Greg Conley likes sports—a lot. When he discovered that the cricket World Cup is the third most watched sporting event in the world (after the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics) he bought tickets to games in New Zealand and a couple of books, and learned the rudiments of the game in two hours. And now he’s hooked. Here’s his interview on espncricinfo.com.
It’s a science…much of the time. Photo courtesy of Paul Ponomarev
I (Evander) was in some Hotstove/Grapefruit/Cactus Leagues discussions with friends. One, a mathematician named Paul, said he had seen an ESPN claim that the three greatest St. Louis Cardinals were Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, and Ozzie Smith.
We love the Wizard of Oz, the back flips, even to entertain in Cooperstown during the summers’ inductions, the whole thing. But one of the three greatest?
What about Rogers Hornsby?
This got me thinking of great hitters. Ted Williams (pictured). Ty Cobb. Babe Ruth. Williams is the last to bomb .400 (.406 in 1941). Cobb’s lifetime average has been downgraded a point to .366. Big deal: still astonishing. Ruth…need I say more?
But for a stretch of 6 seasons (1920-25), all with the Cardinals, Rajah batted .397!* Yes, that’s right. It comes down to 1,296 hits in 3,268 at-bats. To show how much power the right-hander (Williams, Cobb, and Ruth batted from the left side, a big advantage cricket fans need to know) had, three seasons included slugging percentages of .722, .696, and an out-of-any-universe .756.
* Paul subsequently points out that in 5 seasons, 1921 to 1925, Rajah’s batting average is .402. It’s all mathematics and transcendent ability. Would such a contract in modern-dollars be a…$50M-per-season bargain?
India (right) versus Australia
If the heart-palpitatingly exciting semi-final of the cricket World Cup—between South Africa and New Zealand—was a battle between two underrated sides who are known for their sportsmanship and a tendency not to get involved in some of the nastier aspects of gamesmanship, then Thursday’s semi-final between Australia and India is not only the clash of the titans of world cricket today, but a battle royale between two eight-hundred-pound gorillas, who love nothing more than thumping their chests, bellowing about how tough they are, and letting the opponent know just who’s boss. India and Australia have a lot to boast about: batsmen who can plunder the ball; a strong pace attack; batting all the way down the order; a huge and vocal fan-base; and money, money, money. Australia and India are the teams with box-office appeal—the teams that everyone will look to to provide the kind of in-your-face entertainment and drama that animate the Big Bash and the IPL—the two Twenty20 tournaments that command the most global attention—and that will bubble throughout this one-day international. For one night, the comparison will not be between cricket and baseball, but cricket and American football: big plays, lots of attitude, and a whole load of testosterone. We at Right Off the Bat expect fireworks throughout the contest, and not just at the end of the game, the result of which is just too hard to predict.
We have now reached the semi-final stage of the cricket World Cup, and as some of our readers may remember, we predicted the final four teams on Day 2: India, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. These teams were so much better than the rest that the prediction wasn’t a tough one. However, aside from home-team advantage for Australia and New Zealand, it’s now impossible to say with any degree of certainty who will win their semi-finals. Australia play India in Sydney on March 26th, and we’ll have plenty of opportunity to assess that clash of the titans. However, New Zealand play South Africa tonight/tomorrow in Auckland. This, too, promises to be a match of power-hitting and fiery pace-bowling, leavened with the containment and experience of Daniel Vettori’s off-spin and Imran Tahir’s passionate and unpredictable leg-spin.
It’s hard to over-estimate just how prepared New Zealand are for this game. After simmering gentlybefore the series, Martin Guptill came to a furious boil against the West Indies, scoring the second-highest one-day total ever (237 not out)—and playing nary a false shot or slog. With Kiwi captain Brendon McCullum—who doesn’t so much cook at the crease but explode like popcorn—at his side, the South Africans will worry if the pair aren’t back in the pavilion by the end of the fifth over. The opening pair are too dangerous, given what comes behind, to be still at the wicket after 30 balls.
Meanwhile, the Kiwis will be hoping that Quentin de Kock’s return to form is only temporary, that Hashim Amla momentarily forgets that he’s the classiest batsman in world cricket, that A. B. de Villiers fails to appreciate that he’s the best batsman on the planet, and that David Miller and Faf du Plessis hold the willow upside down (even then, the ball will probably cross the rope). Even if either side’s top order fails, with Tim Southee and Vernon Philander coming in at number 9 for New Zealand and South Africa respectively, it hardly matters. Each side has incredible depth.
We expect to see Dale Steyn’s veins and eyes to bulge; we expect Trent Boult’s fiendish yorkers to reach 145 kph; and we expect this one to go down to the wire. Both sides are fit, full of phenomenal fielders, and have everything to prove. It’s gonna be a feast and we urge you to tuck in.
