Sticks and balls
Cricinfo Magazine, February 2006
It’s always a sweet sight. The swing of the bat, the ball scuttling across the earth or arching through the air, human figures moving purposefully, gracefully, at speed, across a vast green lawn. No cricket fan could resist it, even if it’s baseball.
The two great modern stick-and-ball games are not siblings so much as cousins, both descended from a common if remote folk ancestry. Both are episodic. Their rhythms are more leisurely, more unpredictable than those of compressed continuous action sports such as football or basketball. Crucially, both are team sports revolving around an ever renewed confrontation between individuals, one with a ball and one with a bat. As CLR James observed, this structure “reproduces the central action which characterises all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own: two individuals are pitted against each other in a conflict that is strictly personal but no less strictly representative of a social group.” (This interplay between individual and collective is also what makes both games rich in statistics and highly computer-compatible.)
Intriguingly, while the history of the two sports is inseparable from urbanisation, both cloak themselves in pastoral mythology. Baseball emerges in New York City, among apprentices and labourers, is codified in that city in 1845 and spreads nationwide with the Civil War of 1861-64. But just as cricket has its Hambledon legend, so baseball for many years liked to claim that its origins were in rural Cooperstown and that its rules were invented by a farmboy and future Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday. Yet, historical realities notwithstanding, it’s true that baseball and cricket bring a whiff of the rural, of open spaces and old-fashioned festivities, into an industrial and urban milieu. That has always been part of their appeal to a modern society perpetually in a hurry.
In the age of the Robber Barons, when the US emerged as an industrial power, baseball rapidly became big business, unencumbered by the feudal heritage that shaped cricket’s development. Teams passed into private ownership, and the owners formed a cartel: Major League Baseball. For generations the players were serfs, barred from selling their labour in the open market. But spurred by the rebellions of the 1960s, a powerful players’ union emerged to challenge the owners. It’s remarkable that in a country where trade unions are generally weak, the national pastime is so heavily and effectively unionised. Here the gap with cricket is vast. The MLB player’s union can boast that its members enjoy an average annual remuneration of over a million dollars each. Admittedly, the ball players possess rare skills highly prized in a market whose size and wealth is extraordinary. But the point is that they realised their clout in this market through collective bargaining and, when necessary, collective action. They have not hesitated to strike and in doing so they’ve secured major concessions from the owners (compared to whom, the millionaire players are paupers).
The two games share a venerable connection with beer. Bars, pubs and brewing interests have long acted as promoters and sponsors and in baseball as owners. Similarly, gambling fuelled much of the early interest in both sports. In 1919, in what became known as the Black Sox scandal, organized crime bribed the game’s biggest stars to throw the World Series. Despite the revelations of the last decade, there’s nothing in cricket’s annals to compare.
Although baseball was colonised by big business generations before cricket embraced Rupert Murdoch, in some ways it appears a more pristine game. No corporate logos disfigure the uniforms of Major League teams, which bear only the team symbol and the player’s name and number. Like cricket, baseball celebrates its antiquity and heritage, but it puts its money where its mouth is. There’s nothing in the cricket world like the state-of-the art museum in Cooperstown. And though cricket likes to boast of its cultural cachet, baseball’s is arguably richer, certainly more sophisticated – witness novels by Philip Roth or Robert Coover and movies like Bull Durham or Field of Dreams.
One of baseball’s charms is its elastic dramatic structure: the lead can pass rapidly back and forth in the course of single afternoon or evening’s play. Its treasures include the “grand slam home run”, which can transform a game in a way that no single cricket stroke can, and the electrifying “stolen base” and “double play”, for which cricket has no analogies.
Baseball pitchers (equivalent to bowlers) may often look flat-footed and ungainly, but they are magicians with the ball. From a standing position, they hurl it the length of a cricket pitch at 90 MPH plus, and they do so with cunning variety. They can make the ball zip and wobble and dip and swing. They throw ‘curve balls’ that tempt and betray, moving either way late at speed, and humiliating ‘change ups’ (slower balls) that seem to disappear in mid-air, only to materialise after the batter’s swung and missed.
