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Cricket: Failed Baseball

June 15th, 2013 · 6 Comments · Baseball, Cricket, UAE

I have held my tongue for more than 3.5 years. I have been working in the UAE for all that time, and have been immersed in cricket throughout, and I am now ready to say it.

Cricket is failed baseball.

Baseball’s origins probably were in the British games of cricket and rounders, and all three games features a pitched ball and someone attempting to hit it with a stick … but baseball’s founders made something interesting of their game. Four bases, nine innings, batting orders, a game every day.

Cricket practitioners could have followed the same path to improvements and modifications of their bat-and-ball sport … but then it just didn’t happen. The notions of making it interesting, livelier … just sputtered out, overpowered by “tradition” and inertia. And now they are stuck with the dullest major sport in the world. A game not even cricket fans will go to see. (Count the fans in the stands sometime; no serious sport has been played in as many empty venues as has cricket, and it’s not close. Cricket writers marvel when a few thousand fans turn out.)

Cricket is a sport that makes baseball look like high-speed madness. Compared to cricket, baseball is like soccer — a nonstop, don’t-turn-away cavalcade of action.

Baseball has seventh-inning stretches. Cricket has lunch and tea; both last a lot longer than the singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”.

What has pushed me over the top, after 3.5 years, is the current Champions Trophy competition, in England.

These are the eight best cricket teams in the world in the “quick” one-day format (“quick” is six hours, minimum), and it’s a mess, as these things often are.

Some of the problems:

When the weather turns bad … they just quit. Which skews the competition, to say the least.

Australia and New Zealand this week: Australia batted, put up a decent total, and it was New Zealand’s turn. And then the rain began. And didn’t stop.

In baseball, you come back the next day and finish the game. In cricket, you “abandon” the match and declare a tie. Even if the score was nothing remotely resembling a tie; the game just does not have a mechanism for continuing the game.

Two other matches — South Africa versus West Indies and India versus Pakistan — proceeded just far enough to be decided not on the field but by a mathematical projection of what might have happened (the Duckworth-Lewis method) had the game not been stopped by, of course, rain. South Africa and India won inside someone’s calculator, and the first result decided a semifinal participant and the second settled the greatest rivalry in the sport.

Problems inherent in cricket:

1. Your game is flawed when you feel the need to have three forms of it. Cricket originally was “tests”, which lasted for days. For a slower age, certainly. Nobody actually watched all of it; they checked in from time to time and walked away. Then came the one-day international (ODI), which is 50 overs a side (300 “pitches” each), and then they decided that was bloody slow, too, and along game the Twenty/20 game, which is 20 overs a side (120 pitches) and can be played in about 2.5 hours — or about the length of a baseball game, interestingly. And, surprise, Twenty/20, especially in India, is by far the most exciting variety of the sport and generates the biggest crowds and the most money.

Anyway, this acknowledgement within the sport that it needs to have quicker varieties of the game is telling; imagine baseball conceding it needed six-inning games, and three-inning games, too, to keep people interested.

2. The lack of “bases” leads to almost no interesting “running” plays. The occasional tired/jogging batter can be “run out”, but fans cannot count on the bang-bang plays around the bases that any baseball game will produce, and the notion of “running speed matters” does not really exist in cricket, making it a more monochromatic game. Also, the ingenuity of 90-foot basepaths makes almost any play on a ground ball a single-stride outcome at first base.

3. The gaps in action. Enormous. Envision infamous baseball time-killer Nomar Garciaparra backing out after every pitch and going through that 10-point checklist of messing with his batting gloves, etc. … and that dead time is what happens after every delivery from the bowler (pitcher). Guy throws the ball, watches, turns around, walks back out to wherever his starting point is, for his run-up, and you can make a sandwich before he’s ready to bowl again.

4. The notion that deflected balls can be as valuable as driven balls is ridiculous. All you have to do, in cricket, is get the bat on the ball, and if you can deflect it through the defense you could get a “boundary” (worth four runs) for, essentially, a foul ball. The issue, then, is cricket never figured out that the “playing field” should be something less than 360 degrees. In baseball, it is 90 degrees, and that is plenty. The batter gets 45 degrees of field on either side of the pitcher. Enough. A cricket batter perhaps can waste a pitch foul, but he should play it forward.

5. Because cricket plays in 360 degrees, the important action is far from the at-the-venue spectators. The batting and bowling takes place in the middle of a round or oval patch of ground. Baseball fans sitting behind home plate are perhaps 15 yards from the intersection of bat and ball. It’s something like 75 yards, maybe 100, in cricket. Thus, every seat in the house is a bad seat.

