It’s confusing

Over at the Ragtag Daily Prompt the word for today is PITCH.

The word pitch naturally makes me think of cricket.

Not really. Pitch makes me think of baseball, and thinking of baseball makes me depressed because the Twins aren’t very good because the Twins don’t have many good pitchers. Or hitters. Saying the Twins aren’t very good is the positive me writing which is good because you don’t want to read anything the negative me might say about the Twins at this point. Check again in a couple three weeks.

I’ve always wanted to watch cricket but I’m not willing to pay for the cable package that carries cricket. And that’s probably a good thing because I’m not sure how to figure out the game. Pasted below is a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry on the game. Does anyone understand anything after the first 14 words because I didn’t.

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players each on a field at the centre of which is a 22-yard (20-metre) pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The game proceeds when a player on the fielding team, called the bowler, “bowls” (propels) the ball from one end of the pitch towards the wicket at the other end, with an “over” being completed once they have legally done so six times. The batting side has one player at each end of the pitch, with the player at the opposite end of the pitch from the bowler aiming to strike the ball with a bat. The batting side scores runs either when the ball reaches the boundary of the field, or when the two batters swap ends of the pitch, which results in one run. The fielding side’s aim is to prevent run-scoring and dismiss each batter (so they are “out”, and are said to have “lost their wicket”). Means of dismissal include being bowled, when the bowled ball hits the stumps and dislodges the bails, and by the fielding side either catching a hit ball before it touches the ground, or hitting a wicket with the ball before a batter can cross the crease line in front of the wicket to complete a run. When ten batters have been dismissed, the innings ends and the teams swap roles.

Enough of cricket and baseball. And soccer, too, because soccer is also played on a pitch. But soccer is really football, but not to be confused with the football that we play in the United States which is not soccer. The football that we play in the United States and is not soccer is not played on a pitch, but a field. But we also play soccer, the one that’s really football, in the United States. Our local team, Minnesota United FC, is in seventh place in the 14-team Eastern Conference. The “FC” stands for “Football Club”, but no one ever refers to what they play as “football”. I think they just added the “FC” to the end of the name to appear more continental. I don’t follow them because life is confusing enough.