Don't get me wrong, there are many, many moment to moment decisions in baseball that need to be made. And player awareness has to be a lot higher than in cricket (since the ball is never truly dead). But the situations a player faces are far more scripted and rehearsed. A runner on first is always on first and faces only a few possible scenarios.
No and no. If there are no runners, there is no one to steal the next base. It is almost the same as being dead. There are also numerous dead ball situations. Players may ask for time outs. The ball is dead if it is thrown into the stands or if a pitch hits a batter or crosses the outfield fences or gets stuck in a players shirt (it happens). It is dead if there is a balk (a set of rules so complex many people will never understand them) and during substitutions or intentional walks. There are fist fights. The ball can be dead; it is, however, crucial to be awake at all times if you are in the field.
A runner at first is not always the same scenario. Most obviously trying to steal off a left handed pitcher who is pitching from the set position and facing the runner
View attachment 24456 is much harder than stealing off a right handed pitcher whose back is to the runner in the set position.
View attachment 24457
A batsman in cricket can need to bat differently based on the age of the ball, the innings of the match, the bowler, the field settings, how many batsmen are already out, the atmospheric conditions, the condition of the pitch, the progression of their innings and their own level of exhaustion.
All of those things apply to baseball, except the age of the ball. Scuffing up a ball or playing with a damaged or worn out ball is considered cheating. But if you saw my previous post, players are expected to deal with gale force winds, blizzards, standing water, near freezing temps, and so on. Of course, how teams strategize certain situations also depends on the score, who is batting, who is pitching, and whether they are home or away. Exhaustion is less of an issue by the day for pitching because of more frequent substitution schemes used, but it clearly affects who is available to pitch given that starting pitchers generally are on 5 day rotations and they are removed when they are fatigued, and relievers are typically not available on three consecutive days, so figuring out who is playing and who isn't based on exhaustion is a proxy for fatigue during the game.
I have already said that baseball is a more pure athletic pursuit. Cricket is defined by concentration and not the ability to hit harder or bowl faster. Baseball is much more raw skills oriented.
It would seem to require more raw and refined skill. Any number of complex, split second timing kinds of plays such as the three defenders engaged in trying hold, and then catch a stealing runner in about 3.1 seconds after two perfect throws and a perfect tag don't even begin to exist in cricket. Players spend weeks in training being taught what kind of slide to use at each base. Judging the strike zone so as to avoid swinging at bad pitches is the centerpiece of hitting. While plenty of guys come up to the majors at 21 years old, many don't despite years of professional coaching on all sorts of skills -- just listing the skills probably takes longer than and entire t20 match.
Having said that, a baseball batter would be able to adapt far less quickly to cricket than a cricketer to baseball.
I don't know and I don't think we will find out due to the economics of baseball. I do know that no one has ever transitioned the other way despite the fact there's much more money in it. The two cricket players who were given minor league contracts by the Pittsburgh Pirates never progressed much.
Because the basic baseball skillset is a subset of the basic cricketing skillset. Doesn't mean an MLB hitter is going to walk into the Indian test side, or an English batsman is going to get picked up by an MLB side but the complex technical nature of batting in cricket means that it's got a much greater learning curve than baseball batting.
I think not. Watch this video on the complexity of getting the bat to the pitch (coming at 95 mph)
Of course, there's the hundreds and thousands of different defensive techniques from catching the ball to coordinated relays to backing up none of which come up in cricket, so there's that.
But baseball is a game about fielding, not batting or pitching... Baseball is a fielding game that has batting and pitching. .
No. No. No. Fielding comes to the fore when the batting and the pitching are equally matched. The hardest thing in all of sports is hitting major league pitching. The second hardest is stopping major league hitting. At the major league level, it is not all too unusual for these things to be in equipoise, but is is also not to unusual for them to be mismatched. A team can have the best fielding in the world, but it it cannot hit or cannot pitch, it cannot win regularly. 9 of 19 players to win Gold Gloves (best defense at their usual position) did not make the playoffs; the two from the KC Royals were part of the second worst team in the majors.
Fielding is great asset; you would love to have guys on your team who can catch and throw bullets all the time. You can have one of those guys on your club who doesn't hit enough to justify his presence otherwise.
The variety of balls that a bowler can (and do) bowl in cricket dwarfs that of what pitchers can pitch because there is more variety of movement off a pitch than is possible in the air. And weird actions do exist in cricket. See: Muralitharan, Malinga, Bumrah, Johnson and Holding (for the most perfect and beautiful action).
Cricketers have to deal with the ball bouncing variably in four directions (up/down, left/right) and moving through the air variably (dropping, swinging).
You have not checked out the videos of pitchers with different deliveries and trajectories that can involve horizontal movement of 12 inches and vertical movement of 24 inches or both. A batsman also has the luxury of knowing the speed of the ball and then being able to track and start his swing (if he is going to swing) when the ball is 20 feet away and bounces and its already relatively low starting speed of 50 and 55 mph has decreased to 35 as the result of drag and friction. If a baseball hitter waits until the ball is 20 feet away, the ball will be in the catcher's mitt.
