Cricket and Baseball: the forgotten story

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Those were the words of Jacques Barzun. But hearts are curious creatures, often inscrutable to the empirical mind.

For Barzun, there is a wonderful tale, delicious for the cricket fan, and perhaps something of an abomination for the baseball boffin.

Cricket was as popular, if not more so, than baseball in the United States during much of the nineteenth century. Its expulsion from America’s sporting landscape is more due to contrivance than anything else.

At first glance, it is hard to ignore the stark similarities.

The somewhat clownish outfits that suggest an early morning tea (or just tea); the larger, less-than-lean frames that promise a cycle of hearty meals off the pitch. (Between sessions in one cricket match between Australia and England, the English bowlers had champagne.)

Cricketers are far from ‘buff’ and resemble, in many ways, actors of a very long play, cake included. Baseball is different only in terms of duration, replicating the characters and the weighty frames with equal aplomb.

Many baseball followers will be aware of the close presence of cricket amongst English immigrants, notably those on the east coast, where it took hold in such centers as New York, Massachusetts and Philadelphia.

But then come varying accounts of an emerging form of ‘rounders’, a less formal method of the game that sprung up in parts of the colonies.

With that came a new sporting argot: the coining of such terms as ‘striker’ for the batsman and ‘feeder’ for the pitcher, while the fielders were termed ‘scouts’.

As the colonists were exercising their self-appointed right to break away from Britain, George Washington, it has been said, was dabbling in the game at Valley Forge.

Even during the 1840s and 1850s, cricket could still keep pace with its emerging baseball competitor.

The first international cricket match took place between Canada and the United States in 1844. There were cricket clubs in 22 states. The Hall of Famer, Henry Chadwick was first, a cricket reporter before falling for baseball at a game in Hoboken, N.J. in the mid-1850s.

Even in the 1920s, you could find the legendary Babe Ruth speaking of cricket in a rather positive light, wishing he could have used ‘a wide bat like this in baseball’ (AP, Apr 14).

The first sporting field space set up in newly planned Central Park in New York was, in fact, called ‘the cricket Ground’ (Guardian, Jul 3, 2005).

Propaganda is everything. Baseball had a fabulous promoter in the form of the manufacturer of sporting goods AG Spalding, whose 1888 ‘All Star’ baseball tour was a resounding success.

With congressional backing, an investigative commission effectively excised any British involvement with baseball.

The sting of cricket was finally removed, and the origins of baseball put down to the efforts of Civil War hero Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown in upstate New York. (Doubleday was, in fact, nowhere near Cooperstown in 1839, being cadet at Westpoint.)

The patriotically pressing moment, the Civil War, did much to make sure that cricket fell behind in the popularity stakes.

Not only did that conflict define the American state through the mysticism of the Union, it did much to define one of its key sports. For one thing, baseball was easier to play on rougher pitches in war time.

With the British-free fiction happily established, the United States could move forth ‘free’ of its cricket connections. In truth, there is much for fans of both codes to appreciate.

The famed Australian Chappell brothers never stop extolling the virtues of baseball, a game that sharpened their skills.

Then, the rich folklore, the statistical mania that inhabits fans like a brooding, omnipresent god. Only chess players are more unbearable in their interest in archaic statistical fancies.

Bradman stimulates a near orgasmic reaction in the cricket fan; Babe Ruth a similar one in the field of baseball.

Such exhibitions as those at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, currently running, will do much to bring a historical appreciation of cricket back to the New World. But the denial is bound to continue.