I thought it might be useful (and, if not useful, then fun) for me to take what I've
learned so far about cricket and try to compose a summary for a person who might now be
in the position that I was in back in the Spring of 2000--i.e., total
ignorance. This summary will naturally reflect my biases, which is to say that
- It will be geared toward the person who wants to learn to watch or follow cricket, rather
than to play it.
- It will exploit the cricket-baseball connection (or contrast) heavily, making it of
more use to a fellow American than to someone from a non-baseball culture.
That said, even if you don't fit the above characterization, you are very welcome to come
along for the ride.
Ready? Okay, class. let's begin:
Like baseball, only more so
The comedian Robin Williams is supposed to have described cricket as "baseball on Valium,"
but I think that if one's going to look at cricket as baseball on anything, then a better
metaphor would be "baseball on steroids" (and no, I'm not making a point about athletes
using illegal, performance-enhancing substances). Consider: a baseball team has
nine players; a cricket team has eleven.
Baseball is played with a skinny little bat; cricket uses a
big wide bat off whose face a variety of shots are possible. The
baseball "fair" zone is less than 180 degrees; in cricket
it's the full 360. In baseball, an "at bat" lasts at most
seven deliveries (plus as many foul balls as you can hit while on two
strikes), and a batter can make at most one run per turn; in cricket,
on the other hand, a batsman may face hundreds of deliveries and rack
up multiple runs before getting out.
And I'm just getting warmed up! In baseball, the fielding team has only
one pitcher in the game at any time, and the batting side sends only
one man up to bat at a time; in cricket, four
or five of the eleven starters will typically bowl (cricket's equivalent of pitching) during
a team's innings in the field, while for the batting side two batsmen
are "up" at a time (so that cricket has the equivalent of two home plates). Hit a ball over
the fence in baseball and you score one run; hit it over the boundary in
cricket and it's 4 or 6 runs. One team's half of a baseball inning is over
after three outs; it takes ten dismissals
to end a cricket team's innings. And at the end of a typical baseball game, three
hours have elapsed and each team has scored fewer than 10 runs; at
the end of a classic cricket match, five days have passed and each team
has runs numbering in the hundreds.
See what I mean?
More to come...
