Learning Baseball, and the Astros

IT IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE to explain baseball to anyone born and raised in a country in which the sport is not known. Its like trying to explain cricket to an American, someone like me. To learn baseball when exposed to it for the first time in adulthood is like studying mathematics by beginning with calculus. The curtain is being raised, however, as America's past time, or former past time, spreads across the globe. Still, there are challenges. Hitting a baseball with a baseball bat is difficult for everyone; first timers never succeed. Americans are not immune to the confusion. Why is the defensive team scattered all over the field, but there's only one guy on offense? Do the players have to stand in the same place every time, or can they move around? How many foul balls is the batter allowed? Questions, all perfectly reasonable. I recall years ago taking a girlfriend to her first major league game. She had grown up without baseball. Her first question was: why are the guys in the bullpen isolated from their teammates? Are they being punished? As the game progressed, she somehow got the idea that when a batter receives a base on balls, he has been disgraced and is being awarded first base as an act of charity, unable to hit the ball like the other players. She asked whether when a person in the grand stand catches a foul ball, the batter is out. I'm not making this up. Trying to explain the Houston Astros sign stealing scandal presents its own set of problems. Recently I met a lady who lives halfway between Houston and Dallas, but leans towards Dallas. She had not heard anything about it, which reminded me that to have been born in the United States does not necessarily make one a baseball fan. I decided to keep it simple. Rather than go into the details of catchers flashing fingers at pitchers from between their legs while crouching, while on camera, and the difference between a fast ball and a breaking ball, I simply compared it to international espionage. Corporations have manufacturing secrets, I said, and national governments have military secrets, and all sorts of highly classified information. For this reason, they are forever trying to steal information from each other, corporation from corporation, country from country, ad infinitum, because, well, such secret information is highly valuable, hence its secrecy, and hence the espionage. Everybody does it; its the only game in town. Same in baseball. Teams try to win games by stealing information from their opponents. There are acceptable ways to do this, and there are unacceptable ways, much like international intrigue. I told her that her hometown team had crossed the line, seriously, had gotten caught, and was even now in the process of paying dearly for their misbehavior, and would continue to pay. The total amount and precise details of the penalties had not been fully determined, and is now the subject of an intense debate among millions of American and international baseball fans, I explained to her. She seemed only mildly bemused. I comforted myself that I at least did not have the burdensome task of trying to explain the actual game to her, nor of teaching her to hold a baseball in one hand, a bat in the other, and to toss the ball in the air, and swing the bat, and hit the ball to someone standing a couple of hundred feet away, holding a leather glow, expecting to have the opportunity to chase and catch the ball, before it hits the ground.