Why this 15 year old kid still loves baseball
But PlayStation football leaves the grown up in me cold. And why does everything need to be VAR “perfect”?
But PlayStation football leaves the grown up in me cold. And why does everything need to be VAR “perfect”?
Now let’s start where we mean to go on and relax, please, this will not be a historical, statistics driven history of the “National Pastime” of the United States of America or the “Beautiful Game” as association football is commonly referred to around the world. It would be a 90/10 split in favour of football if it was but that’s only because I don’t watch baseball for the statistics or the history. It’s because there’s something enduringly special about watching baseball from Fenway Park or Dodger Stadium at 3am on a dark English morning with the lights off. Oodles of strong tea and the odd biscuit will help, but not always conquer, the infernal and faintly ridiculous battles against sleep, but at 5am, maybe 6 if it’s gone to extra innings or even just after 7am if both teams have run out of pitchers and in the 19th inning you have fans lining up with their best “heater” ready to go. But when sleep comes for me I care not a jot about the history made or the statistics chalked up, I care not for the game of statistics, but I love America’s “National Pastime”.
I used to be a statistics driven, history quoting football fan and I’m not disparaging those who are as I know exactly how exciting it is to quote how many Charity Shields your team has won, who captained the last Championship winning side and how much your team paid to sign a Scottish King who swapped green and white hoops for a mighty Red. It’s just “PlayStation” football, with it’s religion of statistics and history, match ups and rivalries that go by in a betting industry blur of advertisements leaves me a little cold. It’s too bloody correct isn’t it?! Isn’t it? More statistics, more lines on a screen, more daydreaming returns to a mathematics class most of us are glad we never have to experience ever, ever again. We currently need a slide rule, a compass and a shot of tequila before we know, correctly, bloody correctly, whether the striker’s 25 yard thunderbolt is going to count as a goal as he might have been offside in the build up to this wonderous footballing bullet into the top corner. And then the poor beleaguered sod, who used to dress in black but now dresses in a multitude of colours and is “miked for sound” to his colleagues in a different county hundreds of miles away troops off to the side of the pitch to watch the game he’s watching with his very own eyes, right in front of him, on a bloody television! And this vapid and vacuous enterprise to produce a “correct” game, a spectacle, a “show”, still manages to, on occasion, with all the energy sapping waste of time and atmosphere destroying suck of the footballing soul, still get this “correct” game, incorrect.
I’m a somewhat grumpy old romantic. Football is a spectacle, but an organic one, spontaneous, unpredictable, frustrating, heart bursting, dream making spectacle. Not this sterile, stop start, VAR intruding return to a maths class as adverts beg you *not* to bet. Well, “responsibly” anyway. Football is theatre, art, instantaneous, but now we know how many goals Mo Salah has scored but not counted as although he actually did score, you know, in the real world, we have to go into the Matrix for confirmation of this before it actually counts, as a goal, the goal we’ve just all seen this Egyptian magician weave into the bag of wind you’ve just seen hitting the onion bag. And recently, Salah has scored, in back to back league games, goals that would defy Neo in the Matrix and far superior to any illusion a gifted magician could produce. Mo has scored goals recently whereby he’s sent opposing defenders into different postcodes and playing faintly ridiculous, eye disbelieving football from the Gods and some wag, some ne'er-do-well old curmudgeon like me, may even deign to call it “Playstation” football. Football today, as a sporting physical and history making product is sublime and the best there has ever been, but why do we have to avoid having a cheeky bet at half-time and being bombarded with reasons why the big name striker can’t score. And why is that referee watching the bloody television? And why is another referee watching the same game on another bloody television? And why does the “beautiful game” have to be so sanitised and “correct”?
Now, I’m not going to insult your intelligence dear reader and suggest that “America’s Pastime” is any better or any less statistically sanitised. It’s far, far, far worse and in fact one could argue that football has simply imported its statistical modus operandi. Baseball is swamped in statistics, from RBI’s to RISP’s, slugging percentages and OBP’s and they love a good television replay! The speedy shortstop has tapped a soft liner down the third base line and beats out the throw from third base by the width of a cigarette paper. Or has he? Instant slow motion replays from all sorts of impossible angles show that yes he did in fact beat out the throw and it’s bases loaded in the top of the 4th with 2 out, the score still 0–0 yet both sides have had 6 RISPS but failed to score and the pitcher is already over his season average of pitches and can’t locate his curveball which is fully explained by a team of beautifully excitable colour commentators. It’s the same in (American) Football. I’m a Washington Redskins fan, now called the Washington Football Team and still as underperforming and dreadful as they’ve always been. A burly running back breaks into the “hole” created by his offensive line and breaks the plane of the goal line and it’s a touchdown and within seconds it’s replayed, broken down by a commentator with a magical televisual pencil as he scribbles all over the screen and when he’s finished defacing your television screen up pops an innumerable amount of statistics, conversion rates, percentages and mathematical analysis.
