“It’s Time to Play Ball, British Style”
A hot dog, a Pimm’s cup and two national anthems: The cultural dissonance of watching America’s pastime in London.
JULY 9, 2024
We don’t do baseball here in the U.K. If a British person knows anything about the sport, it’s probably because they’ve spent time in North America or have an in-depth knowledge of “The Simpsons.” My own limited knowledge of baseball comes from this latter source, specifically the episode in which Mr Burns hires a bunch of Major League Baseball players to play for the Springfield power plant softball team. A nine-year-old girl in south-east England in 2001 had no business knowing the name “Darryl Strawberry,” a celebrated right fielder in the 1980s and ’90s, and yet I did know it.
Except now, it seems, we do in fact do baseball here, for one weekend a year. In 2019, Major League Baseball – the U.S.’s professional baseball league – brought the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox to London to play two games on international soil. It was such a success that, since the pandemic, the MLB has made it an annual fixture, with two different teams each time. Last year London played host to the St Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs, and this June it was the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Mets.
The sport itself felt incidental to me: It seemed that you could treat the game as a location in which to drink a beer more than anything else.
Why is the MLB doing this? To allow those of us in Britain to revel in the joys of the ball game? In part. But it’s also about money, naturally, and ensuring the future of the sport. Baseball is less popular in the U.S. than it was 20 years ago, so it makes sense for the MLB to look around for new markets. It’s done these “World Tour” two-day events in a handful of cities outside of North America, including Tokyo, Seoul and Sydney.
I have seen one baseball game before, two years ago at Yankee stadium in New York. The sport itself felt incidental to me: It seemed that you could treat the game as a location in which to drink a beer more than anything else. The primary impression I took away was one of overwhelming Americanness. What could a baseball game in London possibly feel like, so far from its native home? What is the appeal of this most American pastime to Brits? I went to the Phillies Mets game to find out.
✺
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, an hour before the second game of the weekend is due to start, I join the stream of people in caps and baseball shirts drifting towards the stadium in Stratford, east London. Originally built for the 2012 Olympics, the stadium is now the home of Premier League football club West Ham. (Something in me recoils from using the word “soccer” to describe what we know here as football, and so I won’t be using it for the duration of this piece.) Once I’m inside, I see that the football stadium has been refitted with a baseball diamond.
I have a media pass, which means I can go for a walk around the edge of the field, something that certainly would not be allowed at a football game. Also hanging around the field’s edge, at the players’ benches, are the actors Rob McElhenney and Kaitlin Olson, of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” fame. The Phillies’ mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, is here too. This guy I know, because I recognise him from “It’s Always Sunny.” In fact, it seems like lots of people have come because they know the Phanatic from this show. I meet a British fan of “It’s Always Sunny” for whom this is his first baseball game since seeing the Mets play the Cincinnati Reds 10 years ago. His main memory from that game was that he sat behind a guy in a shirt that said “thwomper” on the back who told him he’d booked two seats, one for each ass cheek. Once I take my seat in the stands, I spot a group of friends holding up a sign saying “The Gang Goes to London,” in the Sunny font.
Before the game begins, each team parades out onto the field, accompanied by flamethrowers and some kind of miniature military tattoo. Very large British and American flags are unfurled. A woman called Marisha Wallace sings the American national anthem and everyone takes off their caps. People are unsure what to do with their caps during the British one, sung by the Welsh opera singer Katherine Jenkins.
I see several people wearing two baseball hats at once, one pointing forward and the other back, and swiveling them depending on which team had just scored. They are here to support neither the Phillies nor the Mets, but the notion of baseball itself.
Rob McElhenney does some kind of skit around the concept of a “first pitch” which passes me by completely, and then throws a baseball up into our section of the crowd. I only notice this when the people around me stand up to clamour for the ball, as I am making notes on my phone about the transatlantic existence of Darude’s “Sandstorm,” which is playing over the loudspeakers. Now, the game proper can begin, after a video segment in which someone American says “it’s time to play ball, British style.”
