ground's 48,000 capacity.  Watching the game on TV, you could clearly see the thousands of empty seats.  In fact, the upper tiers of the stadium seemed not to be in use at all.  This followed last weekend's FA Cup Third Round when between them clubs playing at home recorded a 80,000 drop in attendances compared to their average League gate.

You can argue that it's just after Christmas, it was a wet and windy night in Manchester and the match was being shown live on TV.  You could also argue that the League Cup's a bit of a meaningless competition.  But even if all that's true, it's not every week that Manchester City have the chance to book a trip to a Wembley cup final. 

Ten years ago on my first trip to America, I went to my first baseball game, at Camden Yards, the much copied retro ballpark in Baltimore.  Sitting in the upper deck for the Orioles-Chicago White Sox match up, you soon realised that Friday night was student night when young people with ID could buy a ticket for $5 and once inside a beer and hot dog for the same price.  Looking around the upper deck, half the undergraduate intake of the nearby University of Baltimore seemed to have taken them up on the offer, giving a huge boost to the atmosphere of a run of the mill regular season game. The Orioles clearly understood that given they were paying staff to steward and provide catering for the game, it made more economic sense to sell tickets for the upper deck cheap than to leave them empty, especially as some of the students who came on Friday nights would become fans of the team and after graduating regular customers paying full price for their tickets.

So why couldn't Manchester City, easily the richest club in the world, have filled their ground for a cup semi-final by offering cheap or even free tickets to kids, students and other people priced out of modern football?