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Sigh Young
Posted in Baseball
Tagged CC Sabathia, Jered Weaver, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Justin Verlander
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England Reach Number One
By beating India in the Third Test match at Edgbaston in Birmingham by an astonishing innings and 242 runs, England is now (according to the rankings) the best Test cricket team in the world. It’s a position that England hasn’t been in since late 1979/early 1980, when many of the best Test cricketers weren’t even playing for their countries, but were instead performing for a breakaway cricket competition.
It’s a position England’s players will be keen to maintain for a long time, given that the West Indies were supreme throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, and then Australia took over until India ascended to the top some eighteen months ago. The team will also want to become better at the one-day game, where England is currently fifth place. England is currently the world T20 champions, but is actually sixth in the world. So, there’s still plenty more to do.
Posted in Australia, Cricket, England, India, One-Day Cricket, T20 Cricket, Test Cricket, West Indies
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Wood toward the Spherical Object
The wrong way to use a baseball bat
In considering the superiority of the baseball bat over its cricket counterpart as a means to quell civil unrest (an oxymoron), Exhibit A might be the August 22, 1965, incident involving Hall of Fame San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal and Los Angeles Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro. (Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax was minimally involved.) As the character Dugan says to the priest played by Karl Malden in On the Waterfront, “I’m doing OK considering they were using my head for a baseball.” Marichal was being ridden by Dodgers on the bench for throwing too close to their batters. Koufax refused to retaliate. In light of this, when Roseboro threw the baseball back to Koufax, he made sure it would come close to Marichal’s head. “I felt it tick my ear,” Marichal proclaimed. In the ugliest incident I have ever seen or heard about on a baseball field, Marichal turned and hit Roseboro on the head from the batters’ box. (For those taking otherwise-understandable exception to my [Evander’s] controversial view that Pete Rose and Denny McLain ought to be inducted in The National Baseball Hall of Fame, note that Juan Marichal is nonetheless a Hall of Famer. Ty Cobb, who sharpened his spikes to the sharpness of a Gillette razor [if not Occam’s Razor], and might generally be the most-hated individual ever to play baseball, was the first player enshrined in Cooperstown. Roberto Alomar, recently inducted, even spit at an umpire.)
Baseball versus Cricket: The Weapon of Choice
Slate magazine has run an article that attempts to ask why Londoners have been buying baseball bats in large numbers rather than cricket bats in order to defend their property and threaten some bodily harm to rioters during the recent disturbances. Although we have no specific evidence on the relative worlds of hurt that can be meted out by either pieces of wood (or metal), our theory is that the baseball bat is easier to swing. The cricket bat is shaped to guide the ball or stroke it along the ground. It’s heavier and bulkier. The baseball bat is one long stick of wood, tapered into a handle that’s easier to hold and direct toward the spherical object that is the human head. Perfect as an offensive weapon, and thus perhaps more intimidating as a tool for defensive. On the other hand, as the snippet from The West Wing below suggests, a cricket bat wielded by a big man with a loud voice can be plenty intimidating.
Posted in Baseball, Cricket
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Audio Interview with Bruce Berglund of New Books in Sports Now Available
You can visit the site and listen to our best interview yet, by clicking here.
Cry Havoc and Play Cricket
When the West Indies cricket team toured England in 1976, there was tension on the pitch and riots in the streets. When the Australians visited England for the Ashes series of 1981, England came back from the brink of humiliation and there were riots in the streets. And now India is touring England, and once more there are riots in the streets. On each of these occasions, race was a factor in the disturbances and cricket was a calming influence or a safe channel for aggression. Over the last few days, numerous soccer games have been canceled, but the cricket continues, even though the current Test match at Edgbaston is only a few yards from disturbances in Birmingham. Sometimes, the best solution really is to play ball.
Posted in Cricket, Test Cricket
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Pushing Forty
Ichiro can do it all, but time is not on his side.
Ichiro Suzuki has been in a season-long slump. Certainly so by his Olympian standards. His current .269 batting average is something like 60 points below his career in North America. He is somewhere around 38. I (Evander) have little doubt, Ichiro will be enshrined in Cooperstown when his major-league career is over. In some ways, he is the baseball equivalent of The Little Master, Sachin Tendulkar. Both are wiry. Both have defied age (Tendulkar also being 38).
Posted in Baseball, Right Off the Bat Website
Tagged Ichiro Suzuki, Sachin Tendulkar
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Zimbabwe Returns!
Brendan Taylor, Zimbabwe's captain, celebrates his century and Zimbabwe's return.
At the turn of the century one of the most formidable cricket teams in the world was from Zimbabwe. The team regularly punched above its weight. Then political turmoil and retirements brought the team low. So low, in fact, that Zimbabwe stopped playing Test cricket. Finally, after years of prowling around the fringes of top-class international cricket, Zimbabwe has played its first Test match in nearly six years. They took on Bangladesh (an admittedly weak side) and won. Unfortunately, the troubles facing the country of Zimbabwe show no sign of going away. On the same day as victory was won on the cricket field, investigators discovered a torture camp used by security forces in the country.
Juan Nicasio and the Dangers of Professional Baseball
No one wants to see this.
Five Fun Facts about the India versus England Test Cricket Series
Stuart Broad: Point proven
1. At one point in the recently concluded second Test match at Trent Bridge in Nottingham the two greatest run-scorers in cricket history were batting together: Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar. Between them they have accumulated 27,386 runs, over 16 and 23 years respectively, in a feat that seems unlikely to be equaled by any members of the same team. File under “Historic.”
2. Stuart Broad, bad boy of the England cricket team, was on the verge of being dropped from the squad at the start of this series. Since then, he’s scored 182 runs at an average of 60.66 and taken 15 wickets at 11.33. (His career figures are 29.02 with the bat and 33.18 with the ball.) Nothing concentrates the mind like an imminent threat to your career!
3. In the final session of third day’s play of the Nottingham Test, England progressed from 254 for three wickets to 441 for six. That’s a total of 187 in only 35 overs. England scored an astonishing 417 runs in one day—by any measure, a rate of run-scoring that would suit one-day cricket rather than the more stately pace of Test cricket.
4. England’s batting is so deep it makes the Mariana Trench look like a paddling pool. Most teams can count on the top seven (out of eleven) to be able to hit runs. India rely on Harbhajan Singh (average 18.65) at number eight to biff some runs. England currently have Tim Bresnan (average 37.85) at eight, Stuart Broad (average 29.02) at nine, and Graeme Swann (23.52) at ten, which means on an average day you can count on the lower order bringing in another hundred runs. Impressive.
5. England are currently 2-0 up against the Indian team with two games to play. If they maintain the two-game margin by the end, they will formally be the best Test team in the world—a status they haven’t had since 1979. In my (Martin) bio for Right Off the Bat, I call myself a “long-suffering fan” of the England cricket team. Therefore, premature and somewhat triumphalist though I may be, I can only say the following: scratch that adjective.
Posted in Cricket, England, India, Right Off the Bat Book, Test Cricket
Tagged Graeme Swann, Harbhajan Singh, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Stuart Broad, Tim Bresnan
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