Sitting behind me are Jackie and John, a couple in their 60s from New Jersey, who tell me this is all normal. They wouldn’t always have the soldiers, though, John says. “It’s because we’re in Europe, it’s a bit more posh.” They’re here on a package tour to see the series, supporting the Phillies.
I am now, by virtue of association with Jackie and John, a Phillies fan. Also because of the Phanatic, who has an anarchic charisma as well as being so, so green. Unlike at a football game, all the fans are mixed in together in the stands. The rivalry between the two teams feels quaint, almost a formality. In fact, I get the sense that plenty of people here aren’t particularly committed to one team over the other. Over the course of the afternoon, I see several people wearing two baseball hats at once, one pointing forward and the other back, and swiveling them depending on which team had just scored. They are here to support neither the Phillies nor the Mets, but the notion of baseball itself.
As the game gets under way, there are baseball terminology primers provided on big screens for people like me, explaining concepts such as RBI, K versus ꓘ and bases loaded. I do not need them, though. When I told John that I don’t really understand baseball, he decided he would step up to the plate and teach me. I have a personal guide in my right ear. I tell him repeatedly he doesn’t have to do this unless he wants to, but he insists. “Okay, three balls, two strikes is a full count, so we want a walk or a hit for Bryce Harper,” he tells me, among a hundred other things. He is being so kind and I am trying so hard to follow, but he may as well be speaking Sumerian. I do learn that, at the moment, the Phillies are the top team in the league, and the Mets are near the bottom. The Phillies won yesterday and are expected to do so again. After the first innings, the Phanatic marches out onto the field dressed as a Beefeater, to roars of general delight. I feel sorry for the Mets mascot, who is just a baseball with a face.
This is one of the main differences between a baseball game and a football match: The amount of entertainment on offer extraneous to the sport itself. There are orchestrated stadium singalongs of “Mr Brightside” and “Sweet Caroline”, and a segment where two sections of fans have to race to bounce a giant beachball across the stands. I don’t think I fully appreciated that T-shirt cannons were real until today. Is there something degrading about 200 pairs of hands groping in the air for a free T-shirt? Yes. Would it have been the thrill of my life to catch one? Of course.
It is nice, I suppose, that you can go for a wander, get drinks or go to the toilet, and not really feel you’re missing much. This is a major cultural contrast, however. Football games are much shorter than baseball games, yes, but even so, you would not catch any self-respecting football fan queuing for any length of time, let alone 45 minutes during the game in order to enter the merchandise tent. But this is what I find several hundred people doing when I leave my seat to go and buy a hot dog. I overhear one woman describing her intention to buy nine T-shirts for her nine grandchildren as she checks the score inside the stadium on her phone.
I feel in my bones that most of the spectators inside the stadium are American, just from the timbre of the crowd’s collected voice. A British stadium crowd has a specific tone, a from-the-chest bray, that I can’t hear here.
I decide to postpone the hot dog and instead join the queue for the merch tent, where I meet Caesar, a 43-year-old from the Bronx who’s been living in London for 10 years. This weekend is a complex puzzle of allegiance for him, he tells me. He’s from the Bronx, so he should be a Yankees fan, but his Dad was from Queens via Puerto Rico, so the Mets. He considers himself a Mets fan, but he also supports the Phillies because he went to college in Philadelphia. Yesterday he came in full Mets gear, and he thought about coming in Phillies attire today before remembering that he’d be sitting next to the same people who saw him yesterday, and he didn’t want to be considered some kind of freak. He’s split the difference today by dressing entirely in Puerto Rican baseball player-themed clothes. When we finally get in the tent, I find a Phillies Mets crossover jacket available for $325.
