When I lived in England, we had kind of a running joke for newbies where we would ask (rhetorically), “Do they have the ‘Fourth of July’ in the United Kingdom?” and when the person would say (almost invariably), “Of course not!” we would respond, “So, they just skip from July 3rd to July 5th on the calendar?” All-goofiness-aside, that play-on-words always has reminded me to refer to it as “Independence Day,” and not “The Fourth of July.” Sure, it’s a personal preference and everybody knows what you mean, but it took on new meaning for me when I was living in East Anglia. Having your neighbors — and darts-teammates — refer to you as a “colonial” and delivering their perpetual condescension about what is “real” football (and what is soccer) or whether baseball is actually a watered-down version of an English game called “rounders” makes for witty banter over beers at the bar, but it also is food-for-thought about what the actual difference is between the two cultures on the athletic-field.
I’ve mentioned this before, but baseball is the perfect summertime game because of its deliberate pace. And while I believe the pitch-clock has improved the quality (more on that in a minute), the relaxed atmosphere of baseball is what is so awesome about it ..
. while dovetailing nicely with its inherent intensity. It’s one of the only sports not bound by time — mostly — and every pitch matters with the game hanging in the balance each time th.