LIFE SPORT

Brendan FitzPatrick takes strike at the American pastime.

Batter up
STANDING DESPERATELY alone at the plate in a cavernous stadium that could comfortably hold the population of a small city, knuckles white, eyes steadied and sharpened to maximum acuity, tense tense beyond taut, white noise roaring in the ears, a body coiled and ready to snap. The crowd collectively sucks in air and holds their breath in anxious anticipation. The wind-up, the pitch the swing Staaaah-riiike! Youre outta here! Fail. Sadly, in baseball, this is the more likely outcome of an at bat with the odds rested fair and squarely in the pitchers hand and glove. Even the most exceptional baseball players the world has ever seen struggle to get the hickory to meet its mark and put the batter on base. So much so that the batting average of arguably one of baseballs greatest, Ty Cobb, is listed at the incredibly impressive .367. In bars across the United States, sports aficionados utter .367 in sanctified reverential solemnity as they lob stat after beer-soaked stat at each other. There is nothing in baseball that is not measured, averaged, quantified, correlated cited. But what does a batting average of .367 actually mean? In baseball, the batting average (BA) is defined as the ratio of hits to at bats. To paraphrase the traditional and spectacularly convoluted actual definition, a hit is when the batter manages to hit the ball and make it safely to first base. Simplistically, you could say that a .367 batter reaches perfection in their job a paltry 36.7 per cent of the time. Alternatively, you could say that they fail 63.3 per cent of the time. Like the rejection-filled half-hearted seduction attempts of the average spotty adolescent boy, making it to first base in baseball is something of an impossible dream, achieved only occasionally by the alpha-male jocks and almost never by everyone else. In baseball, success is not so much about hitting more its about missing less. And from this we can draw a sobering and relevant life lesson; in a hit-and-miss world, perhaps our energies would be better served by concentrating less on a few glittering, hard-to-reach goals, and more on our mere ability to survive the knocks and tumbles of everyday life. Yet the batting average is just a tiny taste of the wide world of Lingua Baseball. Still known as Americas favourite pastime, the sport is rife with the most arcane and nebulous statistics imaginable, all with their own discrete acronymic nomenclature: BABIPs, SHOs, DICEs, SLGs you name it, theres likely to be a stat kept on it. Not being satisfied with just the traditional statistical measures, sabermetrics, derived from the acronym SABR (short for the Society for American Baseball Research, natch) is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence and knowledge. Of course, this science sports its own scientists they would be the sabermetricians, those who seek to question traditional measures of baseball skill. Broadcast baseball commentary is likewise the most incomprehensible, jargon-laced dialect that you will ever hear. Sounding more closely derived from staccato SMS text than any form of recognised language, it unashamedly embraces the liberal and lavish use of

hyperbole and superlative to enthrall and excite. On-screen graphics are seamlessly incorporated with all the subtlety of a Darrell Lea window display. But while the broadcast box may spawn Lingua Baseball in its purest form, the applied language of baseball base-babble has infiltrated corporate America and by default, corporate everywhere with executives across the world exhorting their staff to Hit a home run, Take one for the team or Dodge a curveball. The seminal Abbott and Costello comedy routine Whos on first was quick to identify the inherent comedy in base-babble much to the delight of Americans everywhere. Hollywood likewise has been keen to embrace baseball as sport-as-a-metaphor-for-life with everything from the precocious Bad News Bears through to the esoteric Field of Dreams and everything in between. Baseball is far, far greater than just mere sport; this is the very crux of

shared commonality of American males. Regardless of all religious, cultural, intellectual and economic divides that exist, baseball, or more precisely the discussion of baseball, is the Church of the American males psyche. This is the conduit by which men can relate to other men, and do so with statistical proof and analysis and without cumbersome emotions and feelings. It is probably one of the rare things that almost all Americans know something about and can discuss and share with their neighbours, co-workers, family and friends. It is the stuff that you might share with a stranger on a bus or on a long flight for business. Understand the morality, ethics and sensibilities of baseball and youre going a long way to understanding the way Americans think. You may at the same time realise that success is not something that is absolute but exists in some ways as degrees of lessened failure.

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