Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks

Sudesh said to me last Thursday at the Comics Mart, "You're so American."

I guess that's true. I grew up on American as well as British pop culture, and despite having lived three years in England, loving Shakespeare and London, and supporting English football, my regular trips to the United States, the number of people I know and love in the U.S. and the way I keep bitching about U.S. politics and stuff - not to mention my love affair recently with the Civil War and the South - it's safe to say I do have a jones for America. And it's really no secret I am really, really looking forward to spend an extended time in a country I've grown to adore next year.

The latest manifestation of my fetish is now a desire to learn about baseball. I picked up Ken Burns' 9-part documentary history on the game, and after going through nearly a century of baseball history, I'm beginning to understand the appeal the game has for Americans. It's an incredibly intellectual game, with many subtleties, and literally anything can happen from moment to moment. It's the duel between batter and pitcher, the precision with which the pitcher throws the ball, the decision to swing, or not to, the judgment of the runner whether to attempt to steal the next base, the numbers being crunched in the head of spectators and players to try to predict the probable outcomes. Emotionally, of course, English football fans and American baseball fans, if they knew of each others' histories, can equally relate. Team loyalty, team history, classic moments, the passing of the torch through generations, the near losses, the heartbreak of that stupid last-minute fumble, all that I'm familiar with. So I'm going into the game more with an appreciation for the mechanics and for its history and how it's been intertwined with American culture over the decades.

I haven't decided whether I'm going to support a baseball team yet, but I'm kind of warming towards the Boston Red Sox. They're the kind of almost-champions, stumbling at that last hurdle, that remind me of my own beloved Arsenal FC. Except that while the poor Red Sox haven't won a World's Series since 1919 (when they traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, which some say has jinxed the team since then) Arsenal at least wins once in a while.

The Red Sox are playing the Toronto Blue Jays today at the Sky Dome at 1:05 EDT. Might stay up to watch the results come in over the ESPN web site.

In case anybody was interested...

So, I've followed my first baseball game, albeit over the Internet. The Boston Red Sox lost to the Toronto Blue Jays, 6 runs to 5 in the final game of a series. Blue Jays third baseman Eric Hinske broke the 3-3 tie in the 7th inning with a home run to right field off Tim Wakefield and cinched it with a final home run to the right off relief pitcher Urgeth Urbina at the bottom of the ninth, despite the Sox tying again at the top of that inning with two runs thanks to Trot Nixon's homer .

While I'm disappointed the Sox didn't win, it was quite cool to be able to actually follow a game's play-by-play and understand more than half of what was going on, and the suspense was actually quite palpable at times. It's an experience I wouldn't mind repeating again.