Allen Stanford (right) demonstrates how to catch a cricket ball when handcuffed.
The last couple of days have displayed—in extremis—why we at Right Off the Bat love cricket and baseball so much, and why they will never stop pitching us curveballs or bowling balls that rear up from a good length. On Wednesday, Matt Cain threw a perfect game for the San Francisco Giants against the Houston Astros. It was only the twenty-second time in Major League Baseball history that a pitcher had lasted a full nine innings and no batter had reached first base—no hits, walks, nothing—and Cain had to throw 125 pitches (the most ever in a perfect game) and rely on two astonishing catches in the outfield to keep it perfect. Even more remarkably, it was the first time in the Giants’ 122-year-history that anyone on their team had ever thrown a perfect game, even though the Giants have won the most games and possess the most hall-of-famers of any team in the history of American baseball.
Stanford was hailed as cricket’s American sugar daddy when he bankrolled an international cricket tournament in Antigua that promised to transform cricket finances in England and West Indies and, in the eyes of ECB [English Cricket Board] executives, provide a rival to the burgeoning Indian Premier League.
In the end, however, the crock of gold proved to be a crock of something else, and Mr. Stanford (stripped of his knighthood and not a few of his assets, we imagine) will now have plenty of time to play Howzat! and consider the stunning success of the IPL in prison.
Of course, baseball has had plenty of scandals and cricket continues to throw up astonishing records, so we’ll probably have to wait only a few months for the ignoble/noble facet of each game to be reversed. But, you gotta love sports that continue to surprise you after 150 years of competitive play.
Kevin Pietersen lets the ICC know what he thinks of the one-day game.
In Part I and Part II of this blog, I (Martin) painted a pretty picture of the recently concluded Indian Premier League 5 as a festival of entertainment, which it is. But the IPL is much more than that: it’s an event that is shaping the future of cricket. In the next few days, Chris Gayle—the undoubted batting star of the this year’s IPL—will open the batting for the West Indies in the one-day series against England, having been unavailable for selection for the Test series, which England won 2-0. On the other side, Kevin Pietersen—who was also a huge hit in the IPL—will not be playing for England because he has abruptly retired from all one-day international cricket, citing work overload. Pietersen cut short his time in the IPL in order to play the Test series against the West Indies. What’s going on?
The troubled relationship that these two batsmen—both big-hitting, flamboyant, crowd-pleasers—have with their respective boards goes deeper than whether or not they can play for the IPL and still represent their countries. But the IPL’s riches—players can make several hundred thousand dollars for only seven weeks’ work—cannot be ignored. International stars want to be part of that, and the cricketing year (packed by the various boards with meaningless one-day games and pointless Twenty20 bashes) is draining the enjoyment and energy out of players. Pietersen is married with a young child: the constant touring and life on the road takes a toll—especially when, unlike in baseball, you’re not traveling three hours away for five days but to the other side of the world for months.
The cricketing authorities—especially the International Cricket Council—will, sooner or later, have to leave a space in the calendar for the IPL or risk having the cream of international cricket not playing for their countries. The various boards will have to cut seven and five one-day series between countries to five and three or face the same exodus of the older, big-box-office stars. When I was growing up, cricket matches were rare enough that they became occasions to be eagerly anticipated and then relished. These days so much cricket is played that, as the great BB King would sing, the thrill is gone.
That’s why you gotta love the IPL: sooner or later, with much angst and hand-wringing, it’s going to reorganize the cricketing calendar for the better.
In Right Off the Bat, Martin and I delve into the thorny subjects of empire and race as related to cricket and baseball. Two perhaps lesser-written-about Negro Leagues players, with a couple of the most unforgettable monikers ever, are Judy Johnson and Ghost Marcelle.
