Ship to shore. Ship to shore. I, Evander, “baseball nut”, will be filling in (I don’t know how admirably) for Martin over the next few days of World Cup 2011 play to report my findings. (Not to worry, serious cricket fans: Martin will soon return to his regular post.)
Writing par’ner Martin hit me with a new concept: maiden. I had foolishly asked him what “m” stood for in what us baseball fans call “the box score.” “I don’t remember this in our book….” “Evander, we just could not fit everything.” I looked up the term in my Webster’s Collegiate at home. Aside from the obvious, I only find something about Scottish guillotines. Yikes!
Later, in watching a video on the batsman, Martin hit me with terms for the various strokes and “pushes” and “taps” the batsmen can summon, depending on the situation and what the bowler is delivering. “I don’t remember this in our book!” “Evander, calm down. As I said, we just could not fit everything.” Hence, this website.
Having composed myself, I’m now perusing the MCC (never standing for Montreal Cricket Club!) Cricket Annual 2010; and on page 15, I find “Tour to USA.” “The touring party for America met at Lord’s in mid-March, very excited, but a little uncertain about what to expect from a tour to the USA.” What the MCC reps found on the West Coast (after their driver confused Santa Barbara with Santa Clara: Sheesh!) was a fairly high level of cricket (they seem to have lost most of their matches), one infectious American (Canadians don’t especially appreciate the synonymous use of “United States” and “America,” whether of the Montreal Cricket Club, living near Whistler, or in ravine-endowed Toronto) youngster, a lot of enthusiasm, but still too few home-grown “Americans” with any idea of what a wicket is besides the one that may be sticky.
Russell Crowe, cricketer extraordinary, who the MCC had been told to expect and were eager to see, ultimately came in as a no-show (“When both sides have been in and out including the not outs, that’s the end of the game. Howzat, Mate!”), to the considerable disappointment of the touring party, not to mention their USA opponents. We recommend Right Off the Bat from Paul Dry Books (in May) for everyone involved, including Mr. Crowe, the show-biz-no-show.
Beibu Rusu is the Japanese form of “Babe Ruth”. The Japanese also have the sports-word pepitone. It’s a noun meaning “goof-off,” and this beau mot comes from The Chrysanthemum and the Bat by Robert Whiting.
We’ve had a lot of fun with our blogs at this early stage, already on everything from the World Cup to a Shakespearean homage to Doris from Rego Park.
There’s a Tom Selleck vehicle and spoof from 1992 called Mr. Baseball.
However, this is a serious blog.
Our hopes and prayers extend to the good people of Japan during their time of crisis (too often an overused word). Japan is a great baseball nation but, more importantly, a great civilization. (Basho is one of my favorite poets, a most intense one.) I suspect even the much-vilified Joe Pepitone agrees.
I’m going nuts. No real baseball yet. Only puny spring-training exhibition games. Players I never heard of going at it in Grapefruit League or Cactus League cities I’ve never been to.
Along with William Wordsworth (in “Tintern Abbey”) let me cry out: Five years have past; five summers, with the length / of five long winters.
The New York Times reports that Mariano Rivera made his first spring-training appearance. Twelve pitches. Nine strikes. Three out. Next!
Rivera has been doing this for sixteen seasons. I cannot remember any player, at any position, so dominating the baseball world so consistently.
I attended the second game of the 1995 first-round playoffs between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners. The game was getting out of hand. Yankees’s manager Buck Showalter summoned the arm-plagued rookie starter, Rivera, from the bullpen. Showalter was hoping to catch lightning in a bottle. Did he ever! It was a thrillah as they say. And as they also say, the rest is history.
As Ralph Kramden closes most of the filmed “Classic 39” episodes of The Honeymooners, I’ll spout it here again: Baby, you’re the greatest!
Australia: Will they ever lose?
While I was watching Australia desultorily dismantle Kenya in the World Cup a stat was issued by the uninterested commentators: that the Australians’ inevitable victory would be their thirty-fourth consecutive win in the World Cup—a run that has extended over twelve years (and three World Cup tournaments) since 1999.
By any stretch of the imagination, that is an extraordinary number of victories, especially given that it’s hard for any team to maintain such excellence over a couple of years, let alone a dozen. What it also means is that the pressure on this Australian team—perhaps the weakest in the last three World Cups—will be immense. So far, of course, they haven’t lost a game. But stiffer competition than Kenya awaits. How long can this streak be maintained? Watch this space.
Jacques Kallis: Triumphant
For years, the South African all-rounder Jacques Kallis has been compiling stats that would be the envy of some of the greatest batsmen who ever strode to the crease. As of today, he has scored nearly 12,000 runs in 145 Test matches at an average of 57.43, which gives him the eleventh highest average ever. In addition, he has compiled just over 11,000 runs in 311 one-day internationals (ODI) at an average of 45.45, the twelfth highest average ever. He’s even become a master of the slash-and-crash T20 form of the game, averaging over 34 runs per inning.
His runmaking capacity is, however, only half the story, because Kallis has taken 270 Test wickets at 32.01 and 262 ODI wickets at 31.91—figures that put him right alongside Gary Sobers as the greatest all-rounder ever. No one, not even Sobers, has compiled more runs, at a higher average, or taken more wickets, at a lower average, than Kallis.
