Yet another reason the Yankees SUCK

Let me sum it up. Some lady went to a Redsox bar and drank 4 beers. She had a Yankees bumper sticker on her car and when she left, someone said Yankees suck, so she decided to run him over with her vehicle.


Summery, women are terrible drivers.

billyellis wrote:
Actually I was only pulling your chain (why should you have all the fun ). Although an Englishman born and bred I've loved baseball most of my life and I'm well aware of the long rivalry between the Yankees and the Sox. Like a lot of British fans who fell in love with the game a long time before the days of cable TV I have a special fondness for the Cubs.

Anyone care to guess why the Cubs are so popular amongst older British baseball fans?

billyellis wrote:


Quote:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/baseball/mlb/05/05/yankees.redsox.death.ap/index.html

Got it here, I don't make shit up....just face it, and don't accuse me....it's a fact!!! A*$H@LE

Sorry. The closest thing in your link is that the argument "spilled outside." Nowhere does it say that 6 men went outside to fight a woman as you claimed. In fact, by all accounts the alleged perpetrator was arguing with another woman. [Judging by your tone, I'm glad I'm not discussing this with you in a parking lot...]

Deity - careful, man. I don't want to navigate to this site next time and find that we have been shut down by angry feminists.

Interesting about the Cubs popularity. I guess they are the loveable underdog that everyone would like to see win, even overseas fans.

Honestly I'm surprised that anyone outside the Americas and SE Asia follows baseball at all. I know that the international impression of Americans is that we think that everything we do is cared about by the rest of the world. But I have no illusions about our influence on the sporting world. In general, we have our sports, the rest of the world has theirs, and there is not a lot of overlapping interest outside of the Olympics when we can all mix in some jingoistic nationalism to rev up the interest.

Quote:

Yeah that would probably be hazardous to your health!!!!
Quote:
Sorry, this report says 5!!!

Let me just say: "Manning...lobs it. Burress...alone...TOUCHDOWN NEW YORK!"

Additionally: The combined IQ of all Red Sox fans is 6 because the only two words they can string together are "Yankees Suck."

billyellis wrote: Over the last 20 years or so there has been a lot of interest in Britain in American team sports. Indeed when NFL games started to be shown here in the early eighties the growth of interest in the game was unprecedented. More Britains watched the Miami - San Francisco Superbowl live on TV than watched that years F.A. cup Final (British professional soccer's championship game).

The reason why the Cubs are the most popular MLB club amongst older British baseball fans is because of the time difference (6 hours ahead of EST). The only way we could follow live games before cable and satellite TV was on American Forces Network radio. Day games were transmitted in the evening British time and the Cubs played twice as many day games as any other team back then since Wrigley Field didn't have lights and all of their home games were day games. As a consequence they were featured far more often than any other team. Of course it helped that Britain and has always had a soft spot for the underdog and the Cubs "Any team can have a bad century" philosophy appealed to us. (Incidentally the first ever live satellite TV transmission via Telstar was a Cubs game).

justjoey2000 - How you doin'? Want some sandwiches? I like your smack talk a lot more than the (literally) threatening variety from some other folks. All I can say is enjoy it while it lasts, G-Men. You stole one (like the Pats stole one against a superior Rams team), and believe me it still hurts. A LOT. But, unless you are eventually successful in prying away Pioli...you ain't the Pats, and you won't be back in it every year.

Actually, as a Gator-hater I watched a few Ole Miss games in years past, and while he obviously is not the passer his brother is, I always predicted that Eli would become a better quarterback than Peyton, and I was actually picking the Giants for the SB 2 years ago. I think they have one of the most talented teams in the NFC, but the combination of the NYC microscope, big time egos, and a coach who sooner or later will revert to his true form makes it doubtful that they will contend year in and year out.

Shadowman wrote:

Very interesting, but I still can't understand why you would have started listening in the first place? I think I remember hearing that it is playoff season in the football leagues over there now? So maybe the baseball season in the USA picks up during the offseason lull over there?

