Our summer game is a lot tougher than yours, Yank!
By the age of eight I had lived in Singapore, Delhi and Bonn, where I spoke the rough Rheinlandisch dialect and, thanks to a Prussian refugee nanny, pukka hochdeutsch. I had spent only a few months in England, which was to all intents and purposes another foreign country. In January 1961, a couple of months after my eighth birthday, the family followed my foreign correspondent father to Washington DC, which was to be our home for the rest of that tumultuous decade.
At first I found America frightening. People seemed rather aggressive, my elementary school was unsympathetic, and I quickly learned that the English (Americans never referred to us as British) were, in the nicest possible way, still the old enemy. Oh, and they condescended to us: England was old-fashioned, economically backward and had only survived the war because the Yanks had rescued us. Basically they thought we were weedy wimps.
I found my feet soon enough, made some good American friends and learned to speak in an American accent at school and out playing. That made it a little tricky when friends came home, and I had to avoid pronouncing words like “can’t” in my mother’s hearing.
Two things were especially important in my acculturation. First, which erupted in April 1961, was the centenary of the outbreak of the Civil War. Or, because I quickly adopted the romantic losing side, the War Between the States. The genius of American capitalism ensured that every child instantly acquired either a blue hat, with the stars and stripes on it, or a grey hat with the stars and bars, and our little platoons of Yankees and Johnny Rebs fought running battles every afternoon round the gardens of Chevy Chase.
The other factor was even more important to me: baseball, the summer game! I saw it played at school, then (when my parents let me) on television, and finally my father started taking me to DC Stadium to see the Washington Senators, the major league team that had been allotted to the nation’s capital in the expansion of the American League franchise. 1961 was its first year in DC, as well as mine. The season was marked by Roger Maria of the New York Yankees hitting 61 home runs to eclipse Babe Ruth’s 34 year old record .
The Senators were an awful team, and it was hard to love them. I generally rooted for the Yankees. But I absorbed the colourful atmosphere of the game, learned something of its history and read much baseball literature, including articles by the great New Yorker writer Roger Angell. “Casey at the Bat”, the tragicomic poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, still captures the drama of the game, and the agonies undergone by its fans. To me, baseball seemed to embody all that was best about my new home.
Cricket of course, was a non-subject. If ever mentioned by Americans, it was in sneering tones, a rather wet boring game played by the limp-wristed English between cups of tea and cucumber sandwiches.
We left Washington for good in the summer of 1970 – the year the Senators moved to Dallas in search of better fans – and tried to adjust to life in England, the very alien place we had always called “home”. It was some years before I began to take an interest in cricket.
One weekday in 1975 a Somerset-supporting friend took me to Lords to watch his team play Middlesex, and to get a look at an apparently exciting new prospect by the name of Ian Botham. I wasn’t much impressed. There was hardly anyone at the ground. Someone who looked like an effete version of Bamber Gascoigne greeted an ungainly looking shot with the words: “Oh, the Harrow cut, by all that’s wonderful!” What?
But then I began to get it. The old Test Match Special on Radio 3 helped, with John Arlott, Brian Johnston et al. And on August 12th 1976 I joined a packed Oval crowd to watch West Indies bat first against England in the 5th and deciding Test. Vivian Richards batting at number 3 made 200 off the last ball of the day; he went on to 291 the following day. England were humiliated. I was hooked.
In the years that followed I tried to get to a day or two of test match cricket every summer. I especially loved Trent Bridge, Nottingham, which had the most knowledgeable and humorous fans. I once found myself among a large party of miners from a Derbyshire pit village, who redefined for me the concept of enjoyment. I was there when Geoffrey Boycott ran out the local hero and upcoming England batting star Derek Randall, and while the old oaf was roundly booed, he received generous applause when later the same day he made a century. Not only was I hooked on cricket, I finally began to like and understand the English.
