It took me a long time to get to grips with baseball. Ever since I was little I’d looked at it longingly, knowing there was something I could love about it if only I could work out what it was.

Much has been written about the way baseball embodies the United States of America and generally has some higher mystical relevance. Probably nonsense, but why else could I have been so enraptured as a boy by a strange sport played in a faraway country of which I then knew very little?