I am not sure if Ghost Marcelle self-identified as African-American or mixed-race: Creole. He nonetheless was involved in one of the most bizarre, violent, and downright ghoulish stories that ever surrounded a ballplayer, as described in Wikipedia. Marcelle’s memory in the Negro Leagues was redeemed almost exactly eleven years ago:
“In a strange incident in the late 1920s, Marcelle’s teammate Frank Warfield reportedly bit Marcelle’s nose off after the two got into a fight, when both men were playing in the Cuban Winter League. Bill Yancey, another teammate of Marcelle’s, said, “What got [Marcelle] out of baseball, he and [teammate] Frank Warfield had a fight in Cuba [probably in the winter of 1927-28, over a dice game] and Warfield bit his nose off. He was a proud, handsome guy, you know, and then he used to wear a black patch across his nose and he got so he couldn’t play baseball anymore.” Marcelle had been a staple of the Cuban Winter League throughout the decade. In the 1923-24 season, he batted .393 to lead the league. He ended with an overall .305 average in Cuba.
“After some time with the Detroit Stars, Marcelle didn’t play very much longer. His final career average was supposedly around .315 with 11 home runs.
“Marcelle died in poverty in 1949 in Denver, Colorado and was buried in an unmarked grave in Riverside Cemetery.
“Forty-two years after his death, Oliver Marcelle’s last chapter was finally closed. At 10:30 a.m. on June 1, 1991, members of Riverside’s ownership, the Fairmount Cemetery Co., gathered with members of the Erickson Monument Co., the Black American West Museum, and the Denver Zephyrs, the Triple-A inheritors of, in part, Marcelle’s Denver baseball legacy, to honor The Ghost one final time. In the culmination of a long effort led by baseball historian and Denver-area resident Jay Sanford, there, weeks shy of what would have been the legend’s ninety-fourth birthday, they unveiled a simple grave marker.”
“Their first word isn’t ‘Mama’ or ‘Papa.’ It’s ‘Metsie! Metsie! Metsie!'”
The Mets not only took the first regular-season Subway Series game from the Yankees in 1997 (I, Evander, was there), a 6-0 spanking, they won the very first meeting in a 1962 spring-training game.
The event was fraught with tension. Legendary Yankees manager Casey Stengel was now at the helm of the hapless Mets (a team that would lose 120 games during that first season in existence) after being fired by the Yanks following their weird 1960 World Series loss. The two Rogers (actually one Roger and one Rogers) exchanged insults: Maris had broken Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record but five-and-a-half months before; Mets coach Rogers Hornsby (who would die a short year later) proclaimed that Maris, with his scientifically tapered and (literally) lightweight bat, couldn’t hit his way out of a paper bag.
(Thanks also go to another bud, eagle-eyed Paul Grant, for noting that in paragraph 17 of the Hardball Times link the correct Yankees player is Bill Stafford, misidentified as Terry Stafford [factually, the composer of the 1964 hit “Suspicion.”])
In Part One of this blog I (Martin) mentioned the skills that the Twenty20 form of the game of cricket had developed. Many of these skills involve new and daring shots that, although they may not have been necessarily invented in the subcontinent, have arguably been put into practice most vividly in the IPL. In this blog, I’ll run down four of them.
The Dilscoop
Named after Tillakaratne Dilshan, the Sri Lankan batsman and occasional bowler, the “Dilscoop,” involves the batsman quite literally hitting the ball directly over his head, a potentially very dangerous shot that has to be seen to be believed (see below). It’s the sort of shot that leaves the opposition team standing with their collective hands on hips, saying to themselves “You can’t do that!” Well, yes, you can.
