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I made my way down to the batting cages in Chelsea, Manhattan recently to fulfill a long held curiosity about how someone brought up on cricket would adjust to hitting balls flying out of a pitching machine. And let me tell you, it wasn’t quite as easy as I’d imagined.
The batting cages at the Chelsea Piers have a couple of different speeds.
Once you get past the slow warm-up cage, the idea is to graduate a couple of cages along to the fast pitching set-up, where video footage of a real life pitcher is beamed onto a screen some twenty feet away from which a ball comes flying out of a hole where the hand is placed – just when you least expect it.
Which is the thing about hitting a baseball pitch. It’s onto you much quicker than your instincts imagine.
I played a couple of years of First Eleven cricket at school as an opening batsman, and then knocked around a bit in the years immediately following that. Never to any significant level. But I always thought that I had a pretty decent eye, and the right temperament with which to hit that ball out of the goddamn stadium.
Unfortunately, any allusions I had of starting a professional baseball career at the ripe old age of thirty-something were quickly shattered within the claustrophobic confines of that New York batting cage.
Hitting a baseball is a lot harder than it looks.
And this is without the spins, curves and changes of pace that all major league pitchers throw up.
Yup, give me that shiny red leather and a Gray Nichols bat any day. A ball that bounces just seems a more reasonable target.
Which is not to say that my dismal experiment should in any way be considered the template for potential cross-overs between the sports.
In a recent column in the Times, Mike Atherton quoted Australian fielding coach, Mike Young – a former baseballer himself – as saying that he saw potential in three current cricketers to make the switch:
“Andrew Symonds, of Australia, Dwayne Smith, the West Indian, and Kevin Pietersen, of England, were his picks. All three, he said, had the physical presence, ball-striking skills and speed to the ball to give it a go.”
It’s widely known that Ian Chappell was a baseball enthusiast who would often play the off-season in the local leagues. Less known is the foray of former Essex fast bowler Ian Pont, who had trials as a pitcher with six Major League Baseball teams (including the Yankees and the Phillies).
In 1988, England skipper Graham Gooch staged a ‘hit-off’ with 57 year old Hall of Famer Ernie Banks, and narrowly lost 3 home runs to 2. Of the challenge, Gooch later said: “I hit a number of balls right [on] the screws, but the wind was against me and they just fell short.”
Banks had a different theory.
He told the Boston Globe that Gooch’s problem lay with his swing: “I tried to teach him to swing up and get the ball in the air. He was used to the low, straight swing of cricket, and every time he tried to swing up, he’d pop the ball up.”
Chappell himself wasn’t optimistic about professional cricketers ever making the transition to a professional baseball arena. On a hypothetical match-up between elite cricketers and baseballers, he said bluntly: ‘”It wouldn’t be worth it. There would be no contest, absolutely no contest. Cricket’s batsmen would struggle to get bat on ball, never mind hitting a home run.”
There have been instances reported where professional baseballers have had a crack at cricket.
In 1874, an American baseball team (featuring future Hall of Famer Adrian “Cap” Anson) toured the UK and took part in a few games of cricket against local sides along the way. Although the rules were bent a little to allow them to field 18 players, the Americans were surprisingly competitive, passing 200 runs on several occasions.
Former Cubs great Sammy Sosa hosted a baseball exhibition in London in 2000 and followed that up with a few swings of a cricket bat, just to satisfy his own curisoity. By all reports, he smashed a “number of massive shots with the cricket bat,” before declaring: “if I would have practiced all my life in cricket, I would have made it as a professional.”
With the right training, perhaps it is possible for the two sports to cross-over.
Could Brett Lee have made it as a pitcher, for instance? Or Adam Gilchrest as a hitter?
We’ll never know.
But I got a good taste of just how difficult it is in those Chelsea batting cages.
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