A Texas Yankee on King Arthur’s Court, Er, Pitch

His name was Gary, but I was calling him Clive.

Measuring 1.7 meters and 11.7 stone — or, in Yankee terms, 5-foot-7 and 165 pounds — Clive (née Gary) stood poised behind the bowling crease while greedily eyeing my wicket, preparing himself, just as I had prepared myself, for the inaugural delivery of our newly established cricket league, which we had deemed, with quite some license and Anglophile affectation, the Lone Star Cricket Collective and League of Non-Wanker Sportsmen.

“All right, chum,” I called from the batting crease as I grasped the bat in my anxious hands. “Give me your finest googly! — or, failing that, your most sporting variety of leg break!”

In the manner of Brits from whom we’d inherited the game, I made sure to enunciate the “t” while articulating the sort of formalized phraseology Jane Austen might have penned.

“Verily,” Clive replied, succinctly, as he gripped the ball and prepared for his debut bowl.

Bittersweet and remarkably vivid, the memory of that long-ago afternoon came flush to my mind’s eye last month when I read of a pair of recent and dovetailing developments: On one side of the pond, a former professional cricket player named Kieran Powell is attempting to convert his bat-and-ball skills into those of a salaried baseball player, while on the other, a former minor league baseball player named Boomer Collins is attempting (with equal courage) quite the opposite, transforming his talents into a career in professional cricket.

At a glance, the conversion for each man would seem a far less dicey endeavor than that of, say, a soccer player attempting gainful employment in the National Basketball Association, or a tennis player indulging his crossover dreams in a Formula 1 cockpit. Baseball and cricket share histories and attributes, each a so-called safe haven sport derived from the bat-and-ball games of Old Europe and each still a game in which the players, in one way or another, throw and hit and field a round ball in accordance with the rules of governance.

But a closer look at the stories of those who’ve endeavored the change might also reveal that the physical adaptations are less easily generated than the inspiration itself. For my part, I remember it well and feel it still: the bat in my hands, my eyes on the ball and the longing to hit the thing so hard that a league would have little choice but to recognize my transfiguration and continue to make space for me, a batsman with a brand-new bat.

…

The wood had once felt so foreign, a cylindrical handle widening to a blade better suited to corporal punishment in some Dickensian school, but now, after a few rounds of what we still called “batting practice,” it had begun to feel familiar, as comfortable as a baseball bat had felt in the time before I gave it up. Having budgeted such that pints of beer and impulse buys superseded food and lodging, Gary and I had purchased the cricket bat, along with the ball and wicket, in a Lake District variety shoppe while traipsing bearded and otherwise penniless across the British Isles the previous summer. And now here we were, at opposite ends of the makeshift pitch in the lawn beside our college dorm, poised on the brink of a baptismal showdown that had drawn its motivation as much from a desire to hold onto our native game — baseball, and all the sensations it delivered — as from the admittedly half-arsed ambition to demystify an alien sport by taking grasp of its equipment and winging it.

In the days before we became Clive and Ian, respectively, Gary and I had played baseball together on school and summer teams, trying our best to sustain the dream of becoming as skilled as the men on our baseball cards even as we attempted, without uniform success, to “hit the cut-off man” and “take the ball the other way” in ways that our coaches had dreamed of but, alas, likely hadn’t expected. Upon high-school graduation, Gary had done the appropriately smart and mature thing by replacing his plans for Triple Crowns and MVP trophies with college-entrance essays and a summer job at a corner gas station, while I, by contrast, had refused to disown the dream and instead had prepared to walk on at a Division I university by going to the batting cage and, of course, mowing lawns.

Ultimately, having discovered by way of first-hand research and second-hand accounts that college baseball would interfere with spring break, I had walked off almost as quickly as I’d walked on, leaving the dirt of the diamond for the sand of the beach. (One part of education, I had learned, is recognizing priorities and making efforts to advance them.) Within a year of dropping baseball, however, I had begun to regret the move. It wasn’t so much the “camaraderie” I missed. Casualties of time and age, retired ballplayers always spoke of abandoned fellowship as the price of a career of the game. No, camaraderie I had. I was in college, where camaraderie is as easily achieved as laundry. What I missed was the sensation of hitting a ball with a bat — the feeling, even harder to describe than it is to achieve, of striking a sphere with a stick in a way that conveys across the body a smooth gentle wave, all softness, even as impact echoes.

Now I stood with the bat in hand, ready to restore the kinetic bliss by way of a surrogate object from a faraway place. I wouldn’t be the last to attempt this restoration. Kieran Powell and Boomer Collins would help ensure it. But neither was I the first — not by a long shot.

