Other sports

Wow. I’ve just watched Germany get out of jail against Sweden. With only ten men and staring probable elimination in the face, a jaw-dropping last-gasp free kick winner from a crazy angle on the edge of the box means they’ll make it to the knockout rounds now in all likelihood. I felt sorry for Sweden.

For me, this feels like the last-ever World Cup, so I’m trying to enjoy it. Everything is wrong about Qatar, the hosts in four years’ time. Then in 2026 the competition will expand to 48 teams, planned to be drawn into 16 mini-groups of three. Too many teams. Terrible format. Just ugh.

During tonight’s game the Romanian commentators kept referring to the German team as the Mannschaft, which sounds pretty funny in English. Sometimes they would put it into (I think) the genitive case: mannschaftului. Plenty of other languages have borrowed this German term (it probably sounds very German), but curiously the Germans don’t use it themselves: for them it just means “team”. Or rather, they didn’t use it until after they won the last World Cup. They then rebranded the national team as Die Mannschaft for marketing purposes, capitalising on the popularity of the term in other languages. This reminds me of the term Bahasa, which some English speakers use to refer to the Indonesian language, presumably because it sounds cooler than “Indonesian”. But in Indonesian, bahasa just means “language”.

I should have mentioned that on Tuesday night we all tried a papanași, a quite wonderful dessert that’s a bit like a rum baba, but without the rum, and bigger. Delicious, and well worth the long wait before we eventually got it.

Tomorrow morning I’ll try my hand at fishing, without Dad’s help. Who knows if I’ve rigged up my rod in a way that it won’t all fall apart.

Most of the time when you watch baseball it feels like nothing is happening. That’s because it’s hard to hit a baseball travelling at 90 mph or more. You haven’t got a plank to hit it with like you do in cricket, and unlike in cricket, when you do hit the ball (unless you hit it into foul territory but let’s not complicate things here), you have to run 90 feet to first base without being tagged or caught, either of which means you’re out. And if you rack up three strikes, which usually occur as a result of not hitting the ball, you’re out too. In short, due to the shape of the bat and the structure of the game, baseball is stacked heavily against the batter. An average Major League batter will get on base safely only about 26% of the time (this headline statistic in baseball is written as a decimal, .260, and pronounced “two-sixty”). Anything over .300 means you’re pretty handy with a bat in your hand; above .320 and you’re a superstar. Of course for somebody to outperform the overall average, someone else needs to underperform, and someone who did consistently underperform went by the name of Mario Mendoza. The bespectacled Mendoza was an effective defensive player in the late seventies but not too great with the bat. For a few seasons his average hovered around the .200 mark, and when some wag said to another player in the midst of a form slump, “you’ll be sinking below the Mendoza Line if you’re not careful”, the name caught on. The Mendoza Line was (and still is) the threshold separating the mediocre batters from the truly awful. The other significance of the line is that once you drop below it you’re so bad at batting that the rest of your game can’t possibly make up for it. Mendoza finished his career with a .215 average but by that stage the name, meaning a .200 average, had stuck.

The term Mendoza Line is still used in the US, in baseball and in other contexts, such as politics and box-office takings. It can come into play even when there’s isn’t a number involved. When I recently read about the term I thought about my work history. In my insurance work, some of my colleagues weren’t all that nice, and failure to connect with them was in some ways understandable and acceptable. In my current job the people are much more pleasant, yet I still can’t build connections in a way that will help me progress there. If I can’t manage it in this job, I’ll probably never manage it in any team environment anywhere. I’ve now dipped below the line which I’ve spent so much time trying to stay above. It’s about time I put my bat away and played something else.

I should say that I do get on with my work colleagues, at least those in my immediate vicinity, just as I get on with most people. That’s a big part of how I’ve managed to get jobs and not get fired. But building a relationship is something rather different. (I’d say I did build a relationship with the woman I met in Auckland recently. Her and maybe my current carpool mate, and that’s it.)

Yesterday I saw a Pokémon figure in the shape of a pig on my colleague’s phone. I asked if it was a Porkemon. I also had my last performance review with the company. Maybe it was my last anywhere.

On Sunday my flatmate invited me to see The Big Lebowski at one of his Meetup groups. I went along purely to see the film – I had no interest in dressing up in a Jeff Lebowski bathrobe or doing anything remotely social. I’m not sure the film quite deserves its cult status but it’s clever in many ways and is certainly worth seeing. But afterwards people discussed the movie (I just wanted to go home) and my flatmate became political and controversial and strident, as he does, and then I realised something. Look at their faces. You’re pissing other people off here. It’s not just me.

I’d come to just about tolerate my flatmate, mainly because he said he’d be out by the end of May. Without that light at the end of the tunnel, it’s likely I’d be in a pretty bad way by now. But at the weekend I thought, shit, I’ve had enough of this. I really want you out of the picture. And what if you decide not to leave?

And that’s exactly the problem. He’s always in the picture, front and centre, commentating on and making his opinions known about just about everything he sees and does, and wanting to involve me in the process. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would find this tiresome.

Then yesterday something happened. Someone in Liberia had offered him a job. He was booking his flights to New York where he’ll spend a month before going to Africa. He commentated on the online booking process for a good half-hour – “no I don’t want to book a luxury hotel”, “why on earth would I want to buy travel insurance from you?” and so on and so forth. His commentary was music to my ears. He leaves the country on 8th June and will move out, I hope, two weeks earlier. Then I can get on with my life again.

Yes, Leicester City really are the Premier League champions. That’s just staggering. The upper reaches of British football are so money-driven, and such a closed shop, that something like this is pure fantasy. But it’s real and I have no idea how. The format of the Premier League makes it extremely hard to fluke. Any of football’s cup competitions are flukeable. A baseball World Series certainly is. Even a grand slam in tennis is flukeable to a degree. But the Premier League? Leicester must actually have been very very good. How they got to be so good with such limited resources is a happy mystery.

Talking of baseball, the Red Sox have won seven of their last eight games including a three-game sweep of the Yankees and have a narrow lead at the top of their division, but there’s an awful long way to go. Gosh I’d love to go back to Fenway some time – that was awesome.