Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

Impr
ov
e Y
our Englis
h: Englis
h in Ev
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y Life
142
Uh, there’s also this whole world of baseball, of the 
statistics, and people track this stuff and baseball is really 
known for, uh, for people being crazy with tracking all 
these 
stats
. Uh, and, which actually, I, in a, in a kind of 
dumb way, and I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but ties 
in a little with the Grateful Dead thing because people, 
you know, a lot of 
Deadheads
will keep stats, you know, 
how many times you saw what song or what concert at, 
where, you know, what venue, and things like that, uh, 
and I remember meeting a guy at a show at Shoreline 
Amphitheatre in, uh, California, and he was, after the 
concert, and he was—we were sharing a hotel room and 
after the concert—he was noting down his little stats and 
I-I thought it was the funniest thing, because I did the 
same thing, but I had never realized other people did that. 
And I realized from talking, and from talking to him, we 
realized that we both also had this love of baseball and 
the statistics, uh, and he was a business statistics major, 
and we got into this whole conversation. And it was right 
at the time where I was switching from history to, uh, 
or from geoscience to history, and it kind of planted the 
seed of, uh, of-of using some of these same interests in a 
diff erent setting.
Th
e end, the end of the game, which is why I never 
understood people that leave in the seventh 
inning
, 
’cause that’s, you know, it all builds up to, you know, 
unless they, unless it’s twelve to one in the fi fth inning 
and then it’s 
kinda
done but, uh, it-it all builds up to the 
strategy at the end, you know, towards the end, uh, and 
it-it, that-that’s the best part. And I like sitting where 
you can see—I like now sitting behind home plate. My 
tickets are behind home plate but up. Uh, I like sitting 
behind so you can really see where the pitch is, um, and 
that’s important. If you’re sitting like out in the outfi eld, I 
think that’s one reason why, you know, if you’re kind of a 
casual fan and you get sort of the not, you know, the-the 

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