…

A long shot? By one definition it’s an unlikely event, something with little chance of happening. By another, it’s a deeeeeeep drive, one that baseball calls a “homer” and cricket a “six.” By any definition, it served as an apt descriptor of my abiding objective as I stood at one end of the makeshift pitch, just as it likely described the aim of each athlete who had attempted the conversion, for however long and for whatever reason, before me.

In 1874, a group of American baseball players journeyed to the United Kingdom to introduce to the British public a singularly Yankee sport, despite the irony that the first known reference to baseball appears in the diary of British solicitor William Bray, who in 1775 described a game of “base-ball” he and friends had played in a Surrey village. Medieval England had been host to a variety of games featuring a wooden stick and a round moving object, and more than a few men, having traveled to places where localized games took root, had wielded an assortment of sticks in efforts to square the mandates of a particular place with the urge to whack an airborne ball. Among the group of touring baseball players was a native of Great Britain named Harry Wright, who, according to tour organizers, was “the first and only player to play cricket and baseball at the highest level.”

En route across the Atlantic, and in preparation for the cricket matches the Americans would also play, Wright coaxed the players away from liquor just long enough to provide a bit of cricket instruction, likely telling them, if we may indulge the fantasy of a post factum eavesdrop, to focus on the bowler’s release area to determine the “line and length” of the delivery; to make a quick decision whether to play an offensive or a defensive shot; to render an equally speedy decision whether to hit the shot off the front foot or the back foot; to select a batting stroke from a repertoire of glances, flicks, cuts, drives, scoops, ramps, hooks, pulls, sweeps, reverse sweeps, slogs and slog sweeps; to shift the weight properly while loading a strong top hand and then to strike the ball such that it avoids the square leg, silly point, mid-off and other defensive positions; and above all else, to protect the bloody wicket.

It worked. The baseballers went undefeated in their cricket matches, albeit with the advantage of fielding 18 players to the Brits’ conventional 11. Despite the Yanks’ (asterisked) success, Wright still judged cricket superior to baseball, more challenging in its mental and physical demands and more rewarding when those demands were met.

“There is really more science and enjoyment for the player in cricket,” claimed Wright, a Baseball Hall of Famer. “There are a hundred points in batting that one has to bear in mind.”

Those “hundred points” — roughly the same number that I would confront more than a century later, and that Collins is confronting now — were (and are) the consequence of a key element of cricket: that the bowler (i.e., pitcher) delivers the ball such that it bounces en route to the batsman. If we allow that the stick-and-ball games of the Old World and the New World — cricket, rounders, baseball, et al — are hybridized forms of ancestral sources and the close cousins of other descendants, it is both helpful and terrifying to envision the duel between bowler and batsman as a composite of tennis and field hockey. Imagine, if you dare, the prospect of Novak Djokovic launching a triple-digit serve, with topspin and/or side-spin, at a dude wielding a wooden stick just 66 feet distant.

The ball, Wright was saying, can go a hundred different directions.

Of course, baseball’s counterargument might cite a similar number of pathways for its pitches, emphasizing by way of empirical heat maps and anecdotal at-bats that baseball isn’t golf. The ball is never, nor ever will be, placed politely upon a tee. Indeed, it is worth noting that across his seven seasons of major league baseball, Wright hit just .276 with four home runs (née sixes). And this was before the advent of the knuckleball.

For his part, Babe Ruth at first struggled mightily during a London cricket exhibition in 1935, flailing at a variety of offerings whilst in an “orthodox guard,” i.e., a stance with the bat positioned upside down and its top on the ground. After switching to his baseball stance, however, the Babe pounded several drives before telling the press, “Sure, I could smack that ball all right. How could I help it when you have a great wide board to swing?”

Other men would attempt the baseball-cricket crossover, or vice-versa, with various degrees of success and failure. In the early 20th century, Australian Bill Ponsford alternated seasonally between baseball and cricket and, by all accounts, acquitted himself in “good onya!” fashion on both fields. (During a visit Down Under in 1913, New York Giants manager John McGraw reportedly spoke to then-teenaged Ponsford about the possibility of his playing baseball in the United States.) In 1957, former amateur cricketer Andre Rodgers became the first native Bahamian to reach the big leagues when he debuted at shortstop for the Chicago Cubs, replacing the great Ernie Banks. (By coincidence, Banks would go on to participate in a home run derby against Graham Gooch, one of cricket’s top batsman, in 1988.) For Rodgers, the biggest adjustment wasn’t the oddly shaped bat or differently sized ball; it was learning not to jump away from the curveball as if enemy mortar fire were incoming. Mind you, Rodgers learned sufficiently well to play 11 years in the majors, but he registered just a .249/.328/.365 career slash line and 45 lifetime home runs.

Some time later, in the decades just prior to Kieran Powell’s switcheroo, cricketers Ian Pont and Ed Smith made stabs at professional baseball by auditioning for the Phillies and Mets, respectively. Both failed, and with little delay. Now it is Powell’s turn at the plate.

