This evening, we decided to go to a baseball match. Tainan’s own Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions were playing the Fubon Guardians, so we strolled down to the stadium and bought a pair of tickets for the home side. It was a warm evening, relatively few spectators, though the home side gradually filled up as time went on and because noisier and more chant-y. The stadium is very close to an airfield and every 10 minutes or so a plane flew overhead, a small sand coloured thing with a flat disc on top. Some sort of military craft of course, but I have no idea what it was, or why it had that halo like disc.
The baseball itself was, well, it’s not my sport. The only US sport I find at all enjoyable to watch is basketball, and this one is such an inferior knock-off of cricket that I find it terribly distracting. The mitts are ridiculous, of course, but what I found particularly unappealing was lack of emotional movement. In cricket, as a bowler takes a runup there is a sort of build up of tension and then a release, very different indeed from this sport where a pitcher just stands in one place and throws so there was little apparent shift in the emotions of the crowd.
Anyhow, it was a lively match in parts, with a few home runs and an amusing misfield (I think it’s called an error in this sport). We managed to step outside to buy bubble tea during a no-score innings, and left before the end, learning afterwards that there was no score in the final few innings either. There were some enthusiastic cheerleaders, led by a man in a lion suit and another man whose job was to rouse the crowd, but he didn’t do it with much sensitivity to what was happening on the field.
A perfectly enjoyable way to spend an evening, even for one uninterested in the sport.