What would it be like to watch a baseball game—in London? Imogen West-Knights heads to Stratford, to a stadium in London that’s the home of Premier League football club West Ham, to find out. It’s the Phillies vs. the Mets that day, and over the course of the game, West-Knights observes the “light-hearted bit[s] of cultural exchange” between attendees, and the differences between an American baseball game and, say, a UK soccer (ahem: football) match. She writes a fun, breezy essay for The Dial commenting on the distinct Americanness of the event.
It is nice, I suppose, that you can go for a wander, get drinks or go to the toilet, and not really feel you’re missing much. This is a major cultural contrast, however. Football games are much shorter than baseball games, yes, but even so, you would not catch any self-respecting football fan queuing for any length of time, let alone 45 minutes during the game in order to enter the merchandise tent. But this is what I find several hundred people doing when I leave my seat to go and buy a hot dog. I overhear one woman describing her intention to buy nine T-shirts for her nine grandchildren as she checks the score inside the stadium on her phone.
I decide to postpone the hot dog and instead join the queue for the merch tent, where I meet Caesar, a 43-year-old from the Bronx who’s been living in London for 10 years. This weekend is a complex puzzle of allegiance for him, he tells me. He’s from the Bronx, so he should be a Yankees fan, but his Dad was from Queens via Puerto Rico, so the Mets. He considers himself a Mets fan, but he also supports the Phillies because he went to college in Philadelphia. Yesterday he came in full Mets gear, and he thought about coming in Phillies attire today before remembering that he’d be sitting next to the same people who saw him yesterday, and he didn’t want to be considered some kind of freak. He’s split the difference today by dressing entirely in Puerto Rican baseball player-themed clothes. When we finally get in the tent, I find a Phillies Mets crossover jacket available for $325.
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