6. Defense often is an afterthought. Most outs are recorded on balls caught in flight. But cricket players drop lots and lots of balls. The sort of play a good third baseman would make once a week — diving, one-handed stop — is marveled over in cricket, and goes straight to YouTube.

I don’t begrudge cricket fans their cricket. It is what they know. It is what their countrymen are good at. It links them to a wider world. (Basically, countries that were British colonies.)

It has to be acknowledged that the planet has far more cricket fans than it does baseball fans, if for no other reason than India’s 1.2 billion people have marginal interest in any sport that isn’t cricket.

But it also has to be acknowledged that the game could have been tweaked in ways that make it more compelling, that condense the action.

They could have gone straight to the Twenty/20 game a century ago, and I am fairly sure I would say: “OK, strange dynamics, but at least it puts fannies in seats and is over before I become faint with hunger.”

Perhaps the bottom line is this: Baseball is acknowledged to be a slow game, even by its fans and practitioners. Cricket is far slower, a slave to weather, with too many frustrating non-endings to matches.

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6 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Doug // Jun 17, 2013 at 6:39 PM

    One thing cricket does much better than baseball is the use of instant replay.

  • 2 Cb // Jun 18, 2013 at 1:28 AM

    Hi Paul: agreed baseball got its format right from the start… enough to not have to tinker with it like they’ve had to with cricket since the 70s.

    But cricket has more dimensions to it, no? Batters only need to consider what the ball does in the air in baseball while batsmen have also to take into account what the ball does after it hits the deck.

    While that makes it challenging for them, there is also a greater variety of strokes they can think of than batters can in baseball. That makes players more imaginative, don’t they? Of course, that’s also true because cricket plays in 360 degrees like you said.

    Catching a cricket ball or making a diving one-handed stop – without mitts/gloves – are probably harder than one imagines. And I’m not being snarky.

    But sure, we’ve got way too much showboating in cricket. It annoys me.

    About ‘abandoning’ matches, well, it’s because, again, the pitch conditions come in to play.

    Wouldn’t it have been unfair on New Zealand to come back the next day and play the remainder of a game when the pitch – that was probably dry the previous day – was now damp and therefore giving an advantage to Australia?

    I agree having three formats complicates the calendar. But it only shows there is a more diverse market than one assumes. Many, like me, love to watch Tests (and I would watch every ball if I’m not working) … but as many of them prefer short-form cricket.

    The administrators know that. They see stadiums are filled out for Twenty20 and one-day matches because they’re played over one day. Test cricket doesn’t draw many to the stadiums except on weekends, but TV viewership remains high.

  • 3 Kumar // Jun 18, 2013 at 4:40 AM

    Valid points about deflections and duration of the game. All said and done, there are more nations playing cricket than baseball and numbers speak for themselves; Period. Given that cricket originated from the US, on the world stage, it is US and baseball that has failed cricket. But, as Osman Samiuddin says, try explaining all this to an American in his oyster-like world. The efforts to understand the game for three-and-half years is still laudable, and appreciated.

  • 4 Jim Bordman // Jul 7, 2013 at 6:53 PM

    Baseball : Failed Cricket

    It’s just not Cricket. You’ve tried to watch it endlessly hoping to be entertained in the least bit, but then you find yourself asking “Is this considered a national pastime because there’s nothing else?”. No wonder this country hasn’t heard about Cricket.

    Baseball is like elementary school that makes Cricket look like graduate school. The sheer lack of intellectual complexity in the game is fit for the American psyche and aptitude… it should come as no surprise that so many of their kids discontinue education after high school – so much for their mental capacity to understand and enjoy something as complex as Cricket.

    Problems inherent in Baseball :

    1. Batting in Baseball is a joke. It’s like watching the tailenders swing their bat aimlessly, hoping to connect and watch the ball fly far away. Baseball batting lacks finesse, control and technique. Batters can learn something from batsmen in Cricket who exhibit powerful control over their bat and can direct the ball at will. You never get to see shots like the cover drive or straight drive played by Baseball batters – something that actually requires technique.

    2. The idea of retiring a batter upon scoring a run is ridiculous. It’s like punishing someone for doing a good job. Given that batting in baseball is nothing but an event of sheer luck (trying to swing and hoping to connect), it slowly starts to make sense why “successful” runners are penalized after scoring a run. Yeah, it probably does make sense to let the batter retire upon reaching home base, only because one can’t expect to be entertained by the plain boring display of their “batting” – so why bother watching them bat. Imagine if you had something similar in Cricket – where Kieron Pollard would have to retire after hitting a SIX. Why oh why? I would want to continue watching Pollard display brilliancy in finesse and batting technique. What a pleasure that is!