Imran Tahir: More beard, same exuberance.
The cricket World Cup has finally moved into the business—i.e., knockout stage—end of the competition, and, so far, the quarter finals have offered up no surprises. Not even the mighty resistance of Kumar Sangakkara could prevent Sri Lanka from being defeated by a South African team that simply cannot be pinned down. All eyes before the game were on A. B. de Villiers (would the batting line up be over-reliant on his explosive genius?) or Dale Steyn (when would the crowd get to see the fearsome fast bowler’s eyes and jugular vein bulge in pumped-up aggression?). As it turned out, it was South Africa’s mild-mannered off-spinning all-rounder, JP Duminy, and its expressive leg-break bowler, Imran Tahir, who brought the Sri Lankans to their knees, taking seven wickets between them. (Duminy became the first bowler in a world cup to take a hat-trick—that’s three wickets in three balls, for our baseball friends.)
You’ve gotta love Imran Tahir. Like England’s sometime off-spinner Monty Panesar, Tahir is an exuberant cricketer. His appeals for the wicket are operatic, and his celebrations on snagging a victim often involve a madcap sprint, arms flailing, in the direction of nowhere-in-particular. You get the feeling that Tahir, like Monty, is slightly insecure about his position in the side. It’s perhaps no coincidence that he’s grown a full beard—not merely to copy his teammate Hashim Amla, but to reinforce his sense of being a Muslim in a predominantly non-Muslim side—and that that inner confidence and sense of self-identity have allowed him to settle and unveil the full mysteries of leg spin. That batsman-wicketkeeper Quentin de Kock, who’d had a fairly dismal tournament so far, came into his own against the Sri Lankans must further reinforce the confidence of the South Africans.
Meanwhile, in a result about as surprising as Ian Bell making an attractive fifty and then getting out, India steamrolled Bangladesh into submission. Tonight/tomorrow, Australia will most likely do the same to Pakistan.
Kumar Sangakkara: Greatness comes easily
This site has already had cause to wax lyrical about Sri Lankan wicketkeeper-batsman Kumar Sangakkara. At an age (37) when most players are well into their decline—the muscles tightening, the hand–eye coordination slackening, the hunger gone—Sangakkara has not only had an astonishingly productive period with the bat in Test cricket in the last eighteen months, but has waltzed into this World Cup and scored four ODI centuries in succession (a record for the World Cup), and, for good measure, passed 500 one-day catches behind the stumps—yet another record.
Sangakkara has shown (as has Kiwi Brendon McCullum) that excellence in the Test arena can not only not damage one’s ability in one-day cricket, but either can enhance the other. T20 cricket has forced batsmen to use their feet, be creative, and take risks, and it’s brought a new lease of life to Sangakkara, who without any loss of concentration and drop in orthodox batting technique, has swatted and scooped and driven himself to a formidable Test average of 58+ per innings and is now second only to Sachin Tendulkar in runs scored in ODIs.
Naturally, all Sri Lanka and half of the remainder of the cricketing world is pleading with Sangakkara to stay. Yet he’s announced he will retire from one-day international cricket later on this year and step away from the Test arena shortly thereafter. That determination to leave when you’re at the very top of your game and the level of maturity that comes with making that decision will be surely missed. So, enjoy vintage Sangakkara while the bottle lasts.
In 1882, following the England cricket team’s ignominious defeat to a group of plucky upstarts from Australia, an English newspaper, The Sporting Times, published an “obituary” in which it lamented the death of English cricket, and reported that its body would “be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.” Thus was born one of the world’s great franchise competitions: a biennial competition between England and Australia known as The Ashes.
After today’s equally ignominious defeat to a group of plucky upstarts (to wit: Bangladesh) in the World Cup in Australia, English newspapers and commentators are once again ululating in despair. England, they say, lacked vision; the management was obsessed with metrics and data and not enough with inspiring performances; the out-of-form captain of the one-day squad (Alastair Cook) was replaced far too late in the day by another out-of-form captain (Eoin Morgan); the bowling was weak; the batting was timid; the attitude over-cautious; and in every way England lacked self-belief and confidence. One can only hope, run the lamentations, that from the embers of this catastrophic defeat a phoenix might rise.
That might be hoping too much. Apart from an aberrant blip when England discovered themselves at the top of the ODI rankings a couple of years ago, blinked in astonishment, and promptly fell again, the country that brought you the game in all its forms has been bad at one-day cricket (and underperformed in virtually every World Cup) for decades. Some have blamed the county structure for this; and this may be the case. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone in England knew that this team was relatively young and untested, that it was rebuilding after the loss of Key Players (hint, hint), and that it was undercooked even under Cook.
