Fifteen years ago I attended a portion of a cricket cup match in Bermuda and have had a curiosity about the game ever since. Now I've discovered a book by a cricketer who loves baseball, a game I understand much better. Playing Hard Ball: County Cricket and Big League Baseball (2003) by professional cricketer E.T. Smith is an amusing and insightful comparison of the national pastimes of England and the United States. Smith visits New York in 1998 and is swept up in baseball fever and yearns to learn more about the game. In 2000 he returns to New York to watch the Subway Series rightly supporting the underdog Mets agains the dynastic Yankees.

The next spring he spends a few days with the Mets at Spring Training. Some of the more humorous moments of the book are here as Smith takes a few cuts against live pitching and the American ballplayers inevitably refer to him as a cricketeer. But it also shows that the then Mets manager Bobby Valentine has a sharp mind and actually knows enough about cricket to help Smith with his swing.

In the next section of the book Smith compares the rising fortune of his own Kent County Cricket Club in 2001 while the Mets collapse and fail to make the postseason that same year. The highlight of this book is Smith's reflections on the Mets playing the first game in New York after the September 11th attacks. The memory of the night made me a little bit weepy as did the part where Smith quotes Lou Gehrig's farewell speech. According to Smith, everyone cries at that speech, including himself.

Other chapters of the book focus on sporting dynasties, statistics, and sports literature -which Smith believes is vastly superior in the US than in England, at least prior to Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. Smith is less flattering on a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame and the ideas of baseball as representing national character. Yet he balances this with equal bunk stated about cricket. In the end he concludes, baseball and cricket are great games but have no inherent morality or character other than what people bring to it. Smith also observes about how much more international cricket is compared to baseball although this was written before the coming of Ichiro and Japan's back-to-back victories in the World Baseball Classic.

This is a good, fun book for sports fans and those who are interested in cultural exchange. I can't say that I've learned much about cricket though as those passages are written for an English audience leaving me completely befuddled.
Favorite Passage

It is a surprising comparison. America, which so values individuality and self-expression, has produced sports which are massively reliant on the intervention of coaches and managers, and a culture which demands players to adhere to their demands. But in England, and in English-invented games worldwide, the players have hung on to more of their self-determination.

( )

This fascinating book, the debut of former Kent, current Middlesex and occasional England batsman Ed Smith, examines the differences and similarities between cricket and baseball from both a technical and cultural standpoint. He proves an articulate guide in this non-ghostwritten book.

The sports' most obvious similarlity is their reliance on individual performance within a team context, the battle between pitcher/bowler and batter, but Smith goes much deeper than that.

He starts with his conversion to baseball, arriving in New York in 2000 in the midst of a "Subway Series" (a World Series between the two NYC teams, the Mets and the Yankees). With typically British enthusiasm for the underdog, Smith is drawn to the Mets, since the Yankees regularly made it to the World Series in the preceding few years. The Yankees eventually triumph, but Smith is hooked.

He next attends Spring Training with the Mets in Florida, thanks to having ingratiated himself with the team's owner. Whilst testing his skills as a batter, Smith concludes the role of a cricket batsman is actually more similar to that of a baseball pitcher in the sense that conceding a run in baseball is more akin to a cricket batsman losing his wicket in terms of its influence on the course of a game.

Smith also discusses the role of money - there are vast amounts in major league baseball, precious little in county cricket - the transfer system, both sports' obsession with statistics and what the two sports say about the cultures they come from - the notion of cricket being about fair play versus baseball's brash professionalism, for example. He throws in a few curious historical titbits too e.g. that the first international cricket match was between Canada and the USA in 1844.

All in all, an easy, thought provoking and entertaining read, and Smith's enthusiasm for his subject proves infectious. ( )