For better or worse, baseball allows substitutes and encourages specialisation to a much grater degree than cricket. There are no all-rounders or tail-enders in Major League baseball, which instead prizes the targeted skills of the relief pitcher (whose artistry often comes into play for no more than a dozen deliveries) or the pinch-hitter (the only baseball jargon to have found its way into cricket, though curiously misapplied: in baseball, a pinch hitter comes in to bat as a substitute late in the game – at ‘the pinch’ – to replace a weaker hitter.)
The ruling ethos of the two games is starkly dissimilar. In comparison to cricket, even in the subcontinent, baseball is noisily abusive. Batters routinely challenge umpires in language blunt and scabrous, questioning their sobriety, eyesight or sexuality. Expressions of dissent that would be severely punished in cricket pass unnoticed on a baseball field. But then, baseball never claimed to be a gentlemen’s game. Indeed, that was part of its democratic appeal to the immigrant populations of US cities, as well as to the small town hinterland.
Cricket’s growth beyond its native shores was, of course, shaped by the British empire. Similarly, baseball’s spread coincides with that of the US empire, a more informal but no less potent form of global domination. The game has mass followings in central and south America, Japan, Korea and the Philippines, and the Caribbean, a rare point of contact with cricket. The Dominican Republic has generated a flow of talent to the Major Leagues comparable to the contribution of Barbados or Jamaica to international cricket.
The most eminent international outpost of the game remains the US’s backyard arch-enemy, Cuba. In 1988, I attended a game between two leading clubs at a stadium in a Havana suburb. The facilities were rudimentary, but the quality of play was outstanding. The crowd was knowledgeable and engaged. In those days it was rare to find anyone with a US passport in Cuba and I was interrogated about Major League baseball, which the Cuban fans follow closely. They asked me how it differed from baseball in Cuba. I said that whereas there was no entry charge (at that time) for top-class baseball in Cuba, if you wanted to watch the Yankees in New York you had to fork over a wad of cash. The man next to me shook his head disapprovingly and said, “Fidel would not allow that”. All of which goes to show that the cultures of baseball, like the cultures of cricket, are creatures of their historic circumstances.
Nonetheless, compared to cricket, baseball’s international reach is limited. Although the Major Leagues suck in talent from all over the world, they display it in a showcase largely confined to the USA. The highest echelon in world competition is not between teams representing countries but among privately owned clubs based exclusively in cites in North America. Is there a better example of nationalist myopia than the American predilection for designating the finals of its domestic season as “the World Series” – contested between the champions of ‘the American League’ and ‘the National League’? In this respect, sadly, baseball faithfully mirrors US society, with its deeply-rooted culture of American exceptionalism.
Much as I adore baseball, in the entirely pointless argument about which is the better game, I come down in the end on cricket’s side. Partly because batting in cricket has more dimensions than in baseball – defensive as well as offensive, with a far greater variety of strokes. Partly because there’s something about the geometry of cricket, with its fixed centre, 360 degree playing arc and moveable periphery, that offers more permutations (and more aesthetic pleasures) than baseball’s frontal, rigid V-shape (outside of which everything is “foul territory”). But above all because baseball lacks cricket’s groundedness. In baseball, the ball makes no contact with the earth on its way to the batter, and thus a prolific source of variation and complication is lost. Local conditions are much less influential in baseball than in cricket, which is blessed with a welter of regional sub-cultures and in which a change of weather can blow the advantage from one side to the other.
Finally, Major League baseball is always played with a new ball and the moment the ball is in any way scuffed or irregular, it is thrown away. So no reverse swing. No spinners’ grip. No seeing off the shine. No debate about when to change the cherry. Instead, the profligacy of a consumer society that recognises no limits to the plunder of natural resources. Or am I reading too much into this? Just as the beauty of cricket always transcended the game’s association with British colonialism, so the seductive entertainment that is baseball has something to offer everyone, whatever their current feelings about its native habitat.