All such caveats aside, I, Martin, suspect that one reason England have not shone in one-day internationals is that (whisper it!) we’re not that interested in ’em. Unlike nearly all other countries, England’s grounds are regularly filled for Test matches: for many England fans, The Ashes’ victories over Australia in 2005, 2009, 2011, and 2013 (as well as the losses in 2006–7 and 2013–14) are much more memorable and important than what happened in the one-day series that followed or preceded the Tests. In fact, most would be hard-pressed to remember the scoreline for each series, let alone what happened in which game.
In short, it’s not that England don’t play enough one-day cricket, but they play too many games where the outcome is unimportant, irrelevant, or without context. This must breed a kind of contempt and complacency among the top players, so that when it matters—as in the World Cup—there isn’t the hunger to perform. We’ll have more to say by way of mourning the corpse and reading its entrails in later posts. In the meantime, England will close out their World Cup by taking on fellow losers Afghanistan for stakes that could not be lower than if you buried them in the Mariana Trench. Somehow it seems fitting that England should end up engaged in a campaign as futile as every other one the country has undertaken against Afghanistan—although, we hope, considerably less bloody.
The Babe, The Don: Let The Games Begin!
The Don. The Babe. South Korea. What do all these have in common? According to the Guardian last year, plenty. Martin and I touch on the two 1930s Cricket-and-Baseball Summits in something of a coda to Right off the Bat—minus the South Korean connection, which I come to in a moment.
During the height (i.e., depths) of the depression, Don Bradman occupied a box in Yankee Stadium (photo, more from a decade prior, immediately below [R]), ostensibly to learn baseball. That is, till he shouted out, “Double Play!” at the appropriate moment. Not to be upstaged, Ruth called to the pressmen (they were all men then), “Hey, this fella over here doesn’t need any of my instruction!” Or words similar.
A few years later, it was Ruth’s turn to amaze (tho not in front of The Don). Returning from the Continent during the off-season, and preceding his first spring training in some fifteen years not with the Yankees, Ruth stopped in London for a try at cricket before the long ocean voyage home. At first, taking the orthodox stance of a batsman (as The Don would), The Sultan of Swat couldn’t do much. Ruth was unable to shift his by-then-considerable weight or work out his timing. So, The Mahatma of Mash switched to his baseball-batting stance and proceeded to knock the hard red ball all over (and out of) the august field of Lord’s. (I think it was Lord’s.) “How could you miss?” Ruth quipped. “The bat’s nothing but a paddle!” Or similar words: again, for the benefit of the pressmen.
I said I’d come to the Korean Peninsula and here I go. These 1930s meetings between cricket and baseball take on a contemporary aspect and condition in South Korea, as the influence of the in-many-ways baseball-inspired T20 spreads around the world.
Now, enter one Julien Fountain…
“He played a little cricket as a kid in the 1980s, and when that didn’t work out he took himself off to the USA to try and make it as a baseballer, simply because ‘I saw the World Series on TV in 1987 and it was beautiful.’ After a season playing with the Arun Panthers in Bognor Regis (really), Fountain, only eighteen, headed off to the USA to attend Major League Baseball tryouts. He never made the grade. But he had a long amateur career with the British national team. And in between, he qualified as a cricket coach. He’s gone on to enjoy a good career as a specialist fielding coach, working with the West Indies, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
“Fountain has always believed that there is a crossover between the skills used in the two sports. Now he has the chance to prove his theory. While he was on holiday in Sri Lanka this summer, Fountain went to watch a match between a local side and a touring team from, you’ll never guess, South Korea. This year’s Asian Games are being held in Incheon in September [2014], and, as with the 2010 edition, the 2014 Asiad will include a T20 cricket competition. As hosts, the South Koreans have decided to enter a team. Trouble being that outside of the ex-pat scene, the country isn’t well stocked with cricketers. But what they do have, of course are plenty of baseballers. They won the Olympic gold in 2008, and silver at the 2009 World [Baseball] Classic. Well, you can see where this is going.
“Fountain is now the head coach of South Korea. He is trying to create a T20 team out of a bunch of baseballers. He remembers that match in Sri Lanka, he told Al Jazeera, because ‘the funny thing was that they made a lot of basic mistakes but they still posted 165 in 20 overs. And they even had 59 dot balls. It’s monstrous—they just hit.’ Fountain says: ‘They’re beginners but it’s cheating to call them that. Show me a beginner-cricketer who can hit the ball 110 meters. I’ve got an opening batsman who hit 90 runs last week. He took the opposition apart.’
