We were also keen to take up the opportunity to visit the brand new PK Park, which has been springing up day by day since we have been here. Unfortunately the weather was ghastly - pretty cold and wet, but that didn’t stop us. After all how long can a game of baseball last? We would be home and able to warm up after an hour or two.
Today ‘The Ducks’ were facing ’The Huskies’ (Aka the University of Washington) and quite a few older people and students (it is a weekday) had turned out to give their support. One of the first things we noticed about the game was that yes, it is basically rounders, however, it is actually a really tactical game with each team always trying to spring a surprise on the other, using different bizarre signals to converse with team mates over the game plan for each ball. It took us a while to understand the rules and scoring, not being able to work out when exactly the teams swapped over and how many throws the bowler got to send at each batsman and it was all a little confusing at first. I think we kind of grasped it after the first hour or so and we could then sit back and get into the game.
We quite enjoyed the closely matched game, however there were two main problems. Firstly, there was a lot (and I mean a lot) of faffing about. Before each throw the batsman and bowler seemed to have a bit of a pre-bowl routine - swinging the arms around or going through certain motions. Then the bowler changed quite often and on each occasion they had to do an on-pitch warm up..stopping the game for a few minutes. You could go to the toilet and come back and they would still be on the same batsman. It meant that the pace was just a bit too slow for us.
Secondly, the actual rate of scoring was so low. Obviously my knowledge of baseball isn’t good or even average so it may just have been that the teams were very closely matched, however the end score was something like 5-3 and that’s after a whopping four hours of play (and yes we got very cold and wet). It seemed almost impossible to score, when the ball was hit, it was either caught or the batsman was stumped out before reaching the first post.
So it maybe wasn’t a sport we would go and watch again, but it was definitely a good experience. It was really worth going anyway as we got to see our favourite duck mascot playing about in the rain, and I also enjoyed watching the ‘Duck Derby’ in one of the breaks (basically cardboard ducks on sticks racing along one side of the stadium wall). It has answered quite a few questions we had about baseball and we were happy we went.
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