Baseball is great. It's just not cricket.
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I've recently discovered baseball. It's been a revelation. Readers in the US might not get the fact that you can go through several decades of being alive with a healthy pulse, and not appreciate baseball. Well, in the UK we have cricket. Two sports which ought to be similar [viz, hard ball thrown quickly, a wooden bat and enormous gloves, for the wicket-keeper/'catcher' at least]. But the two games are fundamentally different, though in the same way. Symbiotic. Upside-down. Back to front.
In test Cricket, the advantage is with the batsman ('hitter'). Some of the greatest achievements in cricket revolve around him staying there, scoring slowly, without being caught for three days or more. Over 18 hours of not getting out. In England, these sporting heroes get Knighted by the Queen and win lucrative contracts with Sky TV to commentate on other merely mortal players. In baseball, the advantage is with the pitcher ('bowler') who throws so fast and with such variety, disguise and cunning, that the very greatest of all time can go through nine innings (over 120 throws of over 90 miles per hour) with such unerring accuracy, that not a single batsman gets on base. The perfect game. Here, the 'Knighthood' is the Cy Young award, or the Hall of Fame. In England, we have heroes, who don't get out and in America, they have heroes who don't get hit.
The other big difference between cricket and baseball? No one has ever made a movie about cricket as good as Moneyball. The best sports movie I've seen. I've never been a fan of Brad Pitt, but I loved him as Billie Beane, the GM of Oakland Athletic, in this movie. I hated the 'gross-out' trash movies of Jonah Hill, but he is perfect in this as the Yale analyst Peter Brand. It's a film about sports, and maths, and a man making decisions and living with his own hang-ups and the mistakes he's made. But it is the writing that hits you like a curve ball. It's a clever trick, but the pacey dialogue between Beane and Brand takes the game of baseball apart and makes it logical and comprehensible for a wider audience. Aaron Sorkin gets most of the writing credit which, like the The Social Network, is quick, smart and jargon heavy, yet it zips. ["The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us."] It's not Field of Dreams (which is spoilt by being fist-chewingly soppy) and we see hardly a pitch being thrown or a base being stolen in the whole film, but it makes for essential and compelling viewing.
A new film on the life and career of Jackie Robinson (the first African American player to play Major League Baseball in the modern era) has just been released in the States. It's called 42. The Guardian just called it "the most authentic baseball movie of all time." Awaited. I hope it comes close to Moneyball.