I grew up a fan of the football team from Washington simply because I picked them at random (kind of) when the UK started broadcasting the great game in 1982 but I don’t really have any memory earlier than the 1984 Super Bowl when my adopted team were trounced by the Los Angeles Raiders in the game’s showpiece event. But like the introduction of live “Sunday Night Baseball” on Channel 5 in 1997 I was an instant fan. Both games at first would befuddle me, statistics (again) and the constant intrusion of the adverts and a “word from our sponsors”, but it was live sport from the other side of the world (in 1984 that was a rare event as the UK had the sum total of 4 television channels) and, perhaps more importantly, it was late at night, often running long into the following morning. It was cold outside, a gloaming, foreboding dark outside too, and the 15 year old in me still delights in the slightly illicit nature and rebellious feel this still evokes in me. Nobody in the rest of the entire UK is watching the LA Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants slug out a stupendous 5th game of a 7 game series that would decide the winners of “The Show”. No-one! 4am, bottom of the 5th, the score tied at 3–3 and there’s a mound visit from an old man who will calm down his “Ace” and reassure him that although his change up is being registered at 79mph rather than his usual 82mph, there’s three left handed batters coming up and his percentages against “lefties” are off the chart. Relax. You got this “Ace”.
Cricket was my second sporting love as a consequence of my dear old Mum loving nothing more than watching Test Match cricket all day when it was still shown on terrestrial, free to air television and a Dad who adored Sussex County Cricket Club and Imran Khan in particular. Imran Khan was to dash my own dreams when in 1992 he turned the Cricket World Cup on it’s head to defeat England in the Final, but we don’t have time here for such things as broken dreams. It’s statistics we’re after, and as England only made the Final that year because of statistics and an unfathomable foul weather rule, perhaps we should be avoiding those statistics and the analysis that intrudes (yes, that word again) on our beautiful game(s).
Let’s stick to nostalgia.
Football was my first love, Kenny Dalglish, a mythical place called “Anfield” and how many times they’d won the European Cup (none of your “Champions League” balderdash please, it’s the European Cup) and how much Bob Paisley paid Chester City for a lanky striker who could barely score in his first season. The statistics must have been dreadful! Whatever happened to him? I was a more accomplished cricketer who had a trial for his county when at Under 18 level, a claim to fame I cling to like a piece of driftwood in a raging storm. I played county standard youth football for two years and was just about out of my footballing depth. I was ok but not county standard. But cricket, like (American) football and baseball comes alive late at night and raises the furtive, the secretive and the rebellious in me. Watching cricket on the television from Old Trafford, The Oval, Lords or even the old County Ground in Southampton is a beautiful thing if time affords you such a luxury. But watching England struggle on a “bunsen burner” in Sri Lanka at 3am when the rest of the country is fast asleep is a rather magical thing, at least to this weirdo anyway. Who in their right mind doesn’t want to stay up all night watching a dreadful England team getting their arse handed to them by the Australians in 1999? Night after Christmas, and New Year, night. And at 3–0 down still watching night after night as they enter the 5th and final Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground and Darren Gough, at roughly 7/7.30am, and after a long night of Test Match cricket takes a thunderous, record breaking hat-trick? Lunatics I tells ya. Don’t listen to a word they say! 30 minutes later I was telephoning work faking sickness and dragging myself to bed because Matthew, a lifelong friend would be finishing his own particular work early in the afternoon and was coming round to hand me my own arse as he schooled me yet again on how to play “Tomb Raider” on the PlayStation and who needs work, statistics, credits and debits, spreadsheets, pie charts and percentages when Darren Gough has just taken a hat-trick against the Aussies? And I needed the sleep. There was another day of Test Match cricket to prepare for, and it was starting again around Midnight.
