Cricket and its long-lost rogue cousin, baseball, enjoyed an emotional reunion over the weekend. Jimmy Anderson pitched in front of a crowd almost twice as big as any he has bowled in front of in England, and in all more than 100,000 people attended a two-game series between the Chicago Cubs and St Louis Cardinals at the London Stadium, constituting a mere 0.08% of the Major League Baseball regular season. Indian Premier League franchise owners no doubt cast envious eyes at baseball, dreaming of a 2,430-game regular season. Cricketers may be tempted by $350m (£275m) 12-year contracts.
The weekend offered everything sports watchers in Britain have come to expect from visiting American major-league events a large crowd with considerable enthusiasm for the sport, but understandably limited emotional investment in the result, an armageddon's-worth of cholesterol and a stadium announcer with the kind of deeply sonorous and unquenchably American voice that could imbue a village-fete cake competition with a sense of fundamental sporting gravity.
From my admittedly unscientific research, sitting high in the stands over the left-field wall, the crowd seemed to consist of a good-natured cocktail of American tourists, baseball-curious sports fans and British baseball enthusiasts, many of them a legacy of the days when MLB action occupied the late-night hours of the Channel 5 schedule, hosted by Jonny Gould, a much-loved production which achieved a rare televisual blend of insight, expertise, humour and enthusiasm.
They saw a dominant Chicago victory on Saturday, the Cubs establishing a seven-run lead by the end of the fourth of nine innings, driven by two soaring Ian Happ home runs (it is, admittedly, difficult for a home run to do anything other than soar), and a difficult outing for the veteran Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright. The flicker of a St Louis revival came to nothing.
Denne historien er fra June 26, 2023-utgaven av The Guardian.
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