Knitting fans can spin a good yarn

Victoria Pojrazov pulled her gaze away from the action on the field only once, and that was to show her progress on the tunic sweater she was knitting for a friend. As she sat in her usual spot behind the Blue Jays’ bullpen in left field — Section 137 at the Rogers Centre — during a recent game, Pojrazov’s fingers twirled through green yarn as if independent from the rest of her body.

“Some people eat peanuts,” she said. “I knit.”

Part of baseball’s beauty is its lack of a clock. Over the years, certain spectators have taken advantage of the slow pace in many ways: reading a book or the newspaper, doing homework, sunbathing, napping.

The inaction, though, is also baseball’s curse. Along with rising ticket costs, the increasing length of games has helped lead to seven straight years of declining attendance at MLB games overall.

But one group of fans hasn’t moaned about the plodding state of the game: knitters.

With the average length of a major league game this season hovering at three hours and 10 minutes through Tuesday’s action, two minutes longer than the record set in 2017, knitters are finding plenty of time to make new socks or scarves.

“If anything, it’s a positive for someone who knits,” said Libby Butler-Gluck, who lives in New York. “We sit for long periods of time and knit.”

Butler-Gluck, 46, isn’t as interested in the game itself as her husband is. So whenever they attend a game, most often at Citi Field, she packs her yarn and needles. (It is harder to take knitting needles into Yankee Stadium, she said.)

“I just like going because the baseball is sort of the background noise,” said ButlerGluck, a marketing and PR consultant who counts craft companies among her clients. “And I like to get a hot dog and beer, and it’s just fun.”

Rachael McDaniel, 22, began knitting when she was 17 and has run into fellow knitters while watching the Seattle Mariners or the Vancouver Canadians — a low-level minor league affiliate of the Blue Jays in her home city. She has tried knitting while watching other sports, to no avail.

“I went to a football game, and I brought knitting and I did not touch it,” McDaniel said. “It’s also just that atmosphere of being at a baseball game. It’s very different from being at a hockey arena, or basketball or football, where there’s high energy and everybody is getting riled up all the time.”

She said she had tried knitting while watching hockey on TV. “It just doesn’t work as well,” she said, “because if you look down for five seconds, you’re missing something.”

Baseball and knitting worked so well together that, in 2005, the Mariners hosted an inaugural Stitch N’ Pitch event that nearly 1,000 people attended, Butler-Gluck said. Soon, the national trade association, the National Needle Arts Association, got involved, and many teams held similar events, drawing knitters of all ages, ethnicities and genders.

The knitters all said they were used to the raised eyebrows that their yarn-twirling behaviour drew at baseball stadiums. Pojrazov, 24, said older, male baseball fans had made comments about her knitting at games. “They’re maybe a little bit defensive of their turf,” she said, “Like: ‘I don’t think this girl knows baseball and isn’t paying attention to it. Look at her knitting.’ Some people think it’s funny.”