There is no half-time in baseball and certainly no lunch or tea interval. There’s no need; spectators eat constantly.
Instead there is the seventh-inning stretch, one of the most charming traditions in sport. It is actually more like three-quarter time, given that in baseball each team has nine innings. It allegedly dates back to before World War I when William Howard Taft, fattest of all the presidents, got up from his seat halfway through the seventh to stretch his legs while watching the old Washington Senators. Out of deference, everyone round him felt obliged to get up too.
Now everyone stands up and under normal circumstances sings in unison the ditty Take Me Out to the Ballgame (‘Buy me some peanuts and crackerjack, I don’t care if I ever get back!â€). Many teams have local traditions associated with this. For decades the legendary Chicago Cubs’ commentator Harry Caray would lean out of his booth to conduct the sing-song.
The Baltimore Orioles have a second number, a rousing if incomprehensible John Denver foot-tapper called Thank God I’m a Country Boy. Since Baltimore is as rural as Birmingham this is mysterious.
Club officials kept trying to put a stop to it but, in a rare example of spirit from American sports fans, the crowd kept singing it anyway and saw them off. The stretch seems to be a good indicator of the American mood.
When baseball resumed after September 11, following a week-long hiatus, it was decreed that the jollities of Take Me Out would be replaced by God Bless America. This brings out both the mawkishness and self-importance that constitute the most irritating features of the American national character. On top of that it’s a dirge, it lasted for the rest of the 2001 season, and another decree went out a year ago that it would continue in 2002.
This time the fans quietly rebelled nationally, and the ruling was rescinded. At the weekend the 2003 season started, with American troops once again very much at war. This time the ruling was a cautious one: God Bless America will be sung at the opening home game in each park and on Sundays and holidays. We will know the good times are back when the wretched thing is banished altogether.
The relationship between sport and war has always been fraught. Is it unseemly for young men to get paid for a frivolous pastime when their contemporaries are playing a deadly game? Or is it an essential safety valve for a suffering populace?
In August 1914 the British found it hard to take that war seriously. County cricket continued as normal. The Daily Mail, which has changed less in the past 89 years than it might have done, sent round a photographer to snap pictures of the crowd at Lord’s. It published one with the following caption: ‘People are anxious to see the type of men who look on in the cricket field while the manhood of Europe is in the battlefieldâ€. It added the menacing rider: ‘Further selections will be publishedâ€.
In 1939 Britain went to the opposite extreme and ruled out all spectator sport from the start. It took a great deal of argument with Whitehall to make the case for any kind of leniency.
As it turned out, six years of sporting starvation was the greatest stimulus to the public appetite that spectator sport has ever known. But had the original rules remained, horse racing, for instance, would have collapsed completely. If you can’t race thoroughbreds, you can’t breed selectively either. It would be more than two years before the US entered the war.
To British ears it always seems bizarre that one of American sport’s most resonant streaks — Joe DiMaggio hitting in 56 successive games — was set in 1941, while Hitler was invading Russia. And even after Pearl Harbour, president Franklin D Roosevelt insisted that baseball should continue, although gradually its biggest stars did join up.
This war is far away, conscription has long gone and, though events in Iraq command universal attention, they don’t command universal support.
Thus the rituals of American springtime are being observed. Baseball has begun; college basketball is reaching its climax; the Masters is imminent — and world events will probably do more harm to the feminist protests than to the actual golf.
But some of the joy is undeniably missing. The original plan was for the first two games of the baseball season to be played in Japan; this was junked for security reasons.
The president was regrettably not available to throw the ceremonial first pitch at the opening game of the champions (the Anaheim Angels); their manager did the job. And several north-eastern teams have had to play in weather seriously close to freezing. Not a happy start, not a happy time; and everyone is just a little more touchy than usual. The God Bless America ruling applies even to games in Canada, where the war is very unpopular and the media are always on the lookout for signs of non realisation from the US that it is actually an independent country.
At the opening game in Toronto the music began and officials braced themselves for the boos. To relief and astonishment they heard cheers instead. Very good-mannered, the Canadians. —