The Helicopter Shot
As far as I know, this shot is synonymous with Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the Indian captain and wicketkeeper. The batsmen of the subcontinent have for decades been known for the “wristiness” of their shots. That means that at the moment the ball hits the bat, the batsman rolls or turns his wrists, which directs the ball off at an angle. This allows the batsman to manipulate the ball around the field using flicks and glides rather than pure strength. Or rather did, since the helicopter shot requires the rolling of the wrists to be at the end of a high backlift of the bat and a whirling of the arms (thus the “helicopter”) that allow an enormous amount of power to be generated from a standing position. It looks hard and it is. The below isn’t in the IPL, but it is the great Dhoni:
The Upper Cut for Six
If there’s one thing that one-day cricket and the subcontinental style of playing it has done, it’s made it OK to hit the ball in the air. As in baseball, a ball in the air (unless it goes for a home run or a six) is dangerous, since it can be caught by a fielder on the full or fly and the batter or batsman goes back to the hutch. These days, however, cricketers know that a strategically placed lob over the infield can get you a lot of runs. I don’t know whether he invented the shot that uses the pace of the ball to lift it behind the batsman, but Sachin Tendulkar is the master of the upper cut for six:
The Switch Hit
The switch hit has been around for quite a while and so is now being used even in Test cricket. As in baseball, the switch hit involves being able to hit right- as well as left-handed. Unlike in baseball, the batsman does this while the bowler is in his delivery stride. It’s audacious, and not a little insulting to the bowler—and no one is more audacious or as insolent as Kevin Pietersen. Here he is, lifting the cricketing equivalent of the middle finger to the New Zealanders in a one-day international:
“Bing Crosby owned the Pirates at the time. It was off-season, and I then lived in California. Bing called and asked if I wanted a date with Elizabeth Taylor. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ I responded. I arrived at what struck me as a rather modest house. We were going to the film premiere of Twelve O’clock High, and I wore a tuxedo. She was late, so I had to spend an hour chatting with her parents. Her father turned out to be an affable soul, but her mother behaved in an abrupt, almost rude manner. Mrs. Taylor treated her husband as if he were an incidental person in the household.
“Elizabeth finally emerged in an evening dress and proved to be a lovely lady, not yet spoiled by her success. After the premiere, we attended a party at Romanoff’s. Hedda Hopper asked Elizabeth about me, and since the Pittsburgh Steelers were in town to play the Los Angeles Rams in a football game that weekend, Liz erroneously identified me as the Steelers quarterback. I didn’t bother to correct her.”
—Ralph Kiner
Quoted in David Heymann’s Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor
(Always on the ball, Martin asks if Kiner got to first base. Keep in mind he was one of the most adept ever at circling all the bases.)
Johan Santana pitches a no-hitter for the New York Mets, a first in the fifty-one-year history of the franchise. (Photo from “USA Today”)
Congratulations from the Right Off the Bat project to Johan Santana, the first Mets pitcher to twirl a no-hitter. Philip Gregory Humber and David Cone had pitched perfect games for other teams. Former Mets stars Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, and Doc Gooden had pitched a total of nine no-hitters for other clubs. Pitchers in Mets uniforms have pitched an astonishing thirty-five one-hitters. “No-han” has come all the way back from shoulder surgery to no-hit the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals and throw a second consecutive shutout.
It’s been less than a decade since Twenty20 (T20), the shortest form of the game of cricket, was created, and it’s spread like wildfire. At about three-and-a-half hours, T20 is the perfect length for those who can’t afford to take a day off from work to watch a one-day game (which lasts slightly more than double the amount of time) or haven’t the patience to follow a first-class or Test match (which can go on for up to five days). T20 has also encouraged bold strokeplay, audience engagement, and a festival atmosphere that have led to record crowds and a revival of interest in the sport as a whole.
Nowhere has T20 cricket been embraced with more enthusiasm than India. Since 2008, five T20 tournaments have been played under the rubric of the Indian Premier League (IPL), and the most recent one—IPL5—has just completed its seven-week, 76-match pell-mell run through the global cricketing consciousness. It was, by most estimations, the most successful IPL so far: more crowds in the stadia, more viewers around the world, more big shots, more tight finishes—in short, more more.
I (Martin) watched quite a bit of IPL5: it was the perfect accompaniment for my breakfast cereal and sandwich at lunch. Like everyone else, I marveled at Chris Gayle’s extraordinary ability to respond to a perfectly decent ball coming toward it and deposit with a swing of his mighty bat somewhere into the depths of a packed stadium or, occasionally, over it. One little girl, whose nose was broken when Gayle lofted a ball into the seats, was thrilled when the Jamaican visited her in the hospital. When Gayle offered an apology, the girl told Chris to “chill”; she was thrilled he’d turned up to see her. Inevitably, the girl and Chris were interviewed during a game, and it was probably at that point that I gave up and released myself into the IPL’s lurid embrace.
At a literary salon I co-host in Brooklyn, Suketu Mehta—author of the award-winning Maximum City about the life, lore, and loucheness of his home city Mumbai—told us that the word “maximum” was now being used throughout India to describe everything. Mumbai was, he noted, about money, business, sex, entertainment, corruption, and Hollywood. In conversation afterward, he agreed with me that the IPL not only reflected Mumbai but was representative to a degree of certain aspects of a new India: one that was as maximal as the country itself.
