This is easily in my top 5 Belle & Sebastian songs, and this performance really brings out the song’s latent dusty C&W vibe, which is equally as potent as the strummy Greenwich Village original. And I love when Stuart instinctively, and gamely, mimes a pitcher’s motion on the “affects his speed” line (Stuart would not make an effective baseball pitcher).
So this video/song raises a question I’ve had for some time now. Perhaps some of my British Isles friends and colleagues can help me out. I’ll set it up a bit by saying this: pro soccer is not popular in the United States, as baseball is not popular in the UK and Ireland.
So what I want to know is this: do select people in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Isle of Man, etc. gravitate toward knowing and caring about baseball as a means of distinguishing themselves as fans of something their society at large doesn’t care about? I ask because of the way a lot of American soccer fans wear their fandom. Many (though certainly not all) American soccer fans seem to hold their soccer fandom up as some sort of evidence that they are among the few Americans with sight enough to see the beauty in a game most of their countrymen aren’t interested in. They cheer for Manchester United or Real Madrid or Liverpool FC for… well, I don’t know what reason. I suppose one has to pick a team.
So, is there some sort of baseball-loving subculture over there I’m unaware of? Is knowing the name of the shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds a status thing among fans the way knowing the name of a forward for Lazio might be for an American soccer fan? Stuart Murdoch seems to know a bit about the game here (though perhaps he just looked up Piazza’s stats—the catcher did indeed hit .318 in 1993). Also, is couching a song about baseball in a backing that suggests country music a wry joke—American music for an American subject?
There are definitely people here into baseball, but the ones I know (not counting immigrants from the US!) are into sports in general, and so have a basic love of learning about and watching any sport. I don’t know the extent to which they’d follow a team.
And there aren’t many of them. Of the sports I think of as the “big” American sports - baseball, basketball, and what we call American Football - baseball is #3. Basketball is most popular, because there is an actual UK league (of a pretty low standard), and basketball courts in most urban schools, and there are people into the NBA as a competition.
The only time I personally remember Brits wearing an interest in US sport as a badge of sophistication was in the 80s, when American Football was briefly fashionable among the middle classes. At the time our football was NOT especially fashionable, and Channel 4 (a terrestrial UK channel, launched in 1982) introduced a bunch of “minority” sports to viewers, so as well as ‘gridiron’ you had sumo wrestling and kabbadi. But definitely I knew people who were into American Football, and praised its tactical complexity.
Football/soccer came back into fashion, though, and by the 90s the people who might have taken (or affected) an interest in American football would probably instead be singing the praises of continental football leagues (Channel 4 had the rights to the Italian league.)
There’s still enough interest in American football here for the NFL to play a game at Wembley every year (which sells out) and I think the Super Bowl is shown on terrestrial TV (I’m pretty sure the World Series isn’t). But I don’t think any US sport has the kind of cultural ‘meaning’ soccer has in America.
Tom - I think American Football has overtaken basketball again in terms of popularity. There was a period in the 90s (coinciding with Michael Jordan being at the peak of his powers, and commercial omnipresence) when basketball took over, but since Sky Sports re-introduced coverage of the NFL, it has had exponential growth in popularity. Basketball is nowhere near as accessible for the armchair fan in the UK.
