Baseball

I see great things in baseball. It's our game – the American game. - Walt Whitman

It's baseball season! I don't ever remember not knowing about baseball. My Dad, who seldom ventured into the big city of Boston from our home 50 miles away, took me to see the Boston Red Sox play at Fenway Park at least once every year. Dad was a busy, hard-working blue-collar guy who still managed to get house chores done. No matter what needed to be done, however, when the Boston Red Sox played a televised game, he'd grab a beer and sit and watch it. Mom would join him. She loved the Red Sox, too. At 86, she still does.

It's a pretty easy game. A guy from one team pitches a ball to a guy on the other team who's holding a bat. The batter tries to hit the ball. He's got three chances, with some accommodation for foul balls and such. If he's successful, he runs and touches as many bases as he can (up to four), while the other team tries to catch the ball and touch him or the base before he gets there. If he's unsuccessful, he strikes out. Or if the pitcher doesn't throw strikes or hits the batter … hmm ... it's really sounding a bit more complicated than I imagined. We took a South African friend to a game once and tried explaining the rules as the game progressed. He gave up after awhile in frustration.

Some think it's a boring game. Nine innings can seem interminable sitting in the stands if you don't like the game or understand it. According to Ray Fitzgerald in the Boston Globe, a critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours. According to others, however, baseball is life.

Baseball has its own terminology. Bunts, stolen bases, designated hitters, curve balls, screwballs and knuckle balls, the bullpen and the 7th inning stretch. It's also got lots of colloquial expressions associated with it like the Bronx cheer, deuces and dingers. It's even got its own song and you'd be hard pressed to find a kid in America that doesn't know “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”. There are lots of movies about baseball. My favorites are “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams”, but that may have something to do with Kevin Costner. I remember making a family pilgrimage to Cooperstown, New York in the early 1960's to visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It was quite the trip.

Abner Doubleday is credited with the invention of the game. The earliest known mention of baseball in the United States was a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts ordinance banning the playing of the game within 80 yards (73m) of the town meeting house. Nowadays, from April through September, 30 teams including one from Canada, play 162 games culminating in the World Series. In the summertime, it's truly the American pasttime.

I did a little research about baseball, mostly because I really like trivia. I learned things like

• The average life of a baseball in the major leagues is 6 pitches.
• Rawlings Sporting Goods produces 20,000 baseballs for the professional major leagues per year in their Costa Rica plant. Minor league balls are produced in China.
• Each ball must weigh between 5 to 5.25 ounces, is covered in cowhide (used to be horsehide, but that's hard to come by these days) and must be handsewn with 108 stitches.

• Before every game the umpires rub down each ball with river-bottom mud obtained from a tributary of the Delaware River in New Jersey. Really! I didn't believe this one, but sure enough Lena Blackburn's Baseball Rubbing Mud is still in use.

Not familiar with baseball? From another country or planet? Try watching Abbott and Costello's “Who's on First” for a better explanation.

You've Been Flocked

 

Remember TP'ing when you were a kid? It's probably still done. Trees and bushes were wrapped and draped in toilet paper. It rains and the toilet paper gets soggy and makes a mess which is not easily cleaned up. It wasn't a nice look, nor was it particularly neighborly. Well, I noticed something different the other day and of course, Lin had to explain to me what it was.

“You've been flocked” read the big sign on someone's lawn. I read it twice to make sure I was reading the correct “F” word. Plastic, vibrantly pink flamingos, a rather large flock of them, graced someone's front lawn. Tacky as they are, I'm told it's kind of a compliment to the folks who have been flocked.

I thought it was kind of cute.