Why then are the cricketing hills not alive with the sound of people singing Jacques Kallis’ praises? I have no idea. True, he’s not scored big hundreds (he only has one double-hundred to his name), but he’s still the second highest century-maker in Test cricket. I fancy that one reason for this oversight may be that, for all his incredible strengths—unlike Virender Sehwag, who’s an explosive strokemaker when he comes out to bat, or Sachin Tendulkar, who’s a beloved figure off the field—Kallis is neither charismatic nor particularly glamorous. He accumulates runs and takes wickets, with the kind of no-nonsense, attritional skill that is profoundly effective, but not particularly exciting. In other words, poor Jacques Kallis doesn’t sell his skills. He is simply, calmly, but somewhat anonymously, superb.
Like all sports, cricket is fundamentally about entertainment, and therefore flamboyance and showmanship count for something, even though both may be extrinsic to actual excellence in the game. Kallis recently got a hair transplant, so that a thick rug of hair bounces up to bowl along with his husky, workmanlike frame. It’s unlikely to change the public’s perception of him. But, perhaps, now that he’s in the final stages of a stellar career, he’ll cut loose and express himself on the field, as well as on the top of his head. He certainly deserves it.
I fear that I give short shrift to South Africa in Right Off the Bat. Partly this is because during the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing to love the game of cricket, the South Africans were excluded from playing international sport under the Gleneagles Agreement, and so no touring teams visited England or were televised. Since returning from the international wilderness in the 1990s, the South Africans have been a side that has been more a collection of some outstanding players rather than a team. They have garnered an unfortunate reputation for “choking” in key moments in all forms of the game. As they make their way through the World Cup tournament in the Indian sub-continent, the question is being asked again: Do South Africa have what it takes to win?
Certainly, they do not lack for talent. They have the most destructive and powerful fast bowler in the world in Dale Steyn, the most prolific runmaker over the last twelve months in Hashim Amla, a world-class batsman in A. B. de Villiers, and the greatest all-rounder who ever lived in Jacques Kallis. They can never be ruled out, and yet somehow they’re just not a safe bet, either to reach the final of the World Cup, or to win it at last. It’s doubtful that the South Africans will have a stronger side anytime soon; the question is whether that side will become an unbeatable team.
Here’s Dale Steyn in action—to give you an idea of the sheer toe-crunching force of his bowling:
Some of my baseball-loving friends are still confused over the difference in cricket between a draw and a tie. So, this post is my way to try to resolve that confusion. There are three main forms of the game of cricket. One of them—the first-class game, or (when played between nations) the Test match—is limited by how many days the game goes on: three, four, or (in the case of the Test match) up to five days. The other two forms of the game—the 50-over or one-day game, and the 20-over (or Twenty20/T20) game—are limited by the number of balls that each team can bowl.
The limitation of balls in the two shorter forms of cricket means that ninety-nine percent of the time one team wins (i.e. scores more runs in the allotted number of balls) than the other. Occasionally, however, both teams score exactly the same number of runs, as recently happened between India and England in the World Cup. England needed two runs to win, and India needed to stop England from scoring to triumph. As it turned out, England scored one run off the final ball, and the scores were level. This, in cricketing parlance, is a tie.
Now, in the longest form of cricket—the first-class game/Test match—there are two innings, instead of one, per side. By the end of the fifth (or whatever) day, a team may have failed to score the requisite amount of runs to win the match and not lost all of their wickets and have run out of time. In such a situation—i.e. when neither team takes twenty wickets—the game is called a draw.
Here’s an example of a fictional draw: Australia score 286 all out, and England score 242 in reply. Australia go to bat for their second inning, and score 346 for 5 wickets before ending their innings (it’s called “declaring“). What this means is that Australia believe that, given the amount of time left in the match, they think they can get all of England’s batsmen out in the second innings for less than that 389 it would take for England to win the game. As it turns out, England stymie the Australian efforts and, by the end of the fifth day, have scored 256 for the loss of 7 wickets. Time runs out. Nobody wins. A draw.
Now, very rarely indeed, the teams in first-class games/Test matches may battle it out for five days and score exactly the same number of runs. In other words, with the final ball being bowled after all that time, they are level. And that is a tie. It’s only happened twice in the entire history of Test cricket, so I wouldn’t worry too much about the rule here!
Willie Mays: Salad Days
My (Evander’s) neighborhood in Fort Apache the Bronx, is not the best in the world or the worst. But it has its interesting aspects, as all New York neighborhoods do.
Maybe it was in 2003, I ran into a school-friend named Steven, who’d moved into one of the fancy buildings I face from the other side of the tracks: well, the other side of the Henry Hudson Parkway. We invited Steven for lunch so he could meet the family. From our window, he pointed out that we could see his living room. He then lived in a big white building, with the veddy British name Whitehall. Ed Sullivan, who introduced Elvis Presley to the civilized world, not to mention The Beatles to an even-crazier teen America once upon a time, had lived there. Yvonne De Carlo. Ron Blomberg. Some politicos have and do, too.
Steven asked if Willie Mays (as wise-guy kids, he was “Willie Mayonnaise” to some of us) also lived in his building. “How would I know? You live there.”
(Cricket fans everywhere: Mays may have been the greatest center fielder of them all, which takes in Tris Speaker, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle for starters.)
In fact, reading between the lines of the new Mays bio it’s clear he did live there. I also had a nurse we employed, who also worked in the Whitehall, confirm this: Mays lived in one of the penthouse apartments possibly until 2005.
Around that time one day, on walking a half-block south of my building, I’d seen one gentleman pushing another in a wheelchair. It was spring or, more likely, summer. I was too timid to walk across the street, combined with my not wanting to disturb these men.
I am now fairly certain these were Mays pushing Willie McCovey.
But in all my years in the nabe, I’d never seen WM at the cleaners, at the fruit-stand, or at Key Food, among the mayonnaise jars.
It’s thrill enough to know I may have.
Right Off the Bat 