LONDON — As the fun and excitement of America's Major League Baseball season draws to a dramatic close, the British had reportedly taken it upon themselves to join in and set up their own league. However, they have reportedly mucked it up, sadly getting the rules all wrong, forgetting to wear gloves, using flat bats, and putting some sticks behind home plate for some reason.
There are also now two home plates.
"We've no idea what we're doing, by Jove," said Englishman William Ellington Smithtonshire, who had set out to bring baseball to England. "I thought I could improve the old thing. The game's at its most exciting when chaps leg it to home plate, so I did away with the other bases and added a second home plate so the batsmen could dash to and fro between them. A jolly good time in theory, but no one's got a clue what's going on, I'm afraid."
Witnesses said that something may have been lost in translation, despite the fact that both countries speak English. Just as England added an unauthorized "U" to several words, they had also completely ruined the game of baseball. Gone is the diamond-shaped playing field, replaced with a circle in which there are only two bases. The batter is now the batsman, for the sake of class. Catching a ball hit by a batsman will get them out, just as in actual baseball, but instead of strikeouts, balls are bowled to the stumps to dislodge the bails with the batter not having crossed the popping crease. Whatever that means.
According to sources, no one was quite sure how the wickets, a set of sticks situated behind the two plates, came into play. "They just showed up one day. Everyone thought someone else had put them there, so we just came up with a way to include them," Smithtonshire explained. "Quite strange, innit?"
At publishing time, British baseball had attracted a fair number of fans, after they found it to still be better than British football, which turned out to just be soccer.
Liberal Brynnleigh witnesses a communist utopia in action!
