Centerfield

My local is an Irish bar. Not some tourist-trap faux Irish bar with tacky prints of Yeats and the Cliffs of Moher hanging on the wall, but a bar that is largely staffed and frequented by Irish immigrants.

This atmosphere makes watching the play-offs there a rather surreal experience. You'll be sitting there, drinking a beer, cheering, in the middle of a crowd that is also cheering, yelling and shouting advice at the television screen, some of them in near indecipherable Belfast accents. And the bartender will tap you on the shoulder and say: "There's nine innings, right?"

A question like this is completely understandable. Americans - even if (like me) they've never played a day of organized babeball - have learned the rules and concepts of the game from a lifetime of osmosis. Foul tips, sac flys, tagging up - we know these things instinctively, and have an advantage over those trying to understand what can be a confusing game, with little or no experience of the game to go on. Which is why I occasionally find myself giving an impromptu seminar on, say, the strike zone, what is foul and fair territory, and why a foul ball is a strike unless there's already a two strikes.