Queueing for the hot dog, I hear an American say “we’ve fucking taken this place over.” And they have. The MLB estimated that 71% of the attendees at last year’s series were from the U.K., which feels difficult to believe. Most people I hear talking around the food stalls are American. I feel in my bones that most of the spectators inside the stadium are American too, just from the timbre of the crowd’s collected voice. A British stadium crowd has a specific tone, a from-the-chest bray, that I can’t hear here.
The Brits in the crowd are having a sort of theme park Americana experience. They are wearing the shirts, they are buying the hot dogs, they are fist-bumping American strangers and saying words like “dawg.”
I meet Jay, 55, outside a nachos stand. I ask him what his history with baseball is, and he blinks at me as though I have asked him about his history with breathing. He’s a lifelong Phillies fan who flew over to see the London Series. Several other people I get talking to have also flown over specifically for this fixture. There are bus-loads of Americans in lanyards on package holidays, like John and Jackie. I was expecting homesick American expats in London, but I wasn’t expecting so many Americans to have followed their teams over. “It’s always special when your team plays in a foreign country,” Jay says. This seems an odd thing to say given that before the 2024 London Series, the Phillies had never played outside North America, but it is what he said.
When I meet Lewis and his girlfriend Sarah, both British, I start to understand the appeal for people from both sides of the pond. They have just finished eating something called a “waffle dog.” “If I went to a football game, there’s no way I’d want that,” Lewis said, “but here, it’s part of the fun.” As he sees it, British people here are enjoying cosplaying as Americans. “The reason baseball hasn’t taken off here is because of the Americanness,” he said, “but the reason it works for a weekend is also because of the Americanness.” It does seem that the Brits in the crowd are having a sort of theme park Americana experience. They are wearing the shirts, they are buying the hot dogs, they are fist-bumping American strangers and saying words like “dawg.”
Americans get the same thing, but in reverse. The food stalls sell hot dogs and beer, obviously, but you can also get a Pimm’s cup, or a plate of pie and mash. There is a black cab on a podium surrounded by pyrotechnic flares. “Fancy seeing you ’ere mate,” I heard one American, sitting near Jackie and John, say to another American, in the worst British accent you’ve ever heard. Everyone at this event has bought into a light-hearted bit of cultural exchange. I hear a New Yorker explain to a woman from Huddersfield that you can get to New Jersey by foot, by car or by ferry. “Hey Siri, how many Celsius is 98 degrees Fahrenheit?” another woman says into her phone in the toilet queue.
I return to my seat. By the seventh inning, two and a half hours into the game, I notice my attention is flagging because I am clapping absent-mindedly in the wrong places. This game, John tells me, cannot end in a tie. The score currently stands at 3-3.
“Do you wanna know what a designated hitter is?” John asks brightly.
“Oh my God, leave the poor girl alone,” a friend from his package tour tells him.
But John’s teaching efforts haven’t gone completely to waste. At the start of the ninth inning, the Mets take the lead, 6-4 — meaning the Phillies now need three points to win, or two points to take the game into extra innings. It's not looking good. The Phillies manage to claim one more point, but their comeback is cut short. In a game-ending double play, at which the Phillies bat shatters, it is all over. 6-5 to the Mets. I turn to John and Jackie, expecting them to be miserable.
But they aren’t. Nobody is. The Phillies won yesterday, the Mets win today. I understand that the score of these games doesn’t really matter. The point of the weekend is to put glory on the sacred name of baseball.
Everyone on the walk back to Stratford station seems in good spirits, no matter their team allegiance. I fall into step with a guy in his early 30s from New York called Brendan, who reckons the London Series has been a resounding success. He tells me he could have seen the same game back home, for far less than what he paid to be here today, but he’s happy he came. “Both teams got a win, it was exciting, and a great turnout. Baseball won today.”
And he got to introduce a Londoner friend to baseball, who also had a good time. “That was sick, man,” the friend says, as they duck into a nearby pub.
✺ Published in “Issue 18: Sports” of The Dial