To purists such as myself, IPL is cricket at its most dumbed-down and simplified. Or at least was. I can see now that, for all of its encouragement of big shots and brazen plays, the T20 form has raised fitness levels, fostered innovation, and simply made the game more accessible to those who aren’t necessarily interested in finesse and strategy and the long view. In other words, sometimes you want to careen down the waterslide into a Clive Cussler novel than scuba-dive in the depths of a James Michener opus.
To my (and I think general) surprise, the most successful practitioners of the game haven’t been the young Turks dismissive of the hidebound rules of “proper” play, but tried-and-true professionals of long-standing (or even in retirement from their international careers) who know how to move a ball around the field and take apart a bowling attack. Along with Chris Gayle, Gautam Gambhir, Jacques Kallis, A. B. de Villiers, and Rahul Dravid were among the leading scorers of IPL5.
To respond to the dominance of the bat, bowlers have had, in turn, to become much wilier in how the ball comes out of their hand. They have had to master the disguise of the ball so it arrives much more slowly than the batsman imagines. They have had to develop their ability to land the ball at the batsman’s feet (called a yorker). They have had to be in total control of their line. T20 doesn’t encourage speed bowling (since a fast ball has a tendency to hit the bat hard and thus speed over the boundary that much quicker); it encourages guile, discipline, and even a certain stodginess. Suddenly, the journeyman player has become a vital cog in the team’s wheel.
The IPL has simply taken the T20 traits and turned them up to “11.” The number of sixes (the rough equivalent of baseball’s home runs) in IPL was the highest ever. The number of games won in the last over (14) was greater than ever before. The celebrities—Shahrukh Khan! Priyanka Chopra!! Prabhu Deva!!!—were even more visible; the dancing girls perkier and prettier; the folks in the stands more frenzied; the whole thing more, well, maximum! There was, naturally, some corruption thrown in. Even the ending was a dream come true: the perennial underdogs, the Kolkata Knight Ridersbeat the champion Chennai Super Kings with only two balls to spare. Madness in West Bengal!
Like everything maximum, IPL5 offered a set of literally game-changing challenges to the world of cricket, which I shall deal with in Part 2. Meantime, for your entertainment, look at the following piece of fielding by Australian Steven Smith in IPL5. He knew if he tried to catch the ball he would land outside the field of play and the catch would be invalid. So . . .
It’s long been assumed that humidity in the atmosphere causes the cricket ball to swing through the air when it leaves the bowler’s hand. Well, apparently that’s wrong. According to an article on the BBC website today, scientists have put this theory to the test and have found it wanting. The new theory is that it’s the stillness of the air under cloud cover that causes the ball to move. And that’s also true of the baseball.
Like most red-blooded (Is there any other color?) American (U.S., but let’s include the entire hemisphere) males from Noo Yawk, and aetat. fifty to eighty at this writing in 2012, I (Evander) have a fascination with Yankees star Mickey Mantle—virtually to the point of (strictly baseball) fantasy.
I decided to replay the career stats by ending after the 1964 season, the last great one. Lifetime batting average: .309. Home runs: 454. Home-run percentage (one of the truest marks of the slugger) rises from 6.6 to a stratospheric 6.9, and slugging percentage comes in around .570. Runs scored: 1,473, a staggering number that speaks to Mantle’s unprecedented speed and early career batting closer to the top of the lineup. (As far as I know, Mantle is still the fastest runner from home plate to first base, sixty years later.)
In fact, such a fourteen-year offensive career starts to look a little more like Joe DiMaggio’s. Of course since the Yankees would not be in a World Series again for a dozen seasons, Mantle’s unbelievable total of 18 World Series round-trippers would not change and stands for all time. Like Joe D.’s 56-game hitting streak.
(For some extra what-if nerdiness: If Ted Williams had retired after 1958, his lifetime BA would be just north of .350. If one subtracted Babe Ruth’s years as a pitcher plus his final down years 1933-34, The Bambino’s BA would be a whopping .355.)
Right Off the Bat 