I think I may understand baseball...

J & I were talking yesterday about the bubble in which we city dwellers live: it’s so easy to just do the same thing every day, even though I made a promise to myself when I arrived a year ago that I would continue to look at New York with a sense of wonder rather than let the experience glide by me.

So, in the spirit of understanding the city in which I am making my home, when J said she had a pair of freebie tickets, I spent the afternoon in the Bronx at a ball game. Not just any ball game, but a game played by the New York Yankees in their last season at this stadium before they move next door in 2009 to their shiny new stadium. I enjoyed every single minute of the three hours we spent there watching the Yankees thrash the Seattle Mariners.

No more will the sports pages in The Post be a mystery to me. I now understand the differences between rounders & baseball, the importance of Derek Jeter (million dollar shortstop apparently), drinking beer & eating peanuts at a game, and why the groundsmen do a choreographed routine to YMCA whilst smoothing out the sand between innings.

It’s quite a step from the Japanese fan dances which I watched earlier this afternoon under the cherry trees at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, to hot dogs & beers at the Yankee stadium but both seem part of the quintessentially diverse American experience.