I know, I know. It’s Friday. The World Series ended Wednesday night. We should forget about it as quickly as possible and get on to the next entertainment fix, just as we trash the orange and black from the malls and get the reindeer prancing and Santa selling. I beg to differ. (I stomp my feet and holler to differ.) I had an odd and possibly interesting view of the high baseball holy days from China, and here’s what some of it looked like. This is the third in my World Series Series (the first was here).
“They are three outs away from winning the World Series, ” Dan Shulman suavely said into my earphones in Room 501. He’s a microphone pro, one of the best narrators in the world of sports, and though smooth as always, a younger man’s glee at looming victory was tangible in his voice. (He’s also Canadian, I may have pointed out before, as is Jonah Keri, the author of this excellent recap of Boston’s road to victory. Mine’s a narrower, more idiosyncratic take, while Keri gets inside baseball as well as anybody I’ve read.) I was with Shulman and fellow commentator Orel Hershiser, plus tens of thousands of screaming BoSoxian crazies, and who knows how many eavesdroppers via ESPN Radio, but I couldn’t have been much more alone in my hunger for baseball.
501 is the Chinese teachers’ workroom in the small economics college of a thoroughly average university in northeastern China. There were no tacos, no high fives and no between-innings arguments. (For most of the hour or so I was there, there wasn’t even another human.) I hadn’t been able to find another foreigner with any baseball interest to share the “October Classic” with.