‘Incomprehensible’ Game Needed Vin’s Touch : Baseball’s No ‘Great Russian Pastime’

Baseball came to Russia today. But there were no hot dogs, peanuts or beer and even before the first inning was over, the Soviet verdict was in: “Boring,” “incomprehensible” and “not interesting.”

A sparse crowd shivered in the bleachers as the great American pastime had its semi-official premiere at an exhibition game between two Latin American teams from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.

An 8-year-old boy named Sergei was almost alone in even guarded enthusiasm for the American institution.

“What a strange mitten he has on,” he cried as the first batter hit a fly ball to center field. “It must be very difficult to hit the ball with such a small stick.”

Otherwise, the little boy said the game was “boring, not understandable, strange. . . . This is an American sport; ours is hockey or soccer.”

Only about 200 curious Soviets trickled in to see the game in the Olympic equestrian compound. They sat on bleachers under clear skies but temperatures hovered around freezing.

There wasn’t even a scoreboard on the field. The diamond was hastily chalked in inside ponds that gave the field away as a steeple-chase track.

“Comrades, today we have a real baseball game,” said an announcer, who about 15 minutes into the game admonished the crowd to move from behind home plate “for safety’s sake.”

“It’s totally incomprehensible,” said a young man who was leaving the stadium in the bottom of the first. His 4-year-old daughter chimed in, “But I liked it, Papa.”

The official press agency Tass said last Thursday that the Soviet Sport Committee had made the game an official Soviet sport, and announced a future game between Moscow State University and Patrice Lumumba.

Today’s exhibition game was between Nicaraguans and students from Panama and the Dominican Republic.

A Soviet journalist covering the game for Soviet Sport said he had never seen baseball before and didn’t know the rules.