RISHON LEZION, Israel — I do not remember ever learning the rules of baseball. I don’t think any American child ever does. Perhaps we merely absorbed the sport through cultural osmosis and watching it on television. So imagine trying to explain a sport that is fairly complex — at least as compared to soccer — to someone who knows nothing about it.
As I have been watching the baseball playoffs — Go Red Sox! — on television at a local pub here, a few Israelis usually try to watch it as well. (After roughly three minutes, they always say “it’s boring” and then walk away.) Last night, I found myself explaining the strike zone, a walk, the fact that a foul ball is not a third strike, the distance between bases in meters rather than feet, how baseball is more of a subtle art than a sport, and how a batter with a .500 batting average would be hailed as a superstar even though he fails half of the time. I just started sputtering random facts and rules.
I was reminded of the underrated movie “Blast from the Past” (the trailer is above) in which an early 1960s family raises their son in an underground fallout shelter after wrongly thinking that the United States was about to be nuked. The boy (Brendan Fraser) grows up and then goes out into Los Angeles in 1999 without ever having been above ground before. It’s much more witty and endearing than one might think.
There is an amusing scene in which the boy’s father starts to teach him the rules of baseball while they are underground. In the words of Roger Ebert’s review of the film, “try it sometime.” Well, I have tried it — and you don’t even know where to begin.