So who needs statistics and correctly sanitised decisions when there are human stories to tell? Of a kid who adored a slugger for the Oakland A’s but who would adopt a “closer” for the Los Angeles Dodgers and become a devoted fan for life. Of a young man who stays awake all night watching cricket and England failing to force a result in a far away clime and, at 6am or probably later, passing his beautiful “older lady” on the stairs of their home as he retreats to bed whilst she gives him the thousand yard death stare for being so childishly silly. Or a man who I admired from afar for his resemblance to my Dad (bow tie, rebellious manner and purveyor of winks to whom he liked and admired) and who, on becoming my Boss, secretly told me he’d starting watching baseball too, and all because of a “Big Unit”, a big brute of a pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks who got angrier the hotter his fastball became. Or of “Brother Andy”, who’s not my brother but an in joke we both enjoy and keep to ourselves, and the fact he’s both the most devout of Liverpudlian Red and a sporting kindred spirit of sorts who reminds me of my younger self.
From these human stories we get Jose Canseco, Randy Johnson and Mookie Betts, though Mookie has recently become a Los Angeles Dodgers legend already and I no longer know who “Brother Andy” now calls his favourite baseball player. But all three players are linked by human stories and statistics. Infernal statistics. And correct decisions. And as Mookie Betts is the only current active player of the three favourite players, is alone in being subjected to the “correct” decisions a modern game foists upon it. As I’ve long since bored Andy to despair with, there will come a time when football will adopt the “challenge flag” of (American) football and yet another stoppage, yet another television replay, and yet more statistics will be thrust upon us as we await the interminable wait for a “correct” decision to be decided and that our eyes cannot be trusted with the instantaneous, balletic, poetic, theatre that football once was.
I became a Liverpool Red because my dear old cricket loving Mum was a Manchester United fan. Quite the paradox eh? And please don’t start with rivalries and bitterness stretching down the East Lancs Road between the two cities. I’m bathed in it thanks. I know the history. I know the statistics. I just don’t care for them anymore, the statistics or the rivalry. My dear old Mum worshipped at the altar of a David Beckham cross, a Cristiano Ronaldo header and a Bryan Robson or Roy Keane crunching challenge but she, quite correctly, steered me in the direction of a King, a quiet old man who rather liked collecting pieces of silverware and a Mecca of mythic proportions 256 miles away. I’ve been lucky to attend 2 FA Cup Finals, 4 League Cup Finals, 4 Charity Shields, 1 UEFA Cup Final, attended over 55 English league grounds and 7 European footballing theatres following the Reds of Liverpool. I’ve done my time supporting the Reds and I’ve got the dreaded statistics to prove it. The Liverpool team of Jurgen Klopp has taken those dreaded statistics and blown them out of the water in all directions and play fantasy football that at times eclipses that of any gamer who specialises in Playstation football. High pressing. High intensity. Heavy Metal football devised by a lovable German who’s becoming more and more Scouse as the hours tick by in his glorious Managerial reign. The team I adore has the best goalkeeper in the world with the best centre back in the world in front of him and a Captain in front of him who when not playing, Liverpool don’t play. And those dreaded statistics bear out this very fact as well as the evidence before your very eyes. And up front, where the Mighty Reds once had the dynamic duos of John Toshack and Kevin Keegan, Ian Rush and Kenny Dalglish, Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres, they now have a trio of the world’s best strikers who when they weave their magic, it’s PlayStation football on steroids, with a dash of acid and a whole host of footballing dreams coming true. So why does this footballing delight leave me so lukewarm and borderline cold?
