Cricket and its long‑lost rogue cousin, baseball, enjoyed an emotional reunion over the weekend. Jimmy Anderson pitched in front of a crowd almost twice as big as any he has bowled in front of in England, and in all more than 100,000 people attended a two‑game series between the Chicago Cubs and St Louis Cardinals at the London Stadium, constituting a mere 0.08% of the Major League Baseball regular season. Indian Premier League franchise owners no doubt cast envious eyes at baseball, dreaming wistfully of a 2,430-game regular season. Cricketers may be tempted by $350m (£275m) 12-year contracts.
The weekend offered everything sports watchers in Britain have come to expect from visiting American major‑league events – a large crowd with considerable enthusiasm for the sport, but understandably limited emotional investment in the result, an armageddon’s‑worth of cholesterol and a stadium announcer with the kind of deeply sonorous and unquenchably American voice that could imbue a village-fete cake competition with a sense of fundamental sporting gravity.
From my admittedly unscientific research, sitting high in the stands over the left-field wall, the crowd seemed to consist of a good-natured cocktail of American tourists, baseball-curious sports fans and British baseball enthusiasts, many of them a legacy of the days when MLB action occupied the late-night hours of the Channel 5 schedule, hosted by Jonny Gould, a much‑loved production which achieved a rare televisual blend of insight, expertise, humour and enthusiasm.
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They saw a dominant Chicago victory on Saturday, the Cubs establishing a seven-run lead by the end of the fourth of nine innings, driven by two soaring Ian Happ home runs (it is, admittedly, difficult for a home run to do anything other than soar), and a difficult outing for the veteran Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright. The flicker of a St Louis revival came to nothing.
The game on Sunday began in a flurry of fielding errors (presumably because of the teams’ lack of red‑ball cricket in the buildup). The Cubs raced to a four-run first‑inning lead before the Cards, one of MLB’s worst-performing teams this season, finally roused from their slumbers to take a 7-5 victory in a game replete with hits but devoid of home runs, finished by the closing pitcher Jordan Hicks in a flurry of 103mph rockets.
On both days, there seemed to be a healthy contingent of cricket fans in attendance. If you love one of these two historic sports you can, with the right induction, learn to love the other. (And if, as all correct-thinking humans do, you love cricket statistics, baseball offers more stats than the entire readership of the Guardian has had hot dinners.)
Twenty20 cricket has been, often disparagingly, likened to baseball but the latter is – in tone, pacing and structure – much more akin to the rhythms and moods of Test cricket (assuming the current Bazballistic version of England are not batting). Its fundamental state of existence is inaction with the constant possibility of drama, rather than constant action with the occasional outbreak of actual tension.
As in cricket, each delivery shifts the story of the game, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes strikingly, and if the intricacies of the art and deception of pitching are hard to discern from 150 metres or so away, the eruption of timing and power in a home run, the smooth, high-speed precision choreography of a double play, and the sheer velocity of a well‑whanged ball are aesthetic treats for any sport lover.
Beyond the novelty of seeing high‑level baseball in London, the spectator experience was, as spectator experiences tend to be at such events, largely indistinguishable from anything else. Any gaps in play were filled with something or other from the Anything to Avert The Remote Possibility of Crowd Spontaneity file. The unquestioned highlight was a half-lap mascot race in which a giant Winston Churchill and an even‑more‑than‑usually‑oversized Henry VIII showed the value of top-level leadership experience by streaking away from a showboating Freddie Mercury and a generic bearskin-hatted Grenadier Guard, who seemed overawed by the occasion as much as hindered by his impractical headgear, and failed to mount even a ghost of a challenge. The guardsman’s highly suspicious win in the Sunday race smacked of the kind of dubious fixing that has undermined mascot sporting contests for too long.
The game itself was introduced by MLB this season, which have led to a significantly faster, more fluent spectacle. Cricket (not uniquely in sport) has yet to acknowledge that, whatever the quality of the action, dawdling never adds to it. With its slumping over rates in men’s and women’s games, endless interruptions, glacially moving umpires, and four-hour T20 games, if cricket is not feverishly studying this blueprint for product improvement it is even more of an administrative buffoon than its supporters had assumed.
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In the event of the much prophesied DeathOfTestCricket™, if and when the five-day game finally succumbs to the ravening myopic maw of the so-called “free” markets, baseball will offer a refuge for those who seek a contest with a similar narrative nature.
Post-season baseball in particular, in which teams compete over a series of matches with lasting resonance within the history of the sport, in which the impact of each significant play and tactical decision is magnified and scrutinised, which fluctuates and evolves over days and weeks, is the closest (and perhaps only) available alternative to Test matches.
The links between the two sports have included a 1932 meeting between baseball’s defining player, Babe Ruth, and cricket’s statistical nonpareil Don Bradman, to which we can now add Anderson and Nathan Lyon, almost 1200 Test wickets between them, side‑by‑side in the impressively metamorphosed former Olympic Stadium, throwing the ceremonial first pitch on Saturday.
The England maestro, who, after toiling on the Edgbaston stodgepot, was perhaps enjoying the idea of a sport in which you do not have to make the ball bounce, was in a Cubs shirt. Australia’s premium‑grade off-spinner represented the Cardinals. Regardless of St Louis’s revenge on Sunday, the Cubs’ 9-1 first-game win with Anderson in their corner has surely landed a series-swinging psychological hammer-blow for England before the Lord’s Test.
