5 Ways that Cricket is cooler than Baseball

Rich here.

Indians as a whole are rabid cricket fans. There's typically a game on as I'm walking by the cafeteria and if there's a big match, like India versus Pakistan, everything in the country basically grinds to a halt.

Traditional cricket takes morning till dark for five whole days to play a single match that often ends up in a draw. A shortened "one day cricket" version of the game caught on because not a lot of people have time to sit and watch a single game for five days anymore. A whole day is still a lot of time for me, but finally a new game has come on the scene called Twenty20 (or T20 for short). This one is only a couple of hours, like a baseball or football game, and it is actually a pretty fun sport to watch.

So what is cricket anyway? A very rough approximation is that it's baseball with only two bases, and the batter stays at bat until the somebody knocks down some sticks the batter is standing in front of or somebody catches a pop fly.


I took our 100 software engineers out for a professional T20 game recently. As much as I'd hate to admit it, I actually enjoyed it just as much if not more than a baseball game. So at the risk of sounding un-American, here are:

Five Ways Cricket is Cooler than Baseball

1. The Batsmanship

In basball there is only one type of swing, two if you count bunting. The strike zone is pretty small. In cricket the strike zone is huge. The bowler can throw it right at your feet, to your right or left or straight at your hands.

You don't necessarily have to hit the ball ahead like you do in baseball. The two bases are in the middle of a big round field. Sometimes the batsman will pop the ball up and over their head behind them. Or hit it back and to the side. Or just try and wack it out of the park. The variety of different kinds of swings is huge and the batting part of the game a lot more interesting.

I've tried playing a couple of times and am certainly not a very athletic person, but I've found hitting in cricket darn near impossible.

2. The pitching

The pitcher doesn't just stand there and throw the ball. These guys are athletic. They run towards the batter, and the rules for throwing make it so you can't cock your arm, it has to stay straight. So they kind of hurl themselves forward at it.

The pitcher (or bowler) takes a huge running start, sprints towards the line on the left, jumps over the line, and before his foot touches the ground, hurls the ball at the batsman. Typically, the ball bounces once on the ground before reaching him.

These bowlers are able to achieve near-fastball types of speeds doing this. There is another pitching style where they don't run as fast, but spin the ball so that it breaks after hitting the ground.

Visually, the whole spectacle of the bowler running across the field and throwing themselves at the batsman is a lot of fun to watch.

3. More wholesome controversy

Every sport has it's controversies, it's part of the fun. Baseball has certainly had its share in the last few years.

Cricket has its share as well but they are of a much more wholesome variety. There are two big ones I can think of recently. One was where an Indian player talked some trash to an Australian on the field. Now you don't have to be a professional lipreader to understand some of the vile expletives that cross the fields of American sports.

The Indian player's crime: He called the Australian a "monkey". Charges of racism flew and the whole thing ended up in big protests across India with people burning effigies of umpires.

The other burning issue that I got to witness firsthand at the cricket match I attended was this:


You can't see it very well, but those are cheerleaders that were imported from the USA for India's new cricket league. I think they are from the Washington Redskins.

When they first came to India, they wore the skimpy outfits that are standard fare for the ladies in that profession. There was such a hue and cry from the local political leaders they either got banned or in the case of the ones I saw in Delhi, dressed up better, so now they are covered up from head to toe. The debate rages on, after all the outfits are not any worse than your typical Bollywood movie dance number. This sort of debate is very refreshing after having to endure the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction wall-to-wall news coverage back home.

(One interesting note is that they didn't let some of the dark-skinned cheerleaders perform. The sad part is that this didn't didn't really generate much buzz in the local newspapers.)

4. The drama of the game

The fun of sport are those dramatic moments. Sure, in baseball you've got the home run, but cricket has that too. Players slide into the bases in baseball but in cricket also does it: They dive headfirst towards the line with their bats sticking out.

The key difference between cricket and baseball is this: There is only one inning in the whole game, and each player gets only one shot at bat. If you get out, you're done for the whole game. The good news is that you keep hitting until you are out. In regular cricket, it is possible for a really good batsman to stay at bat for a really long time, slogging it out for whole day or two and score over a hundred points. (That's why the regular game takes days and days to finish, you have to get twelve guys out this way and they are mostly just bunting all the time to keep from getting out.)


So when somebody gets out, it doesn't happen very often and it is a big deal. If the batter gets struck out these sticks get knocked down and sometimes go flying through the air. If a pop fly is caught, the whole team goes crazy. The fielder throws the ball high into the air and the whole team runs towards the fielder where they all hug and celebrate.

In the meanwhile, the batter slowly walks back alone across that big round field to the dugout, his head held in shame.

5. The fans

Here are some of my employees getting painted up for the game.


Could a billion people this nice-looking be wrong?




For those of you who are interested in reading on, here is a quick primer on the rules of the game:

The Rules

Here's a picture of the cricket field we went to as they were warming up and getting it ready:

The game is played on a big round field with the batting happening in the middle. At the bottom of the picture you can see a boundary line that goes around the entire field. Batters can hit the ball in any direction.

Cricket is a bit like baseball, there's a pitcher (called the "bowler"), and a batter (called the "batsman"), and a bunch of fielders standing around. The fielders have to cover a huge area.

Instead of bases like in baseball there are two lines with a set of three sticks, called "the wicket", behind each line. These sticks are just lightly tapped in the ground and can be easily knocked over by a ball. There is a batsman behind each of the lines, only one of which is batting at a time.

The bowler takes a big running start, throws the ball and the batsman then tries to hit it. If he succeeds, he runs from his safe area towards the line on the other side. The guy on the other side also runs the other way, and they keep switching places back and forth from line to line for as long as they feel safe doing so.

There are three basic ways to score:

1. They get one point for each time the batsman on the right crosses the batsman on the left as they are running back and forth, switching places. So if the batter hits a good grounder, they might run back and forth twice and score two points.
   
2. If the batsman hits the ball hard enough that it rolls out of the big round boundary before a fielder stops it, they score an automatic four points.
3. If the batsman hits a home run out of the boundary, they get six points.

There are three basic ways to get out:

1. Just like in baseball, if the ball is caught by a fielder before hitting the ground, you're out.
2. If when one of the batsmen is running between the lines, one of the fielders throws the ball and knocks over the sticks, you're out.
3. If the bowler pitches the ball to you and the ball knocks over the sticks right behind you, you're out.
   

In regular cricket they play two innings and in each inning they have to get all 12 players out (or the sun sets on the 5th day and the match is declared a draw.) They shorten the game by fixing the number of pitches. Twenty20 means that each team gets twenty "overs" or groups of six pitches. After 120 pitches, the teams switch sides and whoever got the most points wins.