i have never been a morning person and definitely not in October

Today the New York Times, has an article entitled, "Baseball Before Breakfast in Taiwan" which describes among other things how the baseball play-offs wreck havoc with your biological clock. It's October in Cape Town and although we don't have a Chien Ming Wang (pronounced Wong) pitching in the prestigious "game one," of the New York Yankees - Detroit Tigers series tomorrow morning (1am), I shall be up following it if we get the satellite feed.

You wouldn't expect it because we unlike Taiwan have more of a cricketing culture but baseball is played and enjoyed in small pockets throughout South Africa. When I was growing up I didn't follow the game primarily because I played tennis and cricket during the summer months but also because we shared our football fields with the baseball fraternity during the off-season and they never returned them in the desired state.

Once the football season begun, you would still find the remains of the mound on some of the fields. This area which was made up of compacted "aggregate" (sand, stone and gravel) proved to be the best place for opposition tough tacklers to foul, nimble, skilful players like myself because you not only got the studs you also got the "turf." So for a long time I disliked game because it had caused me far too many unnecessary scrapes and I only embraced it again in the mid 90ties during the play-offs, when I began to watch a young Yankees team, which had Jeter, Williams, Cone and my favourite player #42, go all the way.

I liked the way they played the game, moving runners, strategic clutch hitting coupled with some really good pitching and an excellent defence - the game captured my imagination. The other more important reason was that for the first time we got to see Major League Baseball on our televisions for a sustained period of time and if the Yankees had not done well that year I would most likely have made a connection with another team who would have enjoyed the major share of the coverage.

Time difference is the major problem when you are following the play-offs, during my first series I had my brother bring me VHS recordings of the previous night's game in order for me to enjoy a "delayed" version. And ever since that memorable first series, thank-you Scott Brosius, I have followed the game with a growing appreciation and to such an extent that it is now one of my favourite "pastimes."

So I was very pleased to read this morning on the eve of the play-offs that October sleep deficiency is not an isolated problem and that like me many Taiwanese experience the same conundrum: "Lawmakers forgave a colleague who fell asleep during a meeting after he explained that, like many Taiwanese, he had stayed up to watch a Yankees game that was shown live in the middle of the night here. Yankees games have some of the highest ratings on Taiwanese television, even for broadcasts that start at 1 a.m. because of the 12-hour time difference" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/sports/baseball/03wang.html?ex=1160020800&en=1d01e1c5c5814321&ei=5087%0A).

Now lets go Yankees and yes I agree, the Tigers have been brilliant this year, just like the As who always are and the Marlins were a revelation but it's the evil empire who have converted me many years ago that I remain faithful to - so lets go Yankees!