Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Facebook ads in "actually being useful" again! Well eventually: this one I first got last weekend when I was away for work, from "MLB in Europe" (an entity I have never heard of before) advertising a live game on Sunday night (here, Sunday afternoon where it was being playing) that could be watched on BBC iPlayer.

I couldn't watch it -- my hotel room had regular TV, but no streaming services like iPlayer -- but I wasn't that bothered anyway as it was Red Sox/Yankees which is both boring ("the league's greatest rivalry," or something, according to the ad: yawn) and likely depressing (I hate the Yankees! and I hate that they're good again!).

But the other day I got another ad for this Sunday's game: Tigers/Orioles. This is much more interesting to me and more fun teams to watch. And D and I were both in the same place again, yay.

So he put it on as I was finishing up dinner (the handle on the oven fell off so today I learned I can open the oven by prying my fingertips around the edges of the door, which is good because otherwise our dinner would have been imprisoned!) and it ended up being quite the experience!

It's geared to a British audience, so one of the first things I noticed when I came into the living room was someone North American-sounding explaining what a shortstop does and why Gunnar Henderson is an unusual one to a British-accented person who didn't know any of this. That's fine, that makes sense. MLB is forever trying to "break in to Europe" by which they primarily seem to mean the UK -- there's been one series a year in London at the beginning of the season for the past few years -- so okay you have to explain these things.

But they were doing it in an extremely strange way that I eventually realized was like all color commentary and no play-by-play.

These are the two genders of baseball (and many other sports, though they go by different names) commentary: someone tells you fairly detailed things about who does what as it happens, and someone offers wider context, bigger picture and/or tangential thoughts.

Which was surprisingly difficult for me to cope with -- okay maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, because of course even when I'm watching TV I'm relying on the people telling me what's happening. When I see a game in person, I miss the majority of it if I don't have a radio with me!

But I was confused. Not just by the absence of play-by-play commentary, but also by the overabundance of color commentary. It's like asking someone for directions and they sing you a song about where you want to go. Even if it's a nice song, after a while you realize you're still no closer to getting there.

And I don't even think it was a very good song, heh. By the end of the game, I'd determined that I just have high standards for how to explain baseball to people who don't know it because I've spent the last couple of years doing that for D.

I concluded that these people all needed British boyfriends to practice their commentating skills on for a couple years first, because I never would've tried to explain the pick-off rule change -- well, I almost certainly wouldn't have explained it at all, because that's not 101-level stuff; I'd maybe explain the rule as it currently is if it became relevant (it did not) but I wouldn't say "it changed" without saying why or what it had changed from and my explanation wouldn't end with "because them he'd had the greenlight"! Because that's just more jargon, I would not trust that its meaning would be clear at all. Similarly, the other person said something about how the Orioles had been active in signing new players last offseason, which again seems a bit arcane and irrelevant but, uh, okay! But as evidence for this I would not offer "they got a Cy Young winner" and then not even saying what "a Cy Young" is or why you'd want someone who'd won one!

It was all that kind of random. They had a "bingo card" of stuff they're looking forward to happening, and it had, like, "Eutaw Street home run" (a thing so rare that when it happens a plaque gets put down but it also had "a curveball strike out" (a thing so ordinary it happened in the first inning and the British person didn't even know it had happened when it did!).

They encouraged the British audience to tweet in their questions. I had so many questions. But none of them were the kind they took on the air: "what is a balk?" (famously complicated and also very rare and also it doesn't really matter) and "can a batter switch the side of the plate they're swinging from in one at-bat" (which is the kind of edge-case D has been asking me about all along, I love questions like this!).

Eventually D took pity on me (or got sick of me asking questions like "What inning is it?" "Who hit that home run?", incredibly basic things that I've had a much better idea of in every other baseball broadcast I've listened to. Which was a sweet little bit of access intimacy.

He's very good these days! I did have to teach him the tricky nuance of "oh and two" (the count: no balls and two strikes) versus "oh for two" (a player's performance so far in the game: no hits in two at-bats) but only because I knew he'd like to know, not to be pedantic or anything.

And the Tigers won, which is what I'd been cheering for. So, this was a fun way to spend an evening! If weirdly exhausting.