Baseball had faded from my consciousness, but in theory at least I remained a fan. I didn’t think of it enough even to make comparisons with the English game. Then in 2003, I read Playing Hard Ball, a study of the two games by Ed Smith, then a batsman for Kent, now chair of England selectors. It is a fascinating and well written book by a highly intelligent cricketer who was invited to train with the New York Mets. He identifies that the degree of pressure felt by a cricket batsman is matched not by pressure on the baseball batter but on the pitcher.
What really set me thinking was my first major league ball game in more than 40 years on a visit to Chicago. We saw the Cubs play the St Louis Cardinals at Wrigley Field, the most eccentric of the major league stadia, indeed the one that most evokes the golden glow of baseball’s legendary infancy. All the old charm was there, the mighty Wurlitzer musically stoking up the crowd between innings, hot dogs and beer, the “seventh inning stretch”, the studied poses of the players, the intense partisanship of the fans. And yet, the game itself was rather dull. Many of the players, especially the batters, looked overweight and some were not very fit. Although both sides were playing to win, one sensed that this particular two or three hour contest was unimportant in the context of a season in which each team would play 162 games.
Just look at the basic differences between the two bat and ball games, and you begin to see that there is really no contest. Americans like to talk about hardball, but while both balls are roughly the same size, the cricket ball used in the first class men’s game weighs 10% more than a major league baseball.
And when baseball fielders handle that lighter ball, they wear enormous padded leather gloves. The only cricketer to wear a glove is the wicketkeeper: his opposite number the catcher not only has the biggest baseball glove of all, he wears body armour and a huge cage to protect his face.
The baseball field is a 90% arc with the batting plate at its apex, while the cricket field is the full 360%, with the pitch defended by two batsmen in the middle of the field. The advantage, baseball fans would say, is that the 90% arc focuses the action. The cricketer would counter that the big open field, with the batting at its centre, affords almost infinite variety of action, and demands more of the fielders than the rather formulaic disposition of the baseball diamond.
A baseball player does not need to be particularly fit. Traditionally some of the field positions have been reserved for the lumbering and the overweight: first baseman, for instance, or catcher or right-fielder. Even pitchers can be as rotund as they like, so long as they can pitch the ball the sixty feet six inches from the mound to the batting plate. The only field position that demands real speed and fitness is the shortstop, who covers the crucial space between second and third base.
Professional cricketers really do need to be fit, especially in the modern era, with the traditional first class long form game being supplemented by fifty over and twenty over variants. As in baseball, the less naturally gifted fieldsmen tend to be put on the boundary to deal with long hits, but even they have to run hard to intercept ground balls or make catches. Baseball has nothing to compare with cricket’s specialised fielders who place themselves suicidally close round the batsman to try to catch balls ten or fifteen feet from the bat.
As to batting, again there is no comparison in terms of toughness and endurance. A baseball player generally gets three to five “at-bats” during a game: three strikes and he’s out, unless he gets a hit and reaches base. Once on base he might have to do a little running, but it’s hardly Olympic stuff. A cricket batsman gets only one at bat per innings: he might be out first ball, he might still be there six hours later having amassed a huge score. Of course the batter and the batsman both need to concentrate, but it is longevity as well as intensity that puts batting at cricket into a class of its own.
One advantage that baseball claims is that each game is played over a reasonable period of time, usually less than three hours. That is true, and it makes the game a more marketable commodity than cricket. A five-day test match has to be seen in epic terms – an Odyssey set against baseball’s short story. But with the development of the shorter forms of cricket, especially Twenty-twenty, crowds have grown enormously, as has the earning power of the best players. Cricket may have learned from baseball, but in doing do has retained, or even intensified its essential toughness.
Of course, for true fans, such comparisons are irrelevant. Cricket and baseball are both beautiful games, exciting, challenging and characteristic of the societies they serve. Both have extraordinary histories and legends, and at their best they are – to borrow the title of a great baseball movie – fields of dreams.
But at bat and in the field, cricket is the tougher game – whatever the Yanks may think.
