Sisko was right about baseball

Ben Sisko - Commander and then Captain in Starfleet during the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine years, in an effort to explain liner time to an alien race, compared it to a baseball game. His reasoning was that you never know what can happen next in life - humans are resigned to being stuck on a timeline that only ever moves forward, where the future is inaccessible.

Why is this relevant? During this lockdown of 2020 I’ve been finding things to do. I’ve been writing more - I’ve finished a fic that I started two years ago, and now that’s been let out into the world I’ve 90% completed another one, in that it’s written but now I’m doing the post production on it (continuity, filling in those missing street names, realising I’ve missed a plot hole, etc.). But I needed a Third Place - everyone needs work, then a hobby or pastime, and then a third something. A while ago someone explained this to me and I realised for me they were right - I did need something that wasn’t connected to the other two, just for a change of pace and skill set.

I’ve never been much of a sports person - I prefer to do rather than watch. I find football interminably boring. Ice hockey is more my pace when watching live in the stadium (even though you can’t actually follow the puck), but when I am reduced to watching it on the telly? That’s hard. I was chatting online with a friend on the other side of the planet about political stuff - Hong Kong, China, that kind of thing - and she mentioned the President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-Wen (蔡英文), tweeting about the opening of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (the CPBL). As the game is not played in China the country (because it’s a game played by dirty anti-communists, perhaps?), this refers to the Taiwan baseball league exclusively.

I’d always liked the idea of baseball but found MLB hard to watch - it was like test cricket, where it seemed to take years to finish a single game. Lots of time-outs, chatting, swapping, farting about - not for me. So when my mate suggested I try one of the free streams to watch a Taiwanese game, I thought, well, what do I have to lose? A quick DuckDuckGo of the internet (I don’t use that search engine beginning with G) produced an excellent website: The CPBL Stats site. As someone who doesn’t actually know the rules to baseball or any history, this site has been invaluable. (Honestly, the only players I could name were Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Willie Mays - and the only reason I know Willie Mays is because of the eponymous trading card that was the MacGuffin of the DS9 episode ‘In the Cards’).

So using this website and its links to free streams (in English), I did catch a game. And it was amazing fun. I don’t know how American baseball games work, but ones in Taiwan are stadium parties with live entertainment. You have AA+ players (something MLB people understand but I don’t) doing their best as trained, fit, athletes (honestly, a lot of the outfielders’ efforts to catch fly balls border on Fancy Dan manoeuvres). You have stadiums full of spectators as Taiwan have already managed to control the whole pandemic quite quickly - and fans have drums, super soakers, player shirts / towels / boards, a ‘never give up, never surrender’ party-or-die attitude. There are cheerleaders who go through easy routines for the crowds to follow in their seats. There are mascots who go round chucking out soft toys, prizes - they have the cameras that go over the spectators with different filters, so you have a ‘wash cam’ (if the camera lands on you then you need to pretend to be washing your hands), a ‘water cam’ (take a drink), a ‘muscle cam’ (show us your arm muscles - especially the kids), a ‘love cam’ (make a heart with your arms and top of your head) - the fun goes on. Major players have their own theme songs and chants that the entire stadium sings with the beat of that guy who brings the drum. There’s one older guy who turns up to every game and sits near the front who I’ve elected to refer to as Fubon Grandad. After the 5th inning there’s a ten-fifteen minute break while they rake the pitch and check the bases etc., so they fill this with the MC of the evening picking people from the crowd to take part in simple games versus cheerleaders to win prizes. There are family groups, friends groups, serious sports addicts, casual fans and everything in between. It’s a fun, fierce few hours - because they rarely go over three and a half hours for a game (when they’re not stopped for rain).

And do you know what all this has taught me? During lockdown I was fine with the constant staying in, the living alone, the being able to work from home and get stuff done - been loving it, actually (not a fan of humans really). But I’ve been doing this since March 2020 and it’s now the end of August. At weekends when I don’t work, I ponder if I actually get out of bed at all. It’s all much of a muchness - there’s nothing to do, nothing to look forward to except a break from being at my work laptop in the corner of the flat. But these baseball games - at weekends they start at 5pm Taiwan time, so for BST that’s 10am. Now I HAVE to get out of bed because the English commentary has already started, showing the pre-game shenanigans such as the opening pitch by a local celebrity, the team run-downs, the whole shebang. And here’s the important bit - the games are so unpredictable, so dramatic in the way they can turn from a comfortable 4-0 lead into a 5-9 defeat, that it’s broken my feeling of lethargy.

Ben Sisko was right - baseball is the epitome of how linear time works. You never know what’s going to happen to the next pitch; will it be a ball or a strike, will it be a bunt, a base hit, fly or a home run? That feeling of a fly ball heading for the stands and an outfielder desperately trying to grab it from the air - will he make it? Will it miss his glove? It’s like only the next few seconds matter. Once we have the outcome of the hit then the game has been irrevocably set on a path. All I can do is watch to see how it unfolds.

I don’t get this feeling with any other sport. Football for me is just a bunch of blokes running around passing things - there’s no urgency in it. American Football is painful - it’s like someone took rugby and made it all about smacking into people, not using skill to get the ball, and they keep stopping for a chat. Basketball should excite me as it’s the same kind of urgency as baseball - but somehow it just doesn’t. MMA irritates me as it seems to devolve quite a lot into wrestling moves that are a few minutes of people squirming around to either keep or break a hold and for me that’s boring to watch. Women’s kickboxing is more my pace but where can I see it (hopefully free or cheap)? Please let me know if you can.

In summary - Ben Sisko was right. And I’m enjoying Taiwan baseball in a way I have not enjoyed a live sport in many years. I ended up purchasing a subscription to the CPBL TV official stream for the friendly price of NT$1,099 (£30 at time of purchase!) for the entire April - October season, plus the winter league. This gives me perfect HD footage with the local Mandarin commentary. I know about twenty words in Mandarin so I play the HD footage on one browser tab with the sound off and run the English commentary on another tab with the sound up. Sorted. While the free streams are excellent for English, the footage quality can be quite poor at times to the point where I can’t read the stats box, so the HD footage is a must for me. The official site does also have the complete schedule of games, but this is free to everyone.

So which team do I support? That also came out of the chat I had with my mate online - there are four teams in the major league this season (should be five next season), so after a joke about how me and my mate both live in the north of our respective countries, and remembering of course that lots of planets have a north, I thought it was only fitting to start looking into which team was furthest north. That is easily Fubon Guardians, whose home is Xinzhuang Baseball Stadium in New Taipei City. It wasn’t until I’d seen a few months of the season and then managed to get hold of a jersey that my mate observed their strip this year is blue, which just happens to be my favourite colour. Yes, they’re kind of the underdogs as they’ve not done particularly well this season (until August), but that’s the excitement. If you support a team that normally wins everything, then who cares? The Guardians seem to have sorted out their issues from the middle of August 2020 and are currently winning games again - not all, but it’s getting better.

And now I can name another four professional baseball players: Lee Tsung-Hsien, Chiang Chih-Hsien, Shen Hao-Wei, and Kao Kuo-Lin. Not bad, even if I do say so myself.

I guess this means everyone should find a new distraction during this pandemic. Obviously we need to ‘keep alert’ and all that, but at the same time, don’t obsess over it. Find something else to think about so that this pandemic isn’t all there is.

And that’s it. Soopytwist, everyone.