The English language is full to overflowing with sailing idioms: Obvious ones, like “even-keeled,” and others, like “three square meals,” that hide in plain sight. And there’s a good reason. Our language originates from a nation of sailors. England’s global empire was built on, and maintained by, the strength of its navy and commercial shipping industry — naturally the jargon of that foundational trade came to dominate the language.
Hundreds of years and a Revolutionary War later (up yours, Charles Lord Cornwallis!), we Americans have built a language on baseball. Three strikes and you’re out. Home run. At least three different pitch types — fastball, curveball, screwball — have distinct non-sporting connotations these days.
I barely remember a time before I knew the ins and outs of baseball, and I suspect that most of you, reading this specialized website for baseball enthusiasts, have similar experiences. But even Americans who are indifferent to or mostly ignorant of the national pastime tend to know the basics just by osmosis.
So what happens if you take a European with little knowledge of the game and drop them into an MLB context?
Over the past few weeks, the professional soccer season has gotten underway in England. But in this shrinking world, a Premier League team isn’t just a neighborhood club anymore — it’s a global brand. So it’s become de rigeur for clubs from Europe to play preseason exhibition matches (friendlies, in the parlance of the sport) abroad, especially in markets they view as ripe for commercial exploitation. For fully half of the 20 teams in the Premier League, that meant playing at least one friendly in the United States this summer.
When one of these clubs goes on tour, it’s common for the social media and marketing arms to take the opportunity to create content. This is exactly what MLB teams do when they play abroad, and for good reason. It’s an opportunity to show the flag globally (like I said, Royal Navy idioms are everywhere) and generate page views and impressions and what have you. The players who participate get to do a little structured tourism — even athletes like to travel — and fans get to see their favorite stars let their hair down a little.
Trying new foods with the guys at Myeongdong Night Market. ? pic.twitter.com/Fvhi4TJhAU
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) March 19, 2024
I was quite fond of this video from the Dodgers’ trip to Seoul in March, featuring an extremely game James Outman (and a somewhat less game Will Smith) housing an octopus kebab at an outdoor market. When in Rome, and so forth.
Not every team that toured the U.S. visited a baseball game, or rather, not every team that did so made content out of it. A selection of Liverpool players took in a Yankees-Phillies game in which Aaron Judge hit about (in their terms) 300 meters’ worth of home runs. They even got local sports broadcaster Taryn Hatcher —who’s known for her work as a sideline reporter on local Phillies broadcasts — to show them around town for a video, but Mo Salah didn’t take batting practice with Bryce Harper or anything like that.
Nevertheless, I want to focus on three videos, and see how the best athletes from across the pond took to baseball.
Crystal Palace, I have to say, cheated a little. They have an American player, defender Chris Richards, who was raised in the college baseball Mecca of Hoover, Alabama. When the team took a trip to Camden Yards in advance of a friendly in Annapolis, the club issued Richards a camcorder and told him to go nuts.
Richards polled his teammates during batting practice on how many home runs they think they’d hit in a season in the majors. Most of them showed proper humility regarding the most difficult task in sports, but goalkeeper Dean Henderson said he’d hit 25. Richards responded to the effect that if that were the case, Henderson was in the wrong sport.
Henderson’s pretty well compensated for a mid-table Premier League goalkeeper; his £100,000 weekly wage comes out to an annual salary of just over $6.8 million (U.S.). (Wow, the dollar sure is strong at the moment, isn’t it?) How much would the 27-year-old Henderson command on the free agent market if he could hit 25 home runs a year? Well, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. just came off a 24-homer season and signed for three years and $36 million. Seems like either Henderson is lying, or he’s missing an opportunity to double his money overnight.
The prime attraction, as is always the case, was seeing manager Oliver Glasner throw out the first pitch.
Throwing out the first pitch is one of the most underrated difficult athletic feats for a normie. Especially one like Glasner, an Austrian, who to my knowledge had never played baseball before. The potential for a 50 Cent incident is huge, and even if the first pitch honoree can get the ball to the plate, anyone who’s watched a baseball movie can tell you how difficult it is to throw a ball without looking incompetent.
“The gaffer is over there sweating,” said Richards.
All in all, it could’ve been worse. Glasner was clearly not comfortable with his pitching motion, but he was able to put some mustard on his toss from his position just in front of the mound. It did take an athletic play from erstwhile catcher Cionel Pérez to make the catch — and it’s a good thing he did, because if Perez had not been quite so nimble, Glasner would’ve brained the Orioles’ mascot.
“I’m disappointed about myself,” a visibly chagrined Glasner told Richards afterward. “Too high. Just threw 60%. Should be better.”
I, for one, think the boss should cut himself some slack. He got it (more or less) over the plate, which is the only bar that matters. But I suppose demanding high standards is how Glasner led Palace to finish last season by taking 18 points from their final seven games.