And frankly I am shocked about the SB audience being larger than that of the F.A. Cup Final. I can't wrap my head around that one. I assumed that since NFL Europe folded, there must not be much interest in American football across the pond.

billyellis wrote:
You have to remember that American Baseball (I use that term because baseball of one kind or another has been played in Europe for nearly a thousand years) is not new to Britain. England beat USA in the final of the first World Championships in the late 1880s and there was once even a professional Baseball league in England (one of our professional soccer teams stadiums is called "the baseball ground"). Although always very much a minority sport American Baseball has been played at amateur level in Britain since it was first "invented" particularly in the London, Nottingham and Newcastle areas. I can't tell you why I fell in love with the game 40 years ago. I just did.

billyellis wrote:
I haven't followed the game but I think interest in Europe began to wane in gridiron football in the early 1990s. It still has its fans but nothing like in the 1980's.

Wow. I had no idea that (a) it went so far back, or (b) that it wasn't a mostly American sport. You inspired me to do a (very little) bit of Wiki-research:

The distinct evolution of baseball from among the various bat-and-ball games is difficult to trace with precision. While there has been general agreement that modern baseball is a North American development from the older game rounders, the 2006 book Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, by David Block, argues against that notion.[2] Several references to "baseball" and "bat-and-ball" have been found in British and American documents of the early eighteenth century.[3] The earliest known description is in a 1744 British publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by John Newbery.[4] It contains a wood-cut illustration of boys playing "base-ball," showing a baseball set-up roughly similar to the modern game, and a rhymed description of the sport. The earliest known unambiguous American discussion of "baseball" was published in a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts, town bylaw that prohibited the playing of the game within 80 yards (70 m) of the town's new meeting house.[5] The English novelist Jane Austen made a reference to ****ren playing "base-ball" on a village green in her book Northanger Abbey, which was written between 1798 and 1803 (though not published until 1818).

The first full documentation of a baseball game in North America is Dr. Adam Ford's contemporary description of a game that took place in 1838 on June 4 (Militia Muster Day) in Beachville, Ontario, Canada; this report was related in an 1886 edition of Sporting Life magazine in a letter by former St. Marys, Ontario, resident Dr. Matthew Harris. In 1845, Alexander Cartwright of New York City led the codification of an early list of rules (the so-called Knickerbocker Rules), from which today's have evolved. He had also initiated the replacement of the soft ball used in rounders with a smaller hard ball.[6] While there are reports of Cartwright's club, the New York Knickerbockers, playing games in 1845, the game now recognized as the first in U.S. history to be officially recorded took place on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey, with the "New York Nine" defeating the Knickerbockers, 23–1, in four innings.

My profuse apologies to the rest of the world for my US-centric assumptions.

You should check the history of your own Red Sox Billy. If memory serves they originally started out as a cricket team called the Philadelphia red stockings. (In the mid to late 19th century most of the Eastern clubs played both cricket and baseball).

Well that would definitely be news to me. I read "Red Sox Nation" last year, and it chronicles the history of the team back into the late 1800's, and I don't remember anything about any history before then including cricket. A quick wiki-check confirms that the team was originally founded in 1901 as one of the charter members of the new American League.

The influence of Cricket in America I know nothing about. Never heard of anyone playing it here, although I'm sure some snotty Ivy League school has a club team (they probably play polo too) because they think being more "British" makes their blood bluer.

According to Wiki again "Cricket has been an established team sport for hundreds of years." So it is conceivable that early pioneers brought the game with them. On the other hand, having grown up in coastal NE where the Puritans settled, I consider it highly unlikely that the game could have arrived here until their influence had waned 2 centuries later, since "fun" would have been banned by their strict Calvinist lifestyle.

Rounders, on the other hand, seems to fit in quite well with the timeline. Wiki describes rounders as a predominantly Irish game that evolved in the mid-late 1800's, and Irish immigrants to the Boston area would likely have brought this game with them. Only problem there is that the National League was founded in 1876 to replace an older league founded in 1871. So it would have to have been an early version of rounders that predated the game's official rules formalization in 1884.

Interesting stuff! Do you have a source for this earlier history of the RS?

billyellis wrote:
Cricket is still being played in the USA particularly in New England http://www.usaca.org/ . It was the most popular summer game and America was one of the leading cricket playing nations until the English national cricket team stopped regularly touring there in favour of the more politically stable Australia (circa 1870). This was one of the influences behind the decline in interest in cricket which was further enhanced by the spread of baseball played under "Cartwright's rules" during the American civil war. (See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_cricket ).

billyellis wrote:
Only my memory I'm afraid. I read it years ago but I can't remember where now.

Cool. Thanks.

Cricket in America - now I've seen everything.

My entire exposure to cricket comes from the hilarious film "La Grande Seduction."

billyellis wrote:
Excellent movie.