Last night I got up again to watch the Mets play. I’ve got a streaming service with MLB.TV, which works great, especially after midnight. I can recall staying up late to watch sports from the other side of the globe when we lived in Australia, but I don’t remember it being this difficult. Of course that was about 25 years ago and I guess I bounced back from lack of sleep better when I was younger. When the Mets fell behind in the second, I was thinking “I’m killing myself to watch them lose again?!” I’d watched them lose the Utley-Tejada game on Sunday morning and I was beginning to worry that I was bad luck. But they came back and built such a big lead that I felt OK going to bed a little after 4:00. I figured with a 10-3 lead after six innings, the lead was pretty safe and if they did manage to blow it, I really didn’t want to see it. I’m hoping that they win tonight to give me a break. If the Mets end up in a Game Five, I will end up staying up all night on Thursday night/Friday morning until the taxi picks us up at 4:15 to take us to the airport for a flight to Naples. The Mets are clearly trying to kill me.

Of course, the baseball playoff get absolutely no media attention here in England, just as I am sure that the Rugby World Cup, or the Ashes cricket matches before it, are utterly ignored by the American media. I wonder if they will make note of the World Series? (My guess is that they will have to if the Cubs are in it since that is such a great story.) Actually there is a British Baseball Federation, with its office in London, which runs some sort of national competition at a variety of levels. I suspect it is something like the Australian Baseball Federation, which ran amateur baseball when I was there and was run by a group of marginally competent stuffed shirts who mainly tried to screw things up for George and the ABL whenever they could. The parallel to my Aussie experience jumped out at me when I found the internet site and I don’t doubt that I could get involved in that organization. But their season just ended, I’m not going to be here that long and I really don’t want to have “deja vu all over again”. (Farewell Yogi…..)

US Football (‘gridiron”) does get pretty significant coverage here. The NFL plays a couple of regular season games here, which has to help and Sky TV shows NFL games on TV, although Sunday. Monday and Thursday Night Football games all start after midnight. They also show a few North American (MLS) soccer games on the “telly”, which is more on indication that the English can never have too much football (soccer). They also show most of the Premier League games, various friendlies and games somehow involved in World Cup qualification and games from leagues in Italy, Spain, the Champions league and others I am unable to even identify. It doesn’t quite reach the saturation point of college basketball in the US, but it is close. I’ve started to look into getting tickets fora Premier League came when the kids are here (especially Alex who actually pay attention to it) and have discovered that most of the games are sold out. To get Arsenal tickets, you have to pay to “join” the Arsenal club to even have the opportunity to buy tickets that season ticket holders cannot use. (But Arsenal is apparently like the Yankees, so maybe I’ll go for West Ham or some other team.) I suspect that there is a UK version of Stub Hub that I will have to use.

I am told that the NBA also gets a lot of TV coverage here (although I think it might be on a different cable service) and they play some games here as I recall (although they may just be exhibitions). I’d be surprised if there is much hockey coverage, although there are some ice rinks in London and if you Google the issue, you do find hockey clubs of some sort. There seems to be zero interest in American college sports, which is fine with me.