A few exits south, the Arsenal women’s team were guests of the Washington Nationals before a friendly against Chelsea at Audi Field; both teams also played friendlies against NWSL teams while they were here. No first pitch shenanigans this time, but captain Kim Little and vice-captain Leah Williamson were presented jerseys, and Screech cajoled Williamson into trying on his oversized hat.
The real fun got going when the game was underway and most of the team had no idea what was going on. Arsenal’s roster is mostly from England and continental Europe, but there are a few players from countries that play baseball. So defender Steph Catley, an Australian, was tasked with explaining the rules.
She looks thrilled to be of service.
I had this problem last year, when I took a friend’s grade school-aged child to their first baseball game. I realized that baseball had become second nature to me to the point where I simply could not explain it from scratch. Catley, despite her reluctance, did better than I could manage.
She held her hands up to approximate a strike zone and said, “Strike. Three strikes, you’re out of here. I think it’s a ball, where it’s below or above. A certain amount of them and you walk. Hit it out of the park, it’s a home run.”
To be honest, that’s all you really need to know. Nevertheless, the camera made its way down the row to the only American on the team, recent Olympic gold medalist Emily Fox, who was sitting with Austrian fullback Laura Wienroither, who had more questions.
Wienroither (pointing to scoreboard): “OK, so what does one to nine mean?”
Fox: “So there are nine innings in a baseball… match… The goal of the game is to get through all of the bases and to hit home base. So you go through first, second, third, and then home base, and you get a point.”
Wienroither: “We don’t need to know more, right?”
Fox (visibly relieved): “Yeah, we don’t need to know more.”
On to the third and final American tour.
Crystal Palace’s opponent for that Annapolis game, Wolverhampton Wanderers, also had a day at Camden Yards. Wolves also produced a video commemorating the event, which illustrates the awkward linguistic difference between British and American English. In the U.K., collective nouns — for instance, a soccer team — are treated as plural. So “Arsenal are” instead of “Arsenal is.” As an American who’s occasionally written about soccer, it’s easy to get caught between the two when working in print. You end up thinking in British but having to translate into American.
Or sometimes, you get a headline like this: “Matt Doherty throws the first pitch at Baltimore Orioles!”
The English audience reads that and infers that Doherty, a fullback for Wolves and the Republic of Ireland national team, has visited Baltimore Orioles, the club, and thrown a first pitch. For Americans, that headline conjures up images of Doherty pegging Heston Kjerstad and Craig Kimbrel with baseballs. “England and America are two countries separated by a common language,” George Bernard Shaw said. (Or maybe he didn’t actually say that? Another entry for the Hall of Apocryphal Epigraphs.)
This video, despite its ambiguous title, is deadly serious. It opens with Doherty practicing for his first pitch by throwing what looks like a cricket ball to a catcher in an Inter Miami top. (Wolves had played in Jacksonville earlier in the week, so presumably this took place in Florida.)
Doherty is clearly putting a lot of work into this, and for good reason. I know I said throwing out the first pitch is tough, and it is, but a conservative lob from about 40 to 45 feet, in front of the mound, isn’t too hard to pull off. Actually throwing a pitch with power and accuracy requires a delicate chain of physical actions.
The sequence is easy to learn. The set position, then the leg lift, and then the stride, arm swing, and follow-through. To demonstrate, here’s Wolves captain Mario Lemina:
Lemina was born in Gabon and raised in France; suffice it to say neither country is a baseball hotbed.
He does the right things in the right order, but he short-arms the pitch. That’s the critical error for a pitching dilettante; getting extension on the throwing arm is what separates the wheat from the Freddie Prinze Jr. in Summer Catch. Even Doherty can’t quite get loose enough to do it.
But by the time the night at Camden Yards comes around, he’s confident. “I’m going to try to throw it hard,” he warns the ball girl who’s been assigned to catch him. (Feels like a slap in the face to Wolves that Glasner got an actual player to catch him. Maybe that snub will provide extra motivation when Wolves and Palace meet in the league this year.)
Nevertheless, Doherty knows the gravity of the moment. After marveling at the height of the mound and its distance from the plate, Doherty lets out an audible “Jeez…” as he’s collecting himself to throw the pitch.
It wasn’t textbook mechanics, and Doherty took a hesitation step or two, but the man got right up on the rubber and threw a strike.
“Lads, that was so far away. Jesus Christ,” Doherty offered his teammates by way of a debrief. “That was a good throw!… Lad, I am sweating.”
As well he should be — what Doherty did wasn’t easy to begin with, and he’s in the minority of first pitch throwers in that he chose to do it the hardest way possible. Top marks, as they say over in that part of the world. And to top it all off, Doherty posed for a post-throw photo with the Oriole Bird, and said “Thanks, Boss,” as they went their separate ways. That’s got to be the first time anyone’s called a major league mascot “Boss.”
As a fan of both baseball and soccer — to say nothing of international cooperation and friendship — it warms the cockles of my heart to see the players and managers of the English top flight embracing our game. They’re not great at knowing the rules or throwing the ball yet, but that’s fine. They can come back next summer and give it another shot.
