This is an exerpt from Bill Bryson's book, "I'm A Stranger Here Myself". Enjoy.
People often ask me, "What is the difference between baseball and cricket?"
The answer is simple. Both are games of great skill involving balls and bats but with this crucial difference: Baseball is exciting, and when you go home at the end of the day, you know who won.
I'm joking, of course. Cricket is a wonderful sport, full of deliciously scattered micromoments of real action. If a doctor ever instructs me to take a complete rest and not get overexcited, I shall become a fan at once. In the meantime, my heart belongs to baseball.
It's what I grew up with, what I played as a boy, and that of course is vital to any meaningful appreciation of a sport. I had this brought home to me many years ago in England when I went out on a soccer ground with a couple of British friends to knock a ball around.
I had watched soccer on television and thought I had a fair idea if what was required, so when one of them lofted a ball in my direction, I decided to flick it casually into the net with my head, the way I had seen Kevin Keegan do it on TV. I thought that it would be like heading a beachball-that there would be a gentle, airy ponk sound and that the ball would lightly leave my brow and drift in a pleasing arc into the net. But of course it was like heading a bowling ball. I have never felt anything so startling not like I expected it to feel. I walked around for four hours on wobbly legs with a big red circle and the word "MITRE" imprinted on my forehead and vowed never again to do anything so foolish and painful.
I bring this up because the world Series has just started, and I want you to know why I am very excited about it. The World Series, I should perhaps explain, is the annual baseball contest between the champion of the American League and the champion of the National League.
Actually, that's not quite true because they changed the system some years ago. The trouble with the old way of doing things was that it only involved two teams. Now, you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work out that if you could somehow contrive to include more teams there would be a lot more money in the thing.
So each league divided itself into three divisions of five teams each. So now the World Series is not a contest between the two best teams in baseball-at lease not necessarily-but rather between the winners if a series of playoff games involving the Western, Eastern, and Central divisional champions of each league, plus (and this was particularly inspired, I think) a pair of "wild card" teams that didn't win anything at all.
It is all immensely complicated, but essentially it means that practically every team in baseball except the Chicago Cubs gets a chance to go to the World Series.
The Chicago Cubs don't get to go because they never manage to qualify even under a system as magnificently accomodating as this. Often the almost qualify, and sometimes they are in such a commanding position that you cannot believe they won't qualify, but always in the end they doggedly manage to come up short. Whatever it takes-losing seventeen games in a row, letting easy balls go through their legs, crashing comically into each other in the outfield-you can be certain the Cubs will manage it.
They have been doing this, reliably and efficiently, for over half a century. They haven't been in a World Series since 1945. Stalin had good years more recently than that. This heartwarming annual failure by the Cubs is almost the only thing in baseball that hasn't changed in my lifetime, and I appreciate that very much.
It's not easy being a baseball fan because baseball fans are a hopelessly sentimental bunch, and there is no room for sentiment in something as wildly lucrative as an American sport. For anyone outside America, one of the most remarkable aspects of American sports is how casually franchises abandon their loyal fans and move to a new city. In English soccer, it would be unthinkable for, say, Manchester United to move to London or Everton, to find a new home in Portsmouth, or any one to go anywhere really, but here that sort of thing happens all the time, sometimes more than once. The Braves began life in Boston, then moved to Milwaukee, then moved to Atlanta. The A's started in Philadelphia, then switched to Kansas City, then pushed on to Oakland.
Meanwhile, the Major Leagues have repeatedly expanded to where they have reached the point where it is deucedly hard, for me at any rate, to keep track of it all. Of the thirty teams in Major League baseball, just eleven are where they were when I was a kid. There are teams out there now that I know nothing about. Without looking at the standings, I couldn't tell you whethere the Arizona Diamonbacks are in the National League or the American League. That's a terrifying confession for someone who loves the game.
Even when teams stay put, the don't actually stay put. I mean by this that they are constantly tearing down old stadiums to build new ones. Call me eccentric, call me fastidious, but I truly believe that baseball should only be watched in an old stadium. It used to be that every big American city had a venerable ballpark. Generally these were dank and creaky, but they had character. You would get splinters from the seats, the soles of your shoes would congeal to the floor from all the years of sticky stuff that had been spilled during exciting moments, and your view would inevitably be obscured by a cast-iron column supporting the roof. But that was all part of the glory.
Only four of these old parks are left, and two of them-Yankee Stadium in New York and Fenway Park in Boston-are under threat. I won't say that Fenway's relative nearness was the decisive consideration in our settling in New hampshire, but it was certainly a factor. Now the owners want to tear it down and build a new stadium.
In fairness it must be said that the new ballparks of the 1990's, as opposed to the multipurpose arenas built in the previous thirty years, do strive to keep the character and intimacy of the old ballparks-sometimes even improve on them-but they have one inescapable, irremediable flaw. They are new. They have no history, no connection with a glorious and continuous past. No matter how scrupulous a new Fenway they build, it won't be the place where Ted Williams batted. It won't make your feet stick. It won't echo in the same way. It won't smell funny. It won't be Fenway.
I keep saying that I won't go to the new park when they finally raze Fenway, but I know I'm lying because I am hopelessly addicted to the game. All of which increases my almost boundless respect and admiration for the hapless Chicago Cubs. To their credit, the Cubs have never threatened to leave Chicago, and continue to play at Wrigley Field. They even still play mostly day games-the way God intended baseball to be played. A day game at Wrigley Field is one of the great American experiences.
And here's the problem. Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.
You see what I mean that it is not easy being a baseball fan?
