On Friday I did something that could be considered rather unusual for me – I went to a baseball game.
To be precise, it was a Seattle Mariners game. I didn\’t buy the tickets myself – a colleague at work had bought tickets for whoever in our department wanted to go, and I figured that it was about time I went to one of these games, if only with out of scientific interest. Hence, I did.
Pretty much everything I learned about baseball, I learned in those three hours sitting up in the stands behind home base, and my colleagues Chris and Ted were very accommodating in that regard. The game is certainly paced faster than one-day cricket (what isn\’t?) although I suspect it\’s just about as fast-paced as the Twenty20 variety.
I suppose it was rather enlightening. I\’m not usually one to get caught up in the moment (unless aforementioned moment was something I was involved in), so I felt a little awkward with all the cheering around me. The Mariners aren\’t exactly known for their excellent game, but it looked like most Seattleites love them anyway.
It was also rather amusing to see the nonsense the stadium would put up on the big screen between innings – for some reason this got a big rise out of the crowd, even though it was nothing but a pre-rendered 3-D animation of a bunch of boats racing (the objective ostensibly to get the crowd to cheer one of them on). I had my DS with me, so I was putting some quality time into Metal Slug 7 between innings instead. More on that in another post, I suppose 😛
I\’ve never been particularly inclined towards being a sports fan – part of it is probably that being the fatass that I am, I\’ve never actually taken part in any sports. That doesn\’t stop a lot of people from supporting their favourite teams, though, so I\’m not quite sure why I don\’t gravitate in that direction. I can appreciate the depth and strategy inherent in these sports, as well as the skill required to play them, but for some reason the notion of being a spectator doesn\’t interest me that much. I guess I don\’t really have the mindset for it.
Oh, and in case you\’re wondering what the title of this post is about, one of the inter-innings things they put up on the screen was a series of short interviews with Mariners players about which of their teammates they thought worthy of an Olympic medal. Then Ichiro Suzuki came on the screen and said, pointing at himself, \”This guy? ANYTHING!\” This was followed by a montage of Ichiro\’s head photoshopped onto pictures of various Olympic atheletes. For some reason I found this hilarious.
Awesome! SS is slowly becoming an American… From my experience, I think in order to become a fan, you just need a specific player to watch and get to know the team players and history. :3
I went to my very first soccer game last july and I was part of the cheer section. Futbol fans are really something! I picked Beckham to watch… and the energy around me was so high and contagious I just had to throw myself into the craziness and participate in the random chants about the ref being a bastard.