Cricket for Americans, Part I
A guide to a mostly non-American game from an American fan.
tl;dr - Wikipedia and ESPN3 are your friends. But it’ll take awhile.
When I tell someone that I’m a cricket fan, I usually get one of two reactions:
“Isn’t that the game that’s played for weeks or something?”
or
“What? Why? How?”
This essay, and others to follow, form the basis of what I say on those rare occasions when I’m asked to explain the game to someone who isn’t familiar with it. It helps if you have a passing familiarity with baseball, because that game serves as a contrast.
In this part, I’ll cover the very broad basics of the game, the playing field, batsmen, bowlers and fielders. Other parts will delve into these topics in detail. Comments/questions/suggestions? dwillis@gmail.com.
The Basics
The essence of cricket is similar to baseball: a contest between a player with a bat and another with the ball, backed up by fielders. There are 11 players to a side. Even though cricket has a detailed list of formal “laws” of the game, it can be a much more fluid game than baseball, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first glance.
In cricket, an “innings” is when a team bats until 10 of its 11 players are out (for there must always be two batsmen in place) or until it decides to stop batting (presumably having scored enough runs to win). This is in contrast to baseball, in which a team has nine innings, each of which end when three outs are recorded.
Perhaps the most confusing thing for newcomers is that there are three different formats of the game, with the main difference being the length of the contest. In each format, the teams are given the opportunity to bat an equal number of times (although that doesn’t always happen in the longest form, the test match).
Test matches can last up to five days, and can end in a win, loss, draw or tie (yes, you read that right). The shorter forms of the game are One Day Internationals (ODIs), in which teams bat for up to 50 overs, and Twenty20 matches (T20s), in which teams bat for up to 20 overs.
Cricket can be played at night, but most matches are played during the day; the shortest form of the game is often played at night to attract spectators. Although there is a host team and a visiting team, a coin flip is held with the winner deciding to bat first or have the other team bat first.
Both teams have a captain, who decides on the batting order, the placement of fielders and the rotation of bowlers. Captaincy, then, is akin to a player-manager in baseball, and is a skill unto itself.
There are two on-field umpires and usually a third replay umpire, and in some matches instant replay can be used to review an umpire’s decision. This is somewhat controversial, and to argue with an umpire’s on-field call is often seen a poor form. A batsman who knows he is out is expected to walk off the pitch without being told to do so. Billy Martin would not have lasted as a cricketer.
The Pitch
In cricket, the nature of the contest changes in ways that it does not in baseball. A lot of that is due to the playing surface, which takes on a much more significant role than it does in baseball. Time is also a variable in ways that it isn’t in baseball. Cricket games have finite endings, even though it seems like some of them never do. But let’s tackle the playing ground first.
Baseball has its variety of playing surfaces. It’s easier to hit home runs in Denver due to the altitude, and Fenway’s Green Monster changes how left fielders play defense. But in cricket, the condition of the ground - its slope, dryness/wetness, proximity to the ocean, humidity, likelihood of rain or sunshine - can produce different kinds of matches. These can be low-scoring, high-scoring, beneficial to a certain type of player or riskier to another. Oh, and the conditions very often change during the match.
Cricket is played in a grassy ground that is roughly oval-shaped, although different grounds have different shapes. In the center of the ground there is the pitch, which is a strip 22 yards long:
There are some white lines on this pitch, and some other things. Three wooden stumps are placed at both ends of the pitch, and atop them are small objects called bails. If those get knocked off by the ball, or by a fielder holding the ball, then somebody is out under most circumstances. So the bails and stumps are important. The stumps even have individual names: leg, middle and off, in order of closest to the batsman standing in front of them.
Confusingly, both the pitch and the stumps are sometimes referred to as a “wicket”, as in: “they’re playing on a dry wicket today (the pitch)” or “the batsman lost his wicket cheaply when he closed his eyes before trying to hit the ball (the stumps).”
The pitch is where much, but not all, of the action occurs. It’s certainly where the action starts, with a “bowler”, the rough equivalent of a baseball pitcher, trying to get a “batsman” out.
The Batsmen
Let’s start with the equipment: cricket batsmen (usually) wear a helmet when batting, but also wear leg pads and heavy gloves for protection. And then there’s the bat: unlike the cylinders used in baseball, cricket bats have a flat batting side.
