Baseball and Beer, but not together

Only in Scotland could you have a day of truly perfect weather - sunny, low-60s, not a cloud in the sky kind of thing - and a wind chill of damn near 40. Really. That was what the last couple of days have been. You look outside and think, "Wow, this is great!" and run down the stairs in a t-shirt only to catch hypothermia as soon as you hit the great outdoors. Brrrrrr.

So on this lovely windy day we decided to trek out to Duddingston for a alleged baseball game. There is ACTUALLY a Scottish Baseball League, and Edinburgh happens to have two teams. They play each other, oddly enough. There were a surprising (or maybe not so surprising if I had thought about it) number of Yanks on the teams, and it seemed odd to hear the American drawl again. My host brother back in Morocco used to tease me and my fellow Americans about our long, drawn out syllables, and after hearing only chipper British and roguish Scottish accents for 9 months, I've come to the conclusion that the teasing was well deserved.

At the game, we were the only spectators who weren't related to any of the players, aside from various drunks/neighborhood kids who stopped by periodically, spent 10 minutes asking questions about how the silly game was played, then 10 minutes wondering how Americans could ever enjoy watching something so droll, and then immediately departing to watch golf (no kidding on that; Scottish teenagers enjoy golf more than baseball!). I really wanted one group of teenagers get beamed by a ball because the only thing they could come up with about baseball was, "Oh, like the Yankees!" Chumps. I think baseball for them is like Rugby for Yanks: all Americans know that there is a sport played in the UK called rugby, but none of us have any idea how it's played, and put it on TV for us and we stare blankly at the screen and even drool a little with disinterest.

BUT the most fascinating thing about Scottish baseball is that the most important (and, indeed, the ONLY) way to score is to steal bases. It was the only way games ever progressed, and Scottish baseball has these complicated rules about who can steal when and how and who can be given a base, etc. There are things like a "Ball rolled into the equipment" rule, and the "Catcher is stuck in the net" rule, and the "Ball didn't actually sail into the home run zone, but they let it roll there on purpose" rule and the ever-popular "Ball just bounced over the wall into busy traffic" rule. Each rule involved some sort of Scottish jig, some wild hand signals, and the advancement of a randomly determined number of base runners. As far as I could tell, anyway. Oh, and they used wooden bats, which is kind of wild.

But it was entertaining, though FREEZING. When we couldn't take the cold anymore, we bundled up and made our way back to the Sheep's Heid Inn, where they were having a Beginning of Spring International Beer Festival. We'd been there on a Sunday afternoon before, but it has NEVER been as crowded as it was yesterday. The place was packed with tourists and locals and Just-Out-of-Churchers drinking happily in the beer garden, which was thankfully shielded from much of the arctic blast. I had a tasty little chocolate stout from Orkny while Jonmikel enjoyed an excellent amber WildCat Ale. It has been a long time since I'd had an actual stout, and I reveled in the fact that stouts are great sources of antioxidants not found in most other beers. Seriously.