I saw a good explanation of the cricket rules a while back so thought I would share. It anonymously written so unfortunately I can’t credit the author.
[quote]The Rules of Cricket as Explained to a Foreign Visitor
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side thats been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game![/quote]
[quote=“hansioux”][quote=“haokaiyang”]Another interesting (to me, at least) facet of this debate is which sport has the more esoteric terminology. Before I read the cricket article on Wikipedia, I would look at BBC cricket news stories without the faintest idea of what they were talking about! Even now that I know the basic rules, I still find them hard to read. So I wonder, is baseball prose just as impenetrable to the unitiated?
I also wonder whether cricket players ever wear thongs when trying to break out of a slump.[/quote]
I think baseball terminologies are more straight forward. You can look at the terms and figure out what it’s talk about. For example, curve ball, sinker are just what they appear, a ball that curves or sinks. By comparison, cricket terminologies that describes similar things, such as spin or swing are pretty confusing. [/quote]
Disagreed. Tennis and ping pong have spin. You can put on a top-side spin (spinning forward), a back spin (making the ball slow and bounce up when it hits the surface), or a side spin.
The difference between baseball and cricket in this respect is that in baseball, the ball doesn’t bounce before the batter hits it.
Even ten pin bowling utilises spin to control the trajectory of the ball; it’s very straightforward (or not, depending on the spin).
Back in the days before professional sport, Australia’s top cricketers used to play baseball in the winter to keep their eyes in. They also tended to excel at baseball.
I don’t see why this has to be a ones better than another thing, as long as the people playing and watching the games are enjoying themselves then what’s the big deal?
To me the to two sports are like watching two different sorts of paint dry, just one takes longer.
Cricket makes no sense when people try to explain it to me. Like other said before, the terminology don’t come naturally. It’s not intuitive. Even the name of the sport is weird. Baseball, a game with a ball where you get players around the bases. Basketball, a game where you put the ball in the basket. Football, a game where you use your foot to play. Cricket…if you never saw it before. Can you even imagine what would even look like.
Perhaps people who speak French or Dutch can imagine what cricket would look like. It’s one of those sports that England imported from France, like tennis.
All of the below means either goal post, stick, crutch, or staff
Jesus Christ. Basketball? Where’s the fucking basket?[/quote]
Yeah, but in most team ball sports, making contact with the ball using foot isn’t allowed. Soccer, Football and its variants, rugby (the original football), Australian football and etc.) and sepak takraw are probably the only ones still going strong today.
A base is a abstract concept. Usage for “base” to describe a military encampment occurred after the 1860s. The word came from Greek basis, which means step and pedestal. That usage is derived from the verb bainein, to step. So since there are 4 bags that a runner should step on to secure their advancement, baseball is pretty aptly named.
New Zealand’s top cricket bowler and baseball pitch challenge each other. Don’t know if the bowling machine is as easy for cricketers as pitching machine is for baseball players, but Riki Paewai makes cricket batting look easy. It probably is on an easy setting, otherwise Riki would have to put paddings on. Chris Harris hits fastballs well, like most cricketers, but when the curveballs and SFF come out he made whiffs.
Watching that, Paewai knows how to play cricket. He probably played a lot growing up. Harris, who incidentally was never a top bowler and was actually pretty crap at test cricket, has been retired from top line cricket for over a decade. To make it a fair comparison, they need to either find an almost 50 year old baseball player who has likely never played cricket, or get one of the current NZ players to do it.
We talked about hitting a lot. But what about fielding and defense? Which is harder? I assume the exit velocity of the ball when you hit it with a baseball bat is much faster, and you need to have an arm to throw it accurately and fast. I know cricket doesnt use fielding gloves to catch, but I wonder which is more difficult in terms of defensive skills required.
There are different aspects to fielding as well. If we are just talking about catching a batted ball. I think that one goes to cricket. No gloves definitely makes a huge difference.
As for range, I think cricket fielders also take this one. Especially when the cricket field’s outfield is about 3 time larger than the baseball outfield, and with 11 men on the field, minus the bowler and catcher, that’s a lot of space for just 9 people to cover.
Cricket players also needs to throw to beat the batsmen, but I am less familiar with that part of the game. I don’t really see Ichiro-level laser beamers when I watch cricket highlights though. That might has something to do with wearing gloves, which makes strong throws catchable.
The field might be larger but i’ve never played cricket before. I played 3rd base, and balls hit there come at me real fast so i’m wondering how fast does a cricket ball travels off the bat. It could be harder to field a ball that is hit faster in a smaller area than a slow ball fit into a larger area.
The fastest bowlers in cricket are bowling at speeds of 150-160km/hr, which I think is comparable to the fastest pitches in baseball. So the speed of the bat should be more or less the same. If the ball hits the edge of the bat and goes flying behind the batsman, it doesn’t really slow down at all.
The average pitch in baseball must be a good deal faster than the average bowl in cricket. Not many bowlers regularly top 150 km/h - those that can are exceptional and many teams lack such a bowler. Spin bowlers very often clock less than 100 km/h. Every time I see a baseball game the pitcher is pitching pretty fast and I’ve never seen a pitcher as slow as a spin bowler, or even a slow medium pacer.
The average speed of the ball coming off the bat would be faster in baseball too, I would guess, because in cricket batsmen play gentle, defensive shots by default in order to protect their stumps (the three sticks in the ground behind the batsman). It is not compulsory for the batsman in cricket to run after hitting a ball so he need not care how far the ball travels after such a shot. And there are no strikes, either, so a batsman can be very selective and patient when choosing a bowl to hit hard. I don’t see batters in baseball bunting nearly as much as batsmen in cricket play defensive strokes (although I could see a possible exception to this if one were to talk about the Twenty20 form of cricket).
However, no baseball fielder stands within a couple of meters of the batter. Cricket fielders frequently stand just a few paces from the batsman and are often hit, sometimes injured, as in the (poor quality :neutral: ) video below:
Cricket fielders are also far busier than baseball fielders because hits in baseball are not nearly as common as their equivalent in cricket (it is possible for one batsman to hit the ball more than a hundred times in a game).
the pitcher is pretty damn close, a baseball can travel 110+mph off the bat right at the pitcher. It one of the scariest moments in baseball when a pitcher gets hit.