The cricket batsman doesn’t typically “swing” at the ball the way that baseball players do, either. There are a wide variety of shots, but many aim to place the ball on the ground rather than in the air, in order to minimize the chance of having it caught for an out.
Oh, and in cricket batsmen can hit the ball in any direction. Even behind them. There is no “foul territory.”
Unlike baseball, there are two batsman on the pitch, although only one bats at a time. There is one bowler at a time, but bowlers must rotate; after six legal deliveries, another bowler takes a turn; this is called an “over”. Whereas baseball keeps track of how many innings a pitcher has pitched, in cricket the equivalent statistic is the number of overs.
Batsmen score runs in a number of ways, but most commonly by hitting the ball and running back and forth between the two “popping” creases in front of the stumps. When the two batsmen cross to opposite sides, that’s one run, and both must cross successfully for the run to count. There are other ways to score runs, and we’ll get into them in a later piece. Two are worth noting here: the playing pitch has a boundary, and balls that cross the boundary before hitting the ground are worth six runs, while balls that cross or touch the boundary after hitting the ground are worth four runs.
The goal of the batsmen, then, is to both score runs and to not get out, because they continue batting until they are out. This is why you sometimes see cricket scorecards that say something like this:
The first batsman (Ravi Ashwin) scored five runs and was not out at the end of his team’s innings. The second batsman scored 11 and also was not out. This is one of the biggest differences between cricket and baseball: when a batsman is out, he doesn’t get another chance in the same innings, whereas a baseball player can strike out in his first three at-bats and hit a home run his last time up. In cricket, you bat until you are out, even if that means batting for several hours. There are so many ways to get out that we’ll need a separate article to explore them.
A final note that we’ll explore more later: batsmen do not have to try and hit the ball, and judging when to leave a ball alone is a skill. Tempting batsmen to try and put the bat on the ball is what bowlers do.
The Bowlers
Bowlers are so-called because in the early days of the game, balls were tossed underhand towards the batsmen. This doesn’t happen anymore; most bowlers bowl over-arm or side-arm.
As baseball pitchers attempt to place the ball in the strike zone, enticing the batter to swing, bowlers try to hit the stumps behind the batsman or otherwise lure the batsman into playing a bad shot. In this regard the aim of bowlers and pitchers is similar. But there are several key differences from baseball pitching:
- Bowlers cannot bend their elbows the way that pitchers do, particularly if they are bowling fast (or with pace, as the phrase goes). The fastest bowlers are still capable of hurling the ball around 90 mph, but many deliveries are much, much slower.
- Bowlers can run towards the batsman when delivering, but cannot step over the popping crease shown above. If they do, it is called a no-ball and the bowler must repeat the delivery (and a run is given to the batting team).
- Bowling deliveries typically hit the ground before reaching the batsman, although they do not have to do so. This is the biggest contrast between bowling and pitching - bowlers use the ground to aid the movement of the ball to get the batsman out.
- There are no balls and strikes in cricket, although some deliveries are considered unplayable and are judged to be no-balls.
In general, there are two main types of bowlers: those who rely on speed, or “pace bowlers”, and those who rely on spin, or “spin bowlers”. Teams usually try to have some of both, although spin bowlers often are called upon to bowl more overs, since they are less reliant on the speed of the ball. A later piece will examine some of the varieties within these two groups.
As I mentioned above, bowlers have to rotate turns; one bowler cannot bowl an entire match. In the shorter formats of cricket, bowlers are limited to a maximum number of overs, but in test matches they can bowl as many as they are able.
The Fielders
Absent the occasional oddity such as the infield shift,baseball’s fielders are typically in set positions. Cricket has two mandatory fielding positions: the bowler and the wicket-keeper, who is the rough equivalent of a baseball catcher. All other fielders can be placed around the pitch in a variety of places. In the following graphic, the wicket-keeper (WK) stands just behind the batsman, who is right-handed:
So yeah. That’s gonna need some explanation, and it will come. But suffice it to say that the duties of cricket fielders and baseball position players are similar: to catch the ball in the air if they can, and to get the ball back to the bowler or wicket-keeper as quickly as possible to prevent the batsmen from running.
That’s where the contest is, and the details of the game are where we’ll meet next.
