Our London Magical Mystery Tour
The Great British Baseball Bakeoff, Bryce as hero and a new Eckstein stat.
LONDON—Well, this has been an incredible blur in London. I don’t know that I ever quite got on London time—a five-day trip just isn’t enough time to really get acclimated—but what a time it has been. I’m in a lovely coffee shop in Southwark called Gail’s, and I cannot remember what happened 20 minutes ago, much less all that has happened since we got here. But I did scribble notes throughout our journey (mostly using the utterly delightful Kaweco Sport AL fountain pen that Margo got me from the charming Choosing Keeping shop in Covent Garden*).
Here are some of those fountain-pen notes, in absolutely no order at all.
*Margo actually got me two fountain pens—the other pen is for Father’s Day, and I’m sure I’ll tell you all about it once I ink it up and start using it. (I’m sure you can’t wait.)
Brilliant Reader Tony in Hitchin. Probably the most amazing parts of this entire trip has been meeting European baseball fans. I’ll tell you about some of them throughout this rambling piece, and let’s start with Brilliant Reader Tony (who actually gave me a business card of himself as “Brilliant Reader Tony.”*)
*On the back of the card, he includes a quote I wrote many years ago about my old friend Dan Quisenberry: “It isn’t that they’re rooting against you: They simply cannot see. Maybe, if you are lucky, someone who loves you will see what you are.”
Tony is a Royals fan. How did he become a Royals fan in Hitchin, a market town about 42 miles North of London? Well, it so happened that in 1985, he was watching Game 6 of the World Series between the Royals and Cardinals. He might have been watching highlights of the game—Tony can tell his story better than I can, of course—but as I understand it, he barely knew the rules and was only mildly interested (if I’m remembering this right, he didn’t even understand what it meant when Jack Clark didn’t catch a foul pop-up). And when he saw the final play, when he saw Jim Sundberg slide in for the game-winning run, everything in his mind said all at once: “THAT’S MY TEAM!”
And he’s been a Royals fan for the last 40 years.
London Series atmosphere. The atmosphere for the London Series games was… honestly, different from what I expected. It wasn’t necessarily worse than I expected, not at all. There was a buzz and excitement, and the whole thing was great fun.
But—and I’m not sure how you will feel about this—