the bat and ball

i: the introduction

sometimes i think about scotland. especially the sports. ever heard of the highland games? it's like the olympics, but every sport (unless you only want to do the hill run like some kind of regular guy) is about performing the coolest action on the heaviest object while wearing a kilt. if you do this, you win. that's the genre that stayed popular in its homeland. but the one that left is where this story begins.

the other (arguably much more funny) one is rock yelling. you have some form of rock and some form of target, and you really try to get the rock to go at the target, and because the rock does not obey your desires by virtue of being a mindless object, you yell (internally or externally) in a vain attempt to get it to do so. you have now been given a cursory instruction in the ways of golf and curling. but their cousin interests us more today. its name is rounders. say hi.

in the games that share their origins in rounders, we see an important distinction: you, the rock yeller, are now required to move yourself around some kind of track (hi hill running) in avoidance and constant fear of the rock which you have bludgeoned as far away from yourself as possible (the target presumably having moved to the point at infinity) with a big stick. and the rock, well, he's got the other team in his pocket to return him to you as quickly as possible, at which point you will be removed from existence.

ii: why the grass is greener on my side

but you probably knew all that, having clicked on such a clearly polarized article as this. you love cricket, or are about to. after all, it shaped the vernacular of true english and comes in many flavors for whatever kind of sport you happen to want to watch at the time. and so we happily leave our baseball-loving friends who clicked on the other article (last chance) where the sports diverge quite some time before the heart of the victorian era.

to name some pinpoint for the start of cricket, the match regarded as test number one began in march of 1877 with the test that inspired the ashes trophy coming five years later. clearly there was cricket before then, but these matches had most of the rules present in tests today, despite the number of balls in an over not having been standardized yet and some people still thinking timeless tests were a good idea. but importantly, the sense of sportsmanship we now know as the spirit of cricket has been ever-present, something which is notably lacking in baseball. were it not for certain practices i shall keep nameless, the spirit would have remained entirely unsoiled, thus allowing for the complete rejection of baseball by the global population and giving cricket bat and ball dominance. but alas. we settled for odi and t20 for the youth.

also notable is the way cricket flips normal ideas of offense and defense on their heads. the bowling side is often referred to as the "attack" because in cricket offense is empowered to such a great extent that run scoring is inevitable. the only way to stop it is by bowling well. the batsmen are even transmuted into some kind of goalkeeper with their defense of the wicket and remain in their places while it is actually the bowlers who end up taking turns. but perhaps the philosophical implications of this are for another time.

iii: the greatest to ever do it

sir donald bradman is within some amount of statistical error the most outstanding athlete who has ever lived, and the tragic tale of his final hour will indeed be told here, but i must use this opportunity to use statistics knowledge first. cricket actually had batting averages before baseball, calculated as runs divided by wickets conceded, which for don was 99.94, a number seared into the minds of many. useless by itself if you don't know what a normal batting average is, but when compared to all qualified test averages, a statistician will find him over four standard deviations from the mean. to the uninitiated, he is essentially one of a kind. and the reason for the wide knowledge of 99.94 comes from his final innings.

bradman falls just short of 100

scoring centuries is generally regarded as difficult. to average a century is unthinkable. and yet before his final match, bradman had accomplished this mythical achievement with an average of 101.39, needing a single four or even to remain not out to stay there forever. yet he was bowled second ball for a duck, and what became immortalized was the tiny fraction by which his 6996 career runs divided by his 70 wickets falls just short of an average of 100. australia played well enough not to need a second innings, and his numbers were set in stone forever.

iv: bitter rivals

i think i'm onto something at this point when i say i am about to describe to you the two flavors of rivalry, at least in sports like this. the first kind is the one that's existed since time immemorial (at least for a certain modern definition of time immemorial) and is between ancient teams with legacies. the second one is a bit younger but never stops being fiery. these are based off the following archetypes:

the old man rivalry: the ashes

the very first time the english cricket team lost an official test at a home ground, which happened already in the ninth recognized test against australia, made them so mad they burned the bails off a wicket, placed their ashes in an appropriately small urn, and published an obituary for "the ashes of english cricket" in a newspaper. it is this urn that england and australia have (metaphorically) fought for ever since. and it is amazing. the nature of a five-test series means that every other year we get a whole month of this rivalry to build anticipation for and constantly theorize about. but in real life, england and australia are friends. what if they weren't?

