Thursday, March 10, 2005
This game is NOTHING like baseball
while perusing an article on the cricket match between india and pakistan, i was reminded of days gone by watching fellow students on the drillfield playing this strange game. i also thought of one of the vignettes in bill bryson's i'm a stranger here myself relating to baseball and cricket. see, this is what the cancellation of the hockey season will do to a man.....forcing one in this dead zone of professional sports to seek out something even nominally related to the start of the baseball season. i've never, even when properly instructed, to be able to sit, watch, and understand a cricket match. what i DO know is that cricket batsman skills transfer quite well to rec league softball. the best hitter on our team last year had never played organized baseball/softball in his life....grew up on cricket. i believe be batted somewhere in the neighborhood of .700 for the season, becoming the best bad-ball hitter since ichiro. fielding prowess, alas, gets lots in the translation.
