Autumn is definitely here

Welcome, mellow fruitful reader, for Autumn is most definitely upon us, even here in Sunny California. I write to you as the temperature outside is a positively arctic 9 degrees Centigrade (it's early; it'll be 21 or so later) and it's cold enough in the house that I have to wear a jumper. Unbearable conditions under normal circumstances, I know, but these are the difficulties we face here in 2020.

Helen baked a rather splendid Autumn shortbread tree in celebration of the season (and also because I'd made a face when she said she wouldn't have time to bake this week):

Autumn's onslaught also means the Presidential election is now just 10 days away. This week saw the second debate; rather better behaved than the first, but still giving the impression that it was two old blokes arguing about nothing. The debate was still relatively light on facts and policy; of course, we know that Trump doesn't deal in such fripperies, but it felt like Biden missed an opportunity to really thump home that point.

Autumn also means it's the World Series of baseball. In a first for this esteemed publication, we had a reader request for me to give an opinion on what is America's second sport. Well I always say you have to be careful what you wish for; but here goes...

The three major sports in the UK are connected directly to class: football is traditionally a working class game (it's short so you don't need time off work to play it), rugby is a game for posh kids (thus the split between the historically amateur Rugby Union and the professional Rugby League, the working class variant), cricket combines the independently wealthy with a background as a village pastime. And there's something of this in the US as well: American football is connected to the college system, whereas baseball is a working class game that anyone can have a go at.

The game itself is... well... pedestrian. Cricketers have perhaps never been the most amazing athletes, but the trend in the game is towards speed and those carrying excess timber are rarer and rarer in the professional ranks. Baseball, however, has yet to get the memo on this. You would think this was a game of running and catching and thus athleticism and dexterity would be par for the course, but far from it; the game isn't played at an elevated pace, and they catch the ball with enormous gloves that take most of the need for skill out of it.

Now, perhaps the most fundamentally odd thing about baseball as a newcomer to these shores is something which appears to be accepted as a given: the fact that for a pitch to be legal it has to pass through an invisible box known as the strike zone, and you're out if you don't hit 3 pitches which pass through this zone. And here's the thing: how the hell are folks supposed to determine with any degree of accuracy whether the ball actually passed through that invisible box or not? It's something that you'd imagine there would be huge controversy about, or a massive amount of technology invested in sorting out once and for all, but it just doesn't happen. It is frankly bizarre.

Baseball is actually characterised by two things: firstly, it's a social event, not a sport. Baseball crowds consume Herculean quantities of hot dogs and beer. The game goes on for three and a half hours, and very little actually happens, so I guess you need those things to keep you going. This is best illustrated by the fact that TV commentary on baseball very rarely ascends to the level where they discuss the game action itself. And that leads to the next thing which marks baseball out: it's a game of statistics. The lack of strenuous activity (with the possible exception of pitching, which looks like hard work) means baseball is played all the time (typically a professional team will play four or five days in a row against the same opposition), which in turn means there's a huge amount of data to pick over and debate. That's great, given that there's precious little action to discuss, but it also makes the game essentially impenetrable unless you're prepared to put in the hours and study what the hell it all means.

The other interesting detail about baseball is that winning the World Series isn't always a great thing, as for some reason it's often followed by fans rioting and trashing their own city. Exactly why this happens eludes me, but it's predictable - I was here for the 2014 Giants win, and several of my work colleagues correctly predicted a riot would follow. This definitely isn't cricket.

The most positive part of baseball is that I see kids playing it a lot. There's something heartwarming about seeing kids facing off with a pitching machine in the parks on Saturdays, wearing helmets that are obviously too big for them, swinging bats wildly, sometimes even in the general direction of the ball. This does seem like a grass-roots, community game and that has to be good.

Whilst writing this, I see the mercury has now climbed to the giddy heights of 14 degrees C, so pretty soon it'll be safe to venture out to the surface of the planet, assuming I wrap up warm; Helen's threatening to take me on a shopping expedition for Halloween-related tat. It does get colder than this here sometimes; working from home and not having to go out does have its advantages!