Baseball in England is new. They have heard of Mark MacGuire, but few understand why the “crazy Americans” love him so. I have found a few English people who love our national pastime as their own. Russell Hargreaves went to New York three years ago and saw the Yankees play. He fell in love with the game immediately. Now his soul is stirred by the crack of the bat, as well as a great googlie at a cricket match. Three years ago, he and eight intrepid Englishmen founded the Cambridge University Baseball Society or “Cubs” for short. It is an apt name.
Ethan Leibitz, Mark Knutson, and I saw an ad to play baseball for Cambridge hanging up in our college; we looked into it. Mind you, none of us are particularly good, but we found ourselves pretty good for English standards. There are a few other Americans there, five including the three of us. A Texan named Bo described our team the best. He said, “It’s like little league with big bodies.” Many people didn’t know how to throw, bat, or field, but with a few practices under our belt, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We could whip any under seven t-ball team in America! Therefore, Russell set up a “baseball match” with Oxford University and Oxford Brooks University.
On a Sunday morning, we all loaded on a public bus for the three-hour ride down to Oxford. Karen Roe came with us to take photos, and to play if not enough people showed up. She is quite an athlete, and an unofficial member of the team, as well as our one fan. We were in good spirits. Laughing, joking, and baseball trivia were the order of the day. We were ready for anything that came at us. Well, we thought. After arriving in Oxford, we got some food and made our way over to the field. The city of Oxford has no diamonds, so we were playing on a large lawn behind the rugby field /hockey field of Oxford Brooks University. To our amazement we saw two well-polished teams that looked good. They could do all the things we had trouble with: field, hit, run, and pitch. Oxford is the newest team in our small league, but they looked smart, in matching uniforms, or “kits” as they call uniforms here. We hadn’t gotten our uniforms yet. In dress, Oxford Brooks was as motley looking as we were, but, as far as skill goes, they looked very good. Our spirits sank. We warmed up and went to play Oxford University.
The first game was close. We were even tied until the second inning, but they pulled off a squeaker 12-9. We called it after three innings, because it was time to play Oxford Brooks. I must add that Ethan pitched three good innings for us in this game. The last time the Cambridge Cubs and Oxford Brooks had met, they beat us by only five runs. Cambridge had yet to win a game against anyone. We were not looking forward to the whopping this game would bring.
This isn’t some story about how the underdogs came back and won against all odds, no. We lost; we lost bad, 20 something to nothing. We only had two hits, but something happened in this game: we stopped trying to win. We had fun. Sure, some infielders tried to stop the ball with their feet; one can never unlearn soccer I guess, and the ball rarely got anywhere near first base when thrown, but it was good fun all the same. Afterwards, we all went out to the Turl pub for a night of laughter and camaraderie.
You may have thought that was the end of the story, but it needs a happy ending. Don’t all stories really need that? Well, I’ll tell you about our second game. It never was played. Only Oxford Brooks was coming, and they could only muster up five players, so they had to forfeit. Cambridge finally won! Perhaps the curse of the Cubs has ended.