I am an American, Kentucky-born. (Yes, those words are, ahem, borrowed from the first sentence of Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” one of the great American novels.) I grew up following the sports Americans follow, and since 1978 I’ve tracked them as a vocation. October 2014 finds me not in America but across the pond, and I’m struck that I’ve spent four days in Blighty without hearing two essential American words.
World Series.
On several occasions, I’ve mentioned those two words to see what the response would be. It has ranged from arch — “You mean the world championship that involves teams from one country?” said Owen Waddingham, our erudite bus driver to the Falcons’ camp — to utter dismissal.
The restaurant/bar downstairs in our hotel is the place to go if you want to watch the rest of the world’s brand of football. The barkeep bangs a bell whenever an English side scores a goal in the UEFA Champions League — which is much closer to a true “World Series” — and, for the next three minutes, all ales are a pound. (This became quite festive funny when Chelsea put three past Maribor in 31 minutes Tuesday night. “I love this place!” shouted one punter. It was less salubrious the next night, when Liverpool failed to score against Real Madrid.)
On Wednesday, I asked a waiter if the bell would be similarly sounded if the Royals or Giants scored a run. He looked at me as if I were a crazy American. “Sometimes we get asked to put on the baseball,” he said. “I tell them, ‘We are football.’”
I’ve been reading three London papers a day, and I’ve not found one article regarding the World Series. The Brit papers, tabloids and broadsheets alike, are almost all football, and not the American kind. I’ve yet to see anything about Falcons-Lions at Wembley in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph or the Times, though local scribes have attended the teams’ media sessions. (The Telegraph’s website did — British-ism upcoming — have a larf about Falcons.com’s graphic relocation of London to Spain.)
As for the World Series, I found one reference: In the Guardian’s agate section, giving the score of Game 2.
Yes, the time difference is pronounced. A World Series game starts at 1 a.m. here, and I was asleep when Game 1 commenced. I listened to a good bit of Game 2 not because of any great dedication, but because — another Brit-ism — I was sick as a parrot and couldn’t sleep.
I realize that, even in the States, the World Series isn’t nearly what it was in those days we’d sneak transistor radios into school to listen. Baseball has reached something of a disconnect: TV ratings for local teams remain solid, but relatively few folks watch the postseason.
Still, it has taken a trip to the U.K. for me to realize how low a profile baseball has come to occupy. (Maybe if I were in Japan I’d feel differently; they like baseball over there.) It’s no longer our national pastime — the NFL is exponentially bigger — and its championship is a World Series in name only.
Back to Mr. Waddingham’s almost-spot-on observation: There’s one Canadian MLB team, and the Toronto Blue Jays actually won the World Series twice, though in the first of those we Atlantans came across as unworldly. Before Game 2 in 1992, a color guard flew the Canadian maple leaf upside down.
Don’t get me wrong. I like baseball, for all its warts, a lot. I follow the playoffs, mostly via the MLB At-Bat app. But our World Series doesn’t even register in this Old World land. The only Londoner I found who had even the foggiest notion that it was ongoing was the cab driver who carted me from Waterloo Station past Big Ben, Parliament, Whitehall and Buckingham Palace.
“One of the teams that’s in it hasn’t been there for a while,” he said. “Is that right?”
Yes. Kansas City. First Series appearance since 1985. Over here, though, they care more about a different set of Royals. In the past three days, Kate Middleton has been featured on the front page of the Telegraph twice — for no reason I could ascertain other than that she’s pretty and stylish and the Duchess of Cambridge.
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