HOWZAT

But the writing was on the wall on a September day when I refused to go to a Mets game in New York because it was so cold. I dragged my poor spouse and a friend off to a bad Italian dinner instead and ended up shivering in a Czech beer garden a mile from the stadium. You could hear the roars through the din of the passing traffic. My husband has never forgiven me and probably never will and I can't say I blame him.

The thing is, I'm rather comfortable with the current arrangement we have with baseball. The nearest team is 45 miles away in Baltimore – just far enough away and just sufficiently lacking in urban charm that we venture out there only a couple of times a year. The team is named the "Orioles" (like the bird, and not to be confused with the biscuit). That leaves only the World Series to negotiate, and we have two television sets for that.

Which brings me back to Mayor Williams and his effort to woo Major League Baseball to Washington. The city has already picked a name for the team – The Nationals. My spouse, like 16,000 others, has already invested $600 in season tickets, and that's just the deposit. Our e-mail inbox is filled with messages saying things like " DC Baseball Needs You". All I know or want to know is that there are 162 baseball games a year and half of them are home games. A typical game lasts three hours. That's 243 hours of my life up in smoke.

So like I said, please, someone, tell me what I'm missing about baseball.

Thanks to Brian in London for a (mercifully short) reading list. “Maybe you would gain a deeper insight into the links between the American psyche and the "game" by exploring some of the wonderful literature of baseball, no space here for a bibliography but Philip Roth's Great American Novel is a masterpiece and Max Apple's Propheteers is an absolute joy.”

And to John from Baltimore: “Here's the deal with baseball. It became popular during the days of radio. It's a boring game which is great to listen to in the background while you sharpen your plough blade, or whatever the hell they did while they listened to the radio in 1937. It's also interesting to read the statistics in the newspaper the next day if you have you have been listening to the games (and care). Why it is still popular, I don't know. It will probably die out in America and become the national sport of Japan for the next 8,000 years.”

Matthew Simpson was “disappointed” in my remark about cricket being more boring than baseball. I should have explained that I am a Scot and genetically ill-disposed. He suggested a look at Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Simon Barnes in The Times, and accused me of “bad timing”, given that England has just achieved a historic eight wins in a row. He offered the insight that cricket was “no longer the game you and I may have known when younger and has re-packaged both its product and marketing” and concluded: “Could I ask that if you are going to force yourself to enjoy a game you give cricket another go, whether you can do it from an objective viewpoint after baseball remains to be seen.”

(Matthew, my cricket-loving colleague in Washington tells me it is “very hard” to watch England in action over here but I promise to try.)

Jeff Probst, a Londoner for 15 years who hails from Los Angeles, sent some of his childhood recollections. “By the time the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, I had read every baseball book in the library,” he recalled. He remembered sportscaster Vin Scully, who was as “implacably neutral as any son of a lawyer could expect, but as awe-inspired by the game as any boy could hope for.” When his mother came to check on him at night he would fake sleep, while “secretly listening to the transistor radio underneath my pillow”. Mr Scully “soothingly wove the story and statistics of each night’s game: Roseboro wriggling signs; Koufax bending at the waist, his fastball inside at the knuckles. Scully grimaced in amazement at Frank Howard’s towering strikeouts, and let his horsehide-edged voice be carried up and away by Snider’s shots to deep center.” He remembered his first visit with his father to the LA Coliseum with such poetic elegance that I am definitely going to try to fall in love with baseball. “The square of daylight beckoned and grew, and we emerged into the open, green-grassed panorama and the hum of the early crowd. Far below, jewels of baseballs thudded and thwacked in and out of the diamond, and men in white loped and swung with superhuman grace. We found our blue plastic seats where my father liked to sit – three decks above first – and settled in for a boy’s greatest show on earth.”