“South Korea only played in their first cricket tournament in 2012, in the ICC’s East Asia-Pacific Division 2. It will be intriguing to see how they stack up against the likes of Hong Kong and the UAE when they get the chance at the end of the summer. Some of what Fountain says about their progress should perhaps be taken with a little pinch of salt: ‘I’ve also got players who bowl world-class off-spin at least one or two balls an over; proper Graeme Swann or Saeed Ajmal stuff.’
“But there’s no doubt that T20 has narrowed the gap between the two sports, and made it easier for a player to switch from one to the other. ‘We’re working on more cultured shots and running between the wickets but we’ll keep it simple,’ Fountain admits. ‘There’ll be no Don Bradmans here.'”
West Indies’ cricketer—Mr. Cool himself—Chris Gayle became the first cricketer to score 200 plus runs in a World Cup game. Before this, highest batting scorebelonged to Gary Kirsten, who scored 188 against UAE in the 1996 World Cup. Until 2009, no one had scored a 200 in a 50-over game. Several had come agonizingly close. Since then, four have reached that score, including Gayle. The other three are from India: namely Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, and Rohit Sharma. Sharma has scored more than 200 twice in a 50-over game. In 2014, he reached an astronomical 264.
Why are these meaningless scores? Anyone who cares about cricket will tell you that the game is only good when batting and bowling have a fair chance. These scores can only mean that the balance was not right that day. Explanations for this recent trend can get a bit nerdy for most us. But, in short, the bias toward batting has to do with the playing area getting smaller in the modern era; the cricket bats getting thicker and meatier; the protective equipment in general improving (which makes batsman less afraid of the cricket ball); and, finally, the field restrictions that the ICC (cricket’s governing body) have made to encourage more entertaining hitting throughout the 50-over game.
Cricket is perhaps the only sport in the world that would allow the game to tilt so much in favor one aspect of its skill set. Batsman are ruling the roost at the moment. In golf, for example, as the equipment has become allowed the ball to be hit further, the courses have become longer and have become more difficult to maneuver through.
It would not be appropriate of me (Parth) to discredit these feats of greatness as merely average feats of sporting behavior. I genuinely feel that scoring 200+ runs in an innings is not easy. But I shudder to call them “great” because I don’t think they merit me using the word. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call them “good.” I say this because, what makes cricket great is the elegance of the play—whether it is the poetry of the late outswinger or the artistry of the on-drive. And just like great art, we enjoy these shots when it happens rarely (perhaps with a glass of our favorite fermented drink). Of course, such an assessment might be merely the response of a fuddy-duddy who has never enjoyed loud music.These innings may have all the right art. But the gallery has too much of it to enjoy each piece and appreciate it to the fullest. All one can do is marvel at the monstrosity of the gallery owner’s collection.
Now, this should not mean that one can’t revere a big innings, on occasions that actually matter: Adam Gilchrist’s 149 at the World Cup final against Sri Lanka. Virat Kohli’s 183 against Pakistan in the Asia Cup. Kohli’s 133 against Sri Lanka at Hobart. Ricky Ponting’s innings in the 2003 World Cup final. Tendulkar’s innings at Sharjah. Tendulkar’s innings in the CB Series finals in 2007. These are some knocks that come to mind as memorable onslaughts. Such innings in a meaningful context and against a worthy opposition are much more memorable and delightful to those of us who still find 50-over cricket a valid format.
In the malaise in which cricket is played today, it’s very hard for an innings to be memorable. And for those of us who are don’t follow the game as much as we once did, or give credence to the meaningless cricket that occurs a great deal with the modern-day schedule, all those monstrous innings from the turn of the 2010s are, sadly, a big blur.
Herb Score: one of the great Might Have Beens in baseball history
On the night of May 7, 1957, left-handed ace Herb Score—called by Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and most significantly by Cleveland Indians’s teammate Bob Feller the greatest lefty anybody had ever seen (Score had fanned a rookie-record-setting 245 batters in an era of fewer free swingers)—was beaned by a batted ball from Yankees’s Gil McDougald, likewise a prodigious ballplayer. Neither Score nor McDougald were the same. Their careers declined in tandem.
Perhaps a fate even more tragic was visited on Tony Conigliaro. In his second season with the Boston Red Sox he became the youngest player to lead his league (American) in home runs: 32. He worked at being something of a pop star then, with 45s “Little Red Scooter” (b/w “I Can’t Get over You”) and “Why Don’t They Understand?” On August 18, 1967, Conigliaro was struck in the eye by a pitch that got away from Jack Hamilton, only recently coming from the NL New York Mets. (There was no interleague play in those long-ago days.) Tho eventually more or less returning to form, briefly, Congiliaro would suffer a massive heart attack and stroke, aetat. 37, succumbing at 45.
Right Off the Bat 
