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Things are just too easy on the batters. They use a huge bat with a big flat face. The "bowler", the guy pitching the ball, throws from six feet further away than a baseball pitcher and has to throw straight-arm. He does his throw at a dead run, which may add five miles per hour to the pitch but eliminates any chance of actually aiming the ball, not to mention making curve balls impossible. The batter swings on every pitch and isn't penalized for hitting the ball badly. (A "foul ball" isn't a "strike" because they don't have either concept.) And when the batter is running after hitting the ball, he only has to run 66 feet to be "safe" instead of baseball's 90 feet. If he hits the ball just 250 feet, he gets the cricket equivalent of a home run, for which he gets six whole points! (In most ballparks you need to hit the ball 500 feet or more for a home run.) The ten fielders are spread out in a 360-degree arc. (In baseball you've got 8 fielders in a 90 degree arc, with a ball outside that arc being out of play.) And the fielders aren't even permitted to use mits, which means you're going to get a lot more missed catches. Everything is stacked in the batter's favor; no wonder they score hundreds of points per game. A cricket batter is lauded for scoring a hundred points in one inning; I presume that "only" scoring thirty would be embarassing. By contrast, yesterday Sammy Sosa hit three home runs in one game, the fourth time in his career that he's done that -- and Sosa is one of the best baseball batters in the game today. He had six RBI's, which is very high indeed. Most baseball players consider it to have been a good game if they score one point or get one RBI. If you put any reasonably competent baseball pitcher in there, and let him throw in the manner he knows, he'd put each batter out in five pitches or less (instead of sometimes dozens in cricket). All he has to do is get the ball past the batter and hit the wicket once. He only has to get one strike per out? And no penalty for "balls"? Heaven! Absolute pitcher heaven. The inning would be over in ten minutes, instead of taking up to a day. Any competent baseball pitcher is quite capable of putting a baseball through a 6-inch diameter ring better than half the time. And his pitched ball is going to be moving a damned sight faster, too -- none of this bouncing on the ground nonsense. It's routine for a fastball to exceed 90 mph, and I've seen 100's on occasion. That's going to make a standard cricket pitch look like a snail. Cricket bat or no cricket bat, an 85 mph curve ball or a 95 mph fastball are damned tough to stop. In fact, the timing is critical. A 95 mph fastball would take 475 milliseconds to travel the length of a cricket pitch. That's not a lot of time to evaluate where it's coming and try to guess how it's going to curve and then to actually swing your bat to meet that ball. On the other hand, you'd be taking a lot of pansy wicketmen to hospital; there's a good reason why a baseball catcher wears a mask and all that padding. But forget baseball pitchers. Even an American softball pitcher could wipe these guys out. Women's baseball at the collegiate level is fast-pitch softball, and while "fast pitch" isn't as fast as men's pitching, it's no slowpoke. A typical pitch is 65 mph -- with curves, rises, drops and high accuracy (and no bouncing on the ground). Like baseball pitchers, fast-pitch softball pitchers have to fool batters to get three strikes, and they do all the same kinds of things that baseball pitchers do in terms of aiming and putting spins on the ball. The best softball pitchers are about as accurate as baseball pitchers are. The resulting pitch is devilishly hard to hit. And they make their pitch standing still (running is for wusses) by windmillling their arm one time and then releasing underhand. As far as I can tell from this page, that would be a legal cricket pitch, because they do indeed keep their elbow stiff during the entire throw. (Of course, cricket might also ban the windmill. Wimps.) After she got used to the smaller cricket ball, I bet any collegiate softball pitcher could also take one of these pussies out in an average of five pitches. Of course, cricket batters get to carry their bats when they run. Do they get to use them on opposing players if they get in the way? Perhaps I was too hasty in calling them wusses. (discussion in progress) |
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