the fiery rivalry: india-pakistan

to make a long and complex story i myself may not fully understand short, what was originally british india was split roughly along religious lines to form india from mostly hindu states and pakistan (and bangladesh) from mostly muslim states. they have been natural rivals in many ways since, cricket being a mostly healthy outlet for this. especially as of the 2024 t20 world cup, this has even evolved to the sporting equivalent of proxy wars, with the united states' defeat of pakistan in the super over becoming a way for india to effectively ridicule pakistan until either the usa finally adopts the sport or something even worse happens to pakistan. this rivalry is for those who love that kind of thing.

v: the flow of cricket

cricket used to be a sport without timers. this was eventually declared boring by popular demand, or at least popular consent. the most shortened forms now rival even rugby sevens for length, which loses the epic scale of former years but has been apparently observed to make more money. i shall relate to you this decline step by step.

the timeless test

was the highest form of cricket. a two-innings-a-side test match with unlimited time to play becuase draws (different from ties) are sad. but after the last timeless test was cut short by the english team's need to not miss the last boat home and be stranded in south africa, the time limit was massively shortened from infinity to the comparably small five days.

modern tests

replaced them and have been the highest form of cricket ever since. even then, some regard them as a dying art reserved for old rich people who can afford to dedicate entire work weeks at a time to watching cricket for over six hours a day. the importance of scale aside, though, the next format still takes a big chunk of time out of your day.

one day internationals

(commonly referred to as odi) introduced a new way for an innings to be closed. teams in this format were limited to facing 50 overs even if not all batsmen were out. this allowed for the first real world cups to be played, but by one day was meant one full day, and that was still too much for some people, who invented

twenty20 (the hundred fans this is as close as you get)

and limited the innings to 20 overs. this conveniently shortened cricket to be the same length of time as a baseball game, and due to the popularity of the indian premier league and the ability for teams to wear outrageous colors that were not white cricket was more accessible than ever. this is the widely recommended format for beginners to watch rather than forcing them to sit through a test match and have to choose between actually learning the rules and listening to whatever happened to the commentators at lunch. but a daring few wondered if cricket could be even shorter.

ten10

cut t20 in half. this is rarely seen but is the perfect length of an innings to encourage batters to be entirely flippant with regard to shot selection in hope of scoring as many sixes as possible. but of course, the slippery slope could not end there.

five5

is usually only used for practice matches actually. i have yet to find an official league. only time will tell if popularity shifts below t20 or if even shorter forms could be invented.

vi: alright i'm sold. but what are all these numbers?

first of all: happy for you. second: if any of the following descriptions decrease your total enjoyment of the sport, immediately close this article and go enjoy cricket instead. i will attempt to arrange this section by increasing nerdiness to facilitate this process.

level one: knowledge of what a sport is required beyond this point

teams are shown next to the innings score, denoted as runs-wickets or the reverse in australia because they are different. their names are usually reduced to strings of two to four characters each or maybe a flag or something. if the second team gets more runs than the first, they win. if they don't, they lose. if it's a test, your friend who is making you watch will explain everything instead.

level two: desire to know what is happening when watching baseball required beyond this point

this is what most tv layouts end up looking like. the scores of the batter in runs (balls) are displayed next to their names, with the bat indicating the player on strike. bowler information is next to this in wickets-runs (overs) notation. the bottom right corner is regularly changed out or abandoned.

final scores are usually given by innings, along with possibly information on the best batter and bowler. results are stated as a draw, a tie (in very rare circumstances), or a team winning by some amount of runs, some amount of wickets (possibly with some balls remaining), or in very lopsided tests by an innings and some runs.

final level: tolerance for math and love of cricket required beyond this point

alright we're done looking at things in boxes. you're here for the numbers. so let's look at the numbers people generally see as good indications of overall performance.

offensive stats

batting average

is runs divided by wickets, much simpler than baseball. usually indicative of how many runs a batsman can be expected to score unless instincts tell you otherwise. most useful in tests, but for limited overs forms there is

strike rate

which is average runs scored per hundred balls faced. when it actually matters (outside tests), it should probably be at least 100.

defensive stats (really just bowlers)

bowling average

is the batting average resulting from combining all deliveries onto a single batting card. again, this is the test version, while the limited overs version is

economy

or runs conceded per over. numbers below six or seven are good and numbers much higher than ten are bad, depending on format. combined, these describe the general flow of bowling spells, but like always anything can happen on any given day.

conclusion

now i want to be perfectly clear, i enjoy both baseball and cricket. any sense of divisiveness in this pair of articles is a part of the bit. i really wrote these as an exercise in being funny and to increase your enjoyment of sports as a whole. if i accomplished that, good. otherwise, consider the other article. if you also didn't enjoy that or sports just isn't your thing or both, just wait around. i'll probably write about something else eventually.

eh. this isn't going anywhere anymore. the end (except for, you know, all the baseball that happens in the future).