His challenge is the one I once faced: to hit a foreign object with a non-native bat.

Gazing out from my crease as Clive gazed out from his, I tried to impress upon myself the leverage I wielded rather than the difficulties I faced. Instead of fretting about the bounce of the leg break, I considered the width of my British-made bat. I thought of the sort of board, wide at the sweet spot, that Babe once brandished and that I brandished now.

…

Thirty-two square inches! — 800 percent larger than the sweet spot on a baseball bat!

According to an ESPN Sports Science segment, these are the numerical identifiers of a cricket batsman’s advantage. It’s like swinging a conveniently sized ironing board, one might think upon taking his stance. How can I possibly miss?

But cricket, alas, has answered this gleefully rhetorical question with ominously hard truth. Per the same ESPN segment, it is a fact of science that a batsman must shift his gaze to the spot where he thinks the ball will bounce — thinks, mind you, as this spot is neither preordained nor predictable — just 200 milliseconds after its release, less time than a baseball player has to initiate his swing on a 95-mph fastball. Just as worrisome for the batsman is that the bounce can reduce the ball’s speed by 40-plus percent, a change-up if ever there was one. Add to these calculations those 100 Wrightsian points, and what you have is an “ironing board” insufficient for the job at hand, especially when factoring in the dispiriting fact that 11 fielders are waiting — in the words of the sport and its homeland — to dismiss you forthwith. Quite.

Granted, I personally didn’t face the prospect of 11 fielders during to my debut; scattered across the makeshift field were half a dozen dudes with differing levels of interest in stopping a struck ball from, say, rolling to the women’s dorm or soaring into a Subaru. For Collins, however, those 11 fielders are a collective reality in his cricket dream, as are all the yorkers and corkers he must attempt to strike with a strange upward swing.

A native Texan like yours truly, Collins, 26, is working with a former cricket player-turned-baseball player-turned-cricket coach named Julien Fountain in efforts to Anglicize his Yankee cut; that is, to convert the horizontal baseball swing into a vertical swing more suitable to turning a doosra into a cover drive, or a googly into a six. For his part, Fountain is promoting a new form of cricket called T20 as he works to match Collins to the emerging sport. Geared toward a younger audience and its cellphone-age attention span, T20 has dispensed with the days-long matches of Test cricket — along with its lunch breaks and tea breaks, its scones and Earl Grey — in favor of shorter matches that de-emphasize the defensive strokes of traditional cricket while spotlighting the power strokes that produce quick scoring. Think 007 in a trucker’s cap, or Queen Elizabeth at Golden Corral.

It is British sport just a wee bit Americanized, aye.

Even so — even with cricket having embraced the essence of Honey Boo Boo and Cheez Whiz — Collins at first found the baseball-cricket exchange rate a difficult thing to manage. In a story published in January, he told MiLB.com that after pounding several drives early in his first practice match against members of the Indian Premier League, he fell victim to more experienced bowlers who quickly discovered his weaknesses and exploited them. In effect, he said, the veterans ate his Cheez Whiz lunch.

Said Collins, “They just wore me about for about an hour.”

It is precisely this sort of growing pain that Powell is facing in his own immersion program. Just as Collins must learn to distinguish a googly from a doosra and a glance from a slog, the 25-year-old Nevisian must master not only the basics of an alien game but also its nuances. Indeed, just as Dinesh Patel and Rinku Singh — the real-life subjects of Million Dollar Arm — had to learn something so simple as how to wear a glove and something not so simple as which base to back up on a bases-loaded single to center field, so must Powell, a prospective outfielder, grasp both the big things and the little things. He must learn to throw to the proper base — let’s call that little, even if it’s often big — and, like Rodgers, train himself not to jump back from curveballs as if they were mortar fire.

Verily, as he told The Sporting News in January, the hook is his rudest Yankee awakening.

Says Powell:

I was like, ‘Oh my God, what just happened?’ I thought ball was coming at me and then it just dipped. I was like, ‘Holy hell, how did he do that with a ball? That surely defies physics.’”

As I sit here today, I remember it well and see it still: the barmy strangeness — the weird gobsmackery — of wielding a foreign bat while eyeing the curious path of an alien ball.

…

Every sport is a complex of norms and peculiarities, of rules so fundamental yet rituals so distinct that its players might fail to consider the game’s accessibility on the one hand and its inscrutability on the other. When Gary and I were in Great Britain, we used both hands in a manner at once foreign and familiar by playing pitch-and-catch with the baseball and baseball gloves we’d brought from America and passed curiously through Customs. I still recall the attention we attracted when, having failed to locate the monster from the shores of Loch Ness, we fetched the equipment from our rucksacks and commenced a day of not quite Walter Johnson-like fastballs and Tinker-to-Evers (alas, no Chance) double plays.

