Dee sports the sleeveless, untucked and backwards cap look. 很好看。

So I took my Chinese teacher to the Seattle Mariners game last Saturday. She’s heading back to China in August, had never seen a baseball game, and how can you let someone leave the states without at least one game? Plus there’s the whole Confucian thing. When I lived in Taiwan, and I was out with Chinese peers, they wouldn’t let me buy anything. I heard this over and over again: 

有朋自远方来， 不亦乐乎？

It can translated a thousand ways, but this is the gist: “To have friends come from far away, isn’t that a joy?” I.e., Be a good host, damnit.

This was my third attempt in the last few years to explain the game to someone from another country. I should be getting better at it but ... no. Most team sports are metaphors for war: You have a rectangular field, a goal on either side, and an object of some kind. The point is to get that object into your opponent’s goal more often than they get it into yours before time expires. Easy.

Baseball’s different and I always struggle about where to begin. In the future, this wouldn’t be a bad place:

The goal of the game is to make it around the bases before making an out, and the team that does this the most times wins.

But I didn’t do that on Saturday. I began with the outs, and the three main ways to make an out: ground ball, fly ball, strikeout. Strikeout was the most difficult, beause it led to “ball” and “strike zone” and what happens when you don’t swing. Not to mention “foul ball.” I didn’t even get into the whole “foul ball with two strikes” thing. Good god.

As I explained all of this, positing an imaginary batter making an out and returning to the dugout, my teacher said, “And he’s gone from the game.”

“No ...” I began, but was already imagining what baseball would be like if this were true.

Beyond the game’s uniqueness: two things got in the way of better explanations: 1) the language barrier (her English was good but not like a native speaker, while my Chinese is beginning level); and 2) Safeco’s loudspeakers and constant music and announcements. It's so loud it makes it difficult to hold a conversation, let alone explain the game to someone from another country who’s never seen it. My throat was raw by the second inning.

Oh, a third thing got in the way: It was “Turn Ahead the Clock” Night at Safeco: the Mariners wore their “futuristic” unis with cut-off sleeves and crazy colors and logos. The entire game was centered around this. A robot delivered the rosin bag, the National Anthem singer had Spock ears, and the PA announcer sounded like Majel Barret’s computer voice on “Star Trek”: Occupying second quadrant, digit 9, Dee Gordon. “Normally,” I explained to my teacher, “we’d hear, ‘Playing second base, number 9...’ So this is just a kind of play off of that.” Things got even tougher when I said the whole concept of Turn Ahead the Clock nights was a parody of Turn Back the Clock nights, in which players from both teams wear the uniforms from, say, 50 years earlier. 为什么？she asked. Why do they do that? And that led to a talk about nostalgia: people wanting to see what they saw when they were young.

The M’s were playing the Royals—hapless again after a few years as one of baseball’s best and most fun teams—but it began poorly for our starting pitcher, Felix Hernandez. He gave up a single, a single, then a homerun. Three batters, three runs. Ouch. Then he settled in. The Mariners came back with a run in the bottom of the first, and after I pointed this out on the scoreboard above the left-field wall, my teacher said, “So the Royals win that round.”

Um ... Sure. 

In the end, she got to see quite a game. M's hit for the cycle: Ryon Healey homered in the second to tie it up, Ben Gamel tripled in the same inning to put us ahead, and Denard Span doubled in the third to pad the lead. Singles were spread out all over, but that's all they'd need. Edwin Diaz closed the door in the ninth and the M's won the future, 6-4. My teacher also got a free cap. It's brick-red rather than traditonal blue but that's probably better: red is a lucky color in China.