Then, being budget-minded, I found an ad for pink flamingos on sale: $5 apiece and there must have been 20 of them on the lawn I saw. Assuming, of course, they bought the birds on sale, does that mean someone, or a flock of someones, spent $100 to do this tacky deed? Perhaps, they recoup them after awhile and reuse them on someone else's lawn? Perhaps it's a progressive flocking, where the flockee collects the flamingos, adds a few more and becomes the flocker somewhere else. Obviously, they've got a bigger budget than we do. Now, would you enter that budget expense under “entertainment” or “gifts”? Just wondering.

Aussie-isms

Like Americans, Aussies have their own expressions and local vernacular to which we've slowly grown accustomed. Some expressions are pretty common and others we hear less often, but at least now we have some Aussie friends to ask when we hear something we don't understand. Early on, it was pretty comical. We have an Australian-American dictionary aboard...really! It helps and it's fun to read, but when you couple the accent with the different expressions, you can really get mixed up. Here's an example of a conversation David had with a local fellow in a Bundaberg fishing tackle shop shortly after we arrived in Australia. David was asking specifically about fishing rules and regulations.

Tom: If you're fishing mundi, you gotta throw 'em back.

David: If you're fishing Monday, you gotta throw back what you caught?

Tom: Yup

David: That's a strange rule. Why do you have to do that?

Tom: Ever since the flood, there haven't been as many of them.

David: Mondays???

Tom: Yup

Translation of what Tom said: If you're fishing for mundi (that's slang for barrimundi, a type of local fish), you have to catch and release. It took awhile to figure this one out.

I had a similar experience when someone asked me if I'd ever seen a goanna.

Marcie: An iguana? Oh, sure, we've seen lots of them. In Ecuador and the Galapagos..., blah, blah, blah.” I droned on and on about about our iguana encounters.

Jim: No, goanna.

Marcie: That's what I said, iguanas. We've seen lots of them.

Jim: No, goanna. I said goanna.

Finally...a light went on.

Marcie: Are goannas and iguanas different?

Jim: I guess so, I've never seen an iguana.

You can see how this can get very complicated, very quickly.

We had local friends on the boat for dinner the other night and Wendy was talking about a frustrating time she'd just had with something. “I nearly spit the dummy”, she said. Hold on a minute...”spit the dummy”? She laughed as she explained that “dummy” is the Aussie word for a baby's pacifier and the expression “spit the dummy” means to become enraged expressing your frustration. New one on us.

We'd certainly heard “fair dinkum” in the past, but weren't exactly sure what it meant until John explained it meant fair, honest or believable. And then, of course, we all know “you'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me”. I was sure this was about dancing with your best girl, Mattie. Mongo wrongo! It's about being a vagabond, an itinerant out on the road (a swagman) and what happens if you steal someone's sheep.

Aussies have a penchant for shortening words. Breakfast is brekkie and afternoon is arvo. Tasmania is Tassie and Brisbane is Brissie. Registration is shortened to rego (redge-o) and a mozzie is a mosquito. Sometimes we need a translation, but usually we can figure it out from the context.

Then there's “strine”. It's what happens when Australian is spoken fast and slurred so that one word blends into the next OR it's what you get when you say “australian” with a broad, but clipped Australian accent. The accent almost overtakes the language. They say if you've listened to Steve Irwin, “the Crocodile Hunter”, speak, you've had a taste of strine. Here's some info copped from Wikipedia.

“It (Strine) was the subject of humorous columns published in the Sydney Morning Herald from the mid- 1960s. Alastair Morrison, under the Strine pseudonym of Afferbeck Lauder (a syncope for "Alphabetical Order"), wrote a song "With Air Chew" ("Without You") in 1965 followed by a series of books. An example from one of the books: 'Eye-level arch play devoisters ...' ("I'll have a large plate of oysters").” Go ahead. Say the words out loud. You'll be “strine-ing”.

Someone called David a cobber the other morning. He wasn't sure whether to be offended or not. We asked our friend Marcia if the fellow was being rude or friendly. We figured it couldn't be too bad because that's what Marcia calls her dog. But you never know. Seems cobber is another word for “mate”...as in G'day, mate.