Question
What's the difference between baseball and cricket?
Answer
I wrote a post about this a few years ago.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
Here's an excerpt.
Here’s all you really need to know about the cricket-baseball difference, as far as understanding this post goes. The cricket-baseball difference is actually the cricket-everything-else difference. Despite superficial similarities, baseball is more like most other team field sports than it is like cricket. Four differences almost completely explain the difference in character between the two games.
In cricket, you don’t have to play every legal ball. You can let it go. No ‘strike’
In cricket, if you hit the ball, you don’t have to run. You don’t have to risk a run-out. You can stay put.
In the classic form of the game, (test cricket), in principle there is no limit to how long a batsman can keep playing. He’s in till he’s out, or decides to ‘retire’ due to fatigue or injury.
The ball is allowed to “pitch” on the ground once before reaching the batsman. This means its trajectory can be a lot more varied than in baseball, since both in-air and bouncing dynamics are involved. The ball and pitch also “age” through the game, due to wear, giving the later stages a very idiosyncratic character, and allowing the home team a decisive advantage in “framing” the game by curating the pitch in specific ways, and helping the ball age in specific ways (there are legal and illegal ways of doing this). Australians, for instance, like to create hard, bouncy pitches to favor their fast bowlers, while Indians like to create low-bounce pitches that favor spinners in the middle of the game.
Though modern innovations such as limited-overs cricket and Twenty20 constrain the third feature (each side gets 50 or 20 overs at-bat respectively; an over is six “balls” or pitches), dominate the game today, test cricket is still the holy-grail form of the game, and the form which gets you into the serious record books.
The point of these four features of the game is that the game can get very long. Five days is the official full length of a test match, and if there isn’t an outcome by then, it is a draw. Five days is long enough to exhaust most of the creative possibilities of the rules of the game (though games like the original Native American version of lacrosse seem to have had enough richness to go on for weeks, on fields that were miles long).
If you want an analogy, cricket is to baseball as Go is to chess. A lot of the comparisons between those two board games hold for baseball vs. cricket.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
Here's an excerpt.
Here’s all you really need to know about the cricket-baseball difference, as far as understanding this post goes. The cricket-baseball difference is actually the cricket-everything-else difference. Despite superficial similarities, baseball is more like most other team field sports than it is like cricket. Four differences almost completely explain the difference in character between the two games.
In cricket, you don’t have to play every legal ball. You can let it go. No ‘strike’
In cricket, if you hit the ball, you don’t have to run. You don’t have to risk a run-out. You can stay put.
In the classic form of the game, (test cricket), in principle there is no limit to how long a batsman can keep playing. He’s in till he’s out, or decides to ‘retire’ due to fatigue or injury.
The ball is allowed to “pitch” on the ground once before reaching the batsman. This means its trajectory can be a lot more varied than in baseball, since both in-air and bouncing dynamics are involved. The ball and pitch also “age” through the game, due to wear, giving the later stages a very idiosyncratic character, and allowing the home team a decisive advantage in “framing” the game by curating the pitch in specific ways, and helping the ball age in specific ways (there are legal and illegal ways of doing this). Australians, for instance, like to create hard, bouncy pitches to favor their fast bowlers, while Indians like to create low-bounce pitches that favor spinners in the middle of the game.
Though modern innovations such as limited-overs cricket and Twenty20 constrain the third feature (each side gets 50 or 20 overs at-bat respectively; an over is six “balls” or pitches), dominate the game today, test cricket is still the holy-grail form of the game, and the form which gets you into the serious record books.
The point of these four features of the game is that the game can get very long. Five days is the official full length of a test match, and if there isn’t an outcome by then, it is a draw. Five days is long enough to exhaust most of the creative possibilities of the rules of the game (though games like the original Native American version of lacrosse seem to have had enough richness to go on for weeks, on fields that were miles long).
If you want an analogy, cricket is to baseball as Go is to chess. A lot of the comparisons between those two board games hold for baseball vs. cricket.