Even that assumes the batter can see the ball coming in so he can swing at all, and that's not always a safe assumption when it is coming at 98 mph. To judge by the quality of the umpiring, sometimes it's not always a safe assumption he can see it coming.
Cricketers have to deal with wind. They don't deal with rain or snow because that would ruin the ball (though ice cricket exists). There's a few high altitude pitches around the world but it's not a huge issue as it'll make the ball swing less if anything. Every sportsperson has to deal with the sun if they're playing in the late afternoon. Shadows across the pitch can be a huge problem for batsmen.
1. Wind affects the fielders more than the hitters. Round ball off round bat in large circular stadium 3 decks tall leads to 150 high popups with 8 and 10 second hang time. A ball can be moved 50 feet. (Tampa plays indoors, but the low roof results in batted balls striking the rafters. Now that's really an unusual thing to deal with.)
2. Altitude affects not only the pitchers' grip on the ball decreasing the rpms, but thin air decreases drag making batted balls carry further while slicing less. That means home runs.
3. Shadows would seem to be far less of an issue for players standing in the middle of the yard than for those 40 feet in front of a structure that is in front of the setting sun. (Home plate is typically on the west or southwest part of the property so the batter does not have to contend with the setting sun. Of course there is no morning play to make him contend with a rising sun.)
And environmental issues are more difficult challenges in cricket because the ball bounces off the pitch. It's literally baked into the design of the sport.
I am thinking that the standard 2500 rpms of pitches create enough in, out and down motion to compare to any crack in the earth not as large as the Grand Canyon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q7-Vj_usV4 And without a fat seam in the middle to pick up that rotation, it is damn hard to hit.
T20 leagues face the same problem. Perth is roughly as far from Brisbane as Washington State is from NYC.
But Perth is not playing Tuesday at 7 in Sydney and then Wednesday at home at 7. Last year, the Perth team never played on consecutive days and seldom played on less than two days's rest. What cricket does have is those punishing 7 week tours to countries where the players don't speak the language, live out of suitcases, and don't necessarily have food or water that their stomachs can handle. I would think that is at least as grueling as traveling from Baltimore to Oakland overnight.
Baseball fielding is running a well oiled machine. Cricket fielding is much less complex, though catching is far more difficult (you have to catch a ball that's smaller and harder than a baseball with your bare hands). Field placement in cricket is far more strategic and requires a high level of understanding of the game situation, current bowler, bowling plans and the ability and intent of the current batsman. And sometimes you set a field for psychological purposes (set two men deep on the leg side and the batsman is probably going to prepare for a bouncer but you might try bowling a full ball to get them lbw).
The cricket ball is a tad bigger. But it is not hit with 100 mph exit velos or 150 feet high nor regularly thrown amongst the fielders at 90 mph, and that is what makes catching a baseball more difficult. As for alignments, the set up of the defense is usually guided by 3 on field coaches and a 1000 page playbook prepared by a 10 member analytics department filled with Ivy Leaguers. I'm not sure nuclear bombs are more complex than that.
Just trust me on this, constructing an innings in cricket is really hard. Getting a run in baseball is hard but once you're on base it's easier than building an innings in cricket. One lucky swing can get you home in baseball. In cricket you can try and ride your luck but doing so will never get you more than a few runs.
Jacob deGrom had an Earned Run Average this year of 1.58. Earned Run Average is like Economy, but multiplied by 9 so as to reflect a projected result for a complete 9 inning game (pitchers are not responsible for runs scored as the result of errors). So that's right, he allowed an average of 1.58 runs per game. He was declared the statistical winner of 10 games this year and loser of 9 out of 32 started. Had his team scored as many as 3 runs for him each time he started (the league average is 4.5 runs scored per game) he would have been 26 wins vs 1 loss (with 5 no decisions).
Scoring is hard. It takes knowing how to play the game. Big bops are great, as are one punch knockouts. They decide a lot of games. Not all.
We all get that baseball is a complex game with a high degree of professionalism. But cricket is a deeper, more expansive game that has a much greater variety of strategies and match situations.
Try watching one or reading about one. Find one called Pure Baseball by Keith Hernandez.
https://www.amazon.com/Pure-Basebal...44593859&sr=8-3&keywords=keith+hernandez+book It is 272 pages breaking down two regular season games. Or one called Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_...gs&sprefix=okrent+,aps,181&crid=2M7GKI3OBO608 304 pages on one game.
Or if you really want to know something, Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans by Tim McCarver.
https://www.amazon.com/McCarvers-Ba...=UTF8&qid=1544594036&sr=8-1&keywords=mccarver 330 pages on offense and defense tactics. Or The Book: Playing The Percentages In Baseball by Tom Tango.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Playing...CR1Y7MY55M0&psc=1&refRID=XG2SGF7NMCR1Y7MY55M0
I'm getting the idea that lots of you think there's little to baseball except clubbing a fastball. No. It is the most poured over phenomenon since the Bible. Maybe more than the Bible considering how things have been going lately.