Because in years to come, in addition to those infernal statistics will also be applied an Asterix. Mo Salah (may his God bless him) has just scored his 100th league goal for Liverpool and may him and his God protect him and guide him to another 100 in the Mighty Red shirt of Liverpool. But there will also be an Asterix somewhere saying he also had X or Y numbers of goals chalked off because a man in a studio watching a bloody television hundreds of miles away confirms a “correct” decision was made, and that his bountiful locks of curly hair were indeed offside and in front of the last defender when he scored yet another glorious goal and so, strictly speaking, and to give the beautiful game an air of stultifying rightness and to be “correct”, another piece of theatrical, instantaneous beauty is no more. Consigned to the memory hole. It never happened. So stop celebrating like a lunatic looking for an asylum. It’s been deleted. Because a man watching on a television said so. The introduction of VAR (Video Assistant Referee) killed a huge amount of my interest in football as, well, it’s not football. It’s coloured lines on a screen, pin point decisions, a crowd who’s joy has been sucked into a quiet whisper as we all wait 2/3/4 minutes for that bloody man to finish watching that bloody television of his. I was at Anfield in 1994 (2nd Row, Lower Anfield Road End) when Robbie Fowler AKA “God” scored a hat-trick in just over 4 minutes against a hapless Arsenal. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, a VAR decision borders this length of time, or it certainly feels like it. It’s not football. Referees going to the side of the pitch to watch a television or advised in his ear by his mate watching television that he might want to send off the brute of a centre back who’s just fouled the elusively quick star striker. And it’s not football not celebrating a goal for fear of a man and a television and some wizards with some slide rules and colourful lines on a screen “deleting” it. It’s “PlayStation Football” and I’m rubbish on the PlayStation. Just ask my mate Matthew.
I still love football, just nowhere near as much as I did with the original “King” and his “big bum” backed into defenders before laying off a perfect pass to Ian Rush to run onto and score yet another record breaking goal. The King is now Egyptian and he plays football sent from the Gods. I just wish it wasn’t spoiled by fun killing bureaucrats drawing lines over a perfectly good piece of theatre, but alas, it’s here to stay and, as “Brother Andy” will attest, in the years to come Manager’s will have “challenge flags” to throw on the pitch to challenge a referee’s decision and then we’ll really all be in the footballing madhouse. So it’s late night baseball for me, Fenway Park or Dodger Stadium, with memories of Jose Canseco crashing home runs for the Oakland A’s in the late 1980’s and Eric Gagne “closing out” wins for the Los Angeles Dodgers. In my mind’s eye, Canseco scored 1,000 Home Runs and Eric Gagne never failed to “close out” a famous win for my LA Dodgers. I could look up the statistics, but I couldn’t care less. I’m in love with Justin Turner now (and *THAT* beard) and a beard I couldn’t grow if you cast me away on a desert island with only Tom Hanks and a volleyball named “Wilson” for company. Mo Salah and Justin Turner play their respective sports like gentlemen and from a different plane of existence sometimes and when they’re not interfered with by The Matrix of an electronic pursuit of being “perfect” and “correct”, it still excites me greatly.
Watching baseball (or the cricketing Ashes from Australia) in the dead of night in the pitch dark with only a hot brew and some biscuits for company is my bag now, and has been since the days of watching Channel 5 and their first broadcasting of “Sunday Night Baseball” to the UK in 1997. Then it was Canseco, then Gagne and a host of players and those damned statistics all the way through to the present, and now Justin Turner and Clayton Kershaw. It’s the memories of watching baseball as a 15 year old on the television in my bedroom or when that didn’t work (and that was often), the small portable TV in the kitchen. To say my dear old Mum was bemused to see me peering into that small screen at 5am on a Monday morning is an understatement of epic proportions. So tonight, as it was last night, it’s lights out and Fenway Park, Boston for me, after the small matter of a must win game for my LA Dodgers against the Atlanta Braves at Dodger Stadium.
“Take, me out to the ball game. Take me out with the crowd……”
Football, like baseball is full of statistics but statistics doth not make a story. If you glanced at my work CV you’d see somewhat of a specialist (of sorts) in figures, statistics, percentages and someone who, if pushed, could rustle up a mean spreadsheet. But that hasn’t been fun for a long time. Us mere mortals create human stories. No statistics needed. My old Boss texted me a few weeks ago asking me to confirm who the big, angry oaf was he fell in love with watching baseball and we reminisced on favourite players and our mutual British love of an American pastime. “Brother Andy” has gotten over Mookie Betts’ defection to the LA Dodgers but he still loves his “Betts 50” Red Sox shirt. As do I, and my Eric Gagne “38” shirt. It’s been with me for over 20 years and has seen more than its fair share of late night drama and bewildered walks to bed at 6am after a last inning defeat. I could give you the statistics for all these late night baseball games and the flagons of tea I’ve drunk over the years in a vain attempt to stay awake.
But who needs statistics, slide rules, VAR and television replays when there’s a human story to be told? That’s far more interesting.