    3. The idea of a “foul ball” is preposterous – both, in theory and practice. It would probably have made sense if they called it a “foul hit”, given that the batter’s action decides whether the ball is foul or not – why call it a “foul ball”. It’s like blaming it on the pitcher for throwing a “foul ball”. I also must mention how a major contributor to Baseball’s notorious image of being a dull game comes from foul balls. More often than not, you see “balls” being thrown by the pitcher. And, if the batter decides to swing, half of those result in the so-called foul ball. It’s like watching a Cricket bowler bowl wides and no balls for a majority of the play’s duration. If that’s how Cricket were, I myself would find it boring.

    4. Requiring the batter to physically jog through the four bases after hitting a home run is insane. Why not award the run automatically? Why require the batter to run and reach home plate, especially when the ball is out of the park – there’s no way this batter/runner is going to be put out before he reaches home plate. For example, if the batter connects and the ball touches the foul pole, falls back into the ground and is then retrieved by the fielder – there’s no way the batter/runner is going to be put out by this fielder’s throw to, say, the short stop… so why on earth still run??? It’s like hitting a SIX and then requiring the batsmen to physically run between the wickets six times. How foolish!

    5. Requiring the batter to run to first base on contact – this is another contributor to baseball’s boring and predictable nature. Baseball provides little to no flexibility to its players as far as tactics and judgment go. When a batter/runner manages to make contact with the ball, you almost always can tell that he’s going to end up being put out at first base. So, basically the batter gets put out because of this stupid rule and not because of the error in his judgment (determining whether it is safe to run or not).

    6. Baseball players are like zombies. Nothing seems to excite them during the course of play. In Cricket, a wicket is so prized that the entire team pulls up together to rejoice and celebrate. When a batsman completes a century, he celebrates. It allows the fans to experience these moments vicariously. In baseball, a ground out or a fly out appears to be so common (not entirely surprising, given that they need those gigantic mitts to field a ball), that the players never celebrate. This aspect of baseball is purely spiritless and vapid.

    The bottom line is this : Cricket was never designed to be a spectator sport, but rather a test of endurance and stamina. It is now evolving itself to adjust itself to modern life’s spectator, whilst maintaining the beauty of its rules. Baseball may have been designed to target the spectator, but in doing so it turned out to be this joke of a sport bereft of technique and finesse and with rules so illogical that could put Aristotle to shame.

  • 5 Jim Bordman // Jul 7, 2013 at 7:06 PM

    Don’t you find my comments about Baseball (the comment above) utterly ridiculous? You’re probably wondering what a bum of an individual I am to even raise points like those. Well, I just wanted to demonstrate how preposterous your opinions about Cricket sound to a Cricket fan.

    And, for the record… I am a hardcore Cricket fan at heart.. but I love Baseball too. I just don’t compare it to Cricket. I respect Baseball for what it is. Wish you could do the same for Cricket.

  • 6 Chris Piccolo // Mar 27, 2014 at 6:07 PM

    The ball isn’t harder to hit in baseball, the difference is that in cricket, you don’t have to swing as hard as you cant as soon as you get out onto the pitch. I’m sure all baseball and cricketers both know that after you’ve been hitting balls for a few minutes you start judging them more clearly, right? Well that’s why cricket allows for higher averages, you can build your innings, you can watch as many balls as you want without swinging until you feel comfortable and then start scoring.

    Similarly, in baseball you have to run every time you hit the ball, making it easier for the fielding team to get you out. In cricket, you only have to run when you think you can make it, again making it harder for the batsmen to get out right away.

    People who suggest that there is much less strategy in cricket obviously don’t understand the game. I’m not saying that baseball lacks strategy, but having to defend a whole 360 degrees in cricket requires high levels of co-ordination between the bowler and the captain (who sets the field).

    Fourthly, technique wise, cricket wins. I’m sorry baseball, but the 90 degree hitting zone greatly limits your shots. ill name a few cricket shots and all you baseball guys can look them up to see the massive differences: The cut shot, the drive (cover drive, off drive and on drive), leg glance, pull shot/hook shot, the ramp shot, the sweep shot and the reverse sweep. These all hit the ball to different areas of the ground depending on where the ball bounces on the pitch.

    Finally, bowling. I know that a fastball in baseball is similar speed to a fast bowlers average delivery in cricket, so I’m not going to go to much detail in that respect, but i do want to point out that the ball bouncing makes it harder for the batsmen. Both sports get movement though the air (curve-balls in baseball and swing for cricket) but cricket also has cut (where the ball deviates off the pitch) and spin (totally different, not even comparable to baseball).

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