Accustomed to cricket but only marginally so to baseball, lads from town marveled at our bent-elbow throwing motions — in cricket, remember, the bowler throws with a straight arm — but cited our use of leather gloves as a valid basis for questioning our manliness, this despite the fact that we were very much their elders. In a seaside village on the Isle of Skye, where the sun set at midnight and locals still danced to Lonely Teardrops, patrons outside the hoora barry pub gathered round as if Gary and I were each the protagonist from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, owner of magical objects and purveyor of mystical acts. I had never been a pitcher, but mine was the best slider they’d seen.

Though made of the same stock, the bat-and-ball sports under the Union Jack and Old Glory have undergone remarkable speciation, evolving such that the adaptations had obscured their passing resemblance. And indeed, as Gary and I shared stouts with the locals that evening, we tried but failed to convey the subtleties of the infield fly rule even as Ewan and Dougal, et al, foundered in their efforts to explain the nuances of “leg before wicket.”

Now, however, the cross-pollination that ultimately helped separate baseball from the other stick-and-ball sports has reasserted itself in a variety of in-progress forms, each drawing a sport and its audience into new unions. Not only has Million Dollar Arm created a fascinating merger of traditions and cultures, it has also spawned Million Dollar Bat, giving baseball batters a chance to play in the Indian Premier League. What’s more, T20 cricket has begun to attract a multilocal following to its unabashedly home run-derby style. Last November, three American cities — New York, Houston and Los Angeles — played host to the Cricket All-Stars Series 2015, in which two teams competed in T20 matches in efforts to seed the sport on American soil. What seemed a fitting image, with regard to the organizers’ vision, was the sight of sixes flying deep into the Dodger Stadium bleachers.

It was exactly that sort of six — that sort of long shot — I had in mind on the makeshift pitch beside our college dorm that day. Before me stood the chum formerly known as Gary, assembling his history and directing it toward our future in the sport, and beyond him the half dozen blokes, formerly known as dudes, who at varying degrees on the eagerness spectrum had agreed to roster spots on this pioneering team. In truth, we hadn’t launched a league so much as a squad of proto-cricketers — a squad, I hoped, that would announce the arrival of cricket and inspire other students to quickly enroll their jolly good talents.

No experience necessary, I’d proclaim, forthrightly. Because, yeah — who on campus had ever played cricket? Who knew a dibbly dobbly from a death rattle, a flipper from a floater?

Every sport, at every stage, is in transition. Though bound to its history and constrained by its traditions, it is nonetheless obedient to the winds of change. From my perspective in the batting crease, the wind was blowing out — out toward the women’s dorm, out toward a beautiful new audience, indeed! — and as Clive began the run-up to his debut delivery, I imagined a foreign yet familiar sound, a crack!, and the smooth gentle wave once lost but now found…and the softness pulling me back to baseball while pushing me toward cricket.

What I did not imagine, but what I can still see and feel, was the bat snapping in half.

Crack, indeed.

Whatever challenges Boomer Collins and Kieran Powell face, this will not be among them. One imagines — one knows — their leagues are in possession of more than one bat.

References & Resources

• Eric Miklich, 19c Base Ball, “1874 World Base Ball Tour”
• MLB.com, “Base Ball Discovered: The Diary of William Bray”
• Fiskerton Cricket Club, “Cricket Shots”
• Andy Bull, The Guardian, “Babe Ruth, Don Bradman and cricket’s uneasy relationship with baseball”
• Lyle Wilson & Rory Costello, SABR, “Andre Rodgers SABR Bio”
• Joe Gray, BaseballGB, “Countdown to SABR Day 2011: 1980s Cobbette – Gooch vs Ernie Banks and Botham (vs Hank Aaron)”
• Ed Smith, The Economist, “Time for a needle match: cricket against baseball. Which is the better sport?”
• ESPN Sport Science, “Cricket vs. Baseball”
• Cricket Victoria, “Batting Fundamentals”
• Paul Rhys, CNN, “T20 takes off: Baseball fuels cricket’s rise”
• Scyld Berry, The Telegraph, “It’s not cricket, but baseball is making its mark on our game”
• Tyler Maun, MiLB.com, “Former Blue Jay Collins trying hand at cricket”
• David Waldstein, The New York Times, “Cricket Star Kieran Powell Tosses His Bat and Picks Up a Smaller, Rounder One”
• Ryan Fagan, The Sporting News, “Q&A: Former cricket star Kieran Powell talks about transition to baseball”
• Press Trust of India, The Indian Express, “‘Million Dollar Bat’ to hunt for US-born IPL star”
• Peter Della Penna, ESPN Cric Info, “Noise levels trump numbers as stars wind up roadshow”