I shall ignore that ill-judged bit about cricket being stupid (sport sorta is stupid - it just reaches parts of the alienated soul on a weekly basis that only a great song can reach, and that only every few years). I did respect the eye-moistening, lip-quivering bits that followed.
Did you watch that PTV documentary on the social history of baseball? I did - and I can't find it in me to mock its fans now (no matter how boring its content and formulaic its commentators may seem to mine unencultured eye and ear). That, the Civil War doco, the Eyes on the Prize doco, Vidal's Aaron Burr and an encounter with many of the crew of the Enterprise in Hobart, Tasmania in 1976 pretty well constitutes the databank with which I consciously go into conversations with Americans. Lessons: don't mock baseball; don't even think about mentioning the Civil War before you've heard your interlocutor's accent; don't think the Civil Rights spirit and its opposite died with ML King; don't dare insert your foreign beak into the never-quite-dead Burr/Hamilton debate, and don't let Americans near Tasmanian beer without a good week's acclimatisation (it was Gettysburg all over again - bodies everywhere and some very bemused senior officers reviewing the carnage).
>Baseball is not based on cricket.
Doug Bagnall's great post did a good job on this. But this isn't what I was saying. What I was saying is that the baseball model, with its same-day guaranteed results, its worship of the brutish big hit, its macho posturing, and its 10000 games a week all merging into each other, well, this is now the basis media moguls have chosen for cricket in the future. And I'm a diehard conservative about cricket's virtues of yore (which I realise can't be translated into American).
And Doug's right, there are stats galore these days. Me, I don't look at 'em (I like the horses for my weekly stats fix - although the actual betting is pretty well over now that I've spawned). Even imperialism has its contradictory good side - and poor benighted cricket is just about all the good that came out of Albion's tenure as top dog (Bill and Doug B. might make mention of the rugby, but that never held most of the map's erstwhile pink bits in thrall, and they have to stress it coz their cricket team can't even win a test match when they astonish themselves by getting the opposition all out for 83 in the first innings).
Cheers, Rob.
>Baseball is a game of beautifully precise geometric dimensions, which is
>something unknown to cricket. E.g., the bases are 90 feet apart to
>require the
>fielder the come up with the ball cleanly and make a crisp, accurate throw to
>first to get the batter as runner. The pitcher's rubber is 60 ft. 6 inches
>(not 5 inches) from home plate, the mound is a certain height (currently 10
>inches), the strike configured in such a way, and the diameter of the bat
>limited (to no more than 2 3/4") so as to maintain the historic, delicate
>balance between the skills of the pitcher vis a vis the batter. Baseball
>stats,
>which are legion--everything that happens is recorded in some way--are
>therefore timeless. Currently, in fact, hitters are doing too well by
>historic
>standards. Soon the lords of baseball are likely to raise the pitcher's mound
>back toward the 15 inch height at which it was originally set in 1903 (it was
>lowered in 1969 when the pitchers were doing too well). Fascinating, no?
>Nothing like this in cricket, is there? There is, in fact, nothing even
>interesting about cricket, which, correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't even
>produce
>any stats to pour over.
>
>RO