You are facing the two-time Cy Young Award–winning Dodgers pitcher Blake Snell from a distance of twenty-two yards, armed only with a three-foot-long paddle and your own nerve. To enliven the proceedings, Snell interacts with you not from the traditional, essentially static position but after a twenty- or thirty-yard headlong sprint from the outfield to the pitcher’s mound, at the climax of which he hurls a cherry-red leather ball in the general direction of your ankles. In most cases, the ball will hit the turf, deviate sharply left or right, and rear up like a skipping rock somewhere toward your unprotected midriff.
For good measure, Snell will periodically vary the routine by dropping the ball in shorter, with the result that it bounces off the grass and bears in on your head. At your discretion, you may have equipped yourself with a device much like a motorcyclist’s helmet for the event. Other than avoiding serious injury, your primary job is to score runs—the currency of the game—by striking the ball to the field boundary, or far enough from the eleven fielders to allow you, the batter, to run to the other end of the twenty-two-yard infield before the ball can be returned. At least two bowlers, as they’re called, must take turns, from alternating ends; also, there are always two batters on the field, each to take a turn as required. When the entire batting team has been dismissed, either by committing one of various technical indiscretions or by being rendered hors de combat, the teams’ roles are reversed. After all the players required to bat on both sides have done so either once or twice, a ritual that can take from a few hours to as long as five days, the total number of runs accumulated determines the winner—unless time runs out first and the result is a draw.
There, in a nutshell, is cricket, which despite, or because of, its fabled idiosyncrasies remains the world’s second-most-popular spectator sport, after soccer. It’s perhaps worth adding just two further points before we move on. First, if nothing else, cricket has been around a long time. The game’s exact origins are a matter of scholarly debate, but it’s generally agreed that in the England of the mid-sixteenth century, the essential bat-ball duel at the heart of the proceedings had evolved far enough to be recognizable as the highly structured contest enjoyed in more than 100 countries today. And second, as the preceding passage perhaps shows, it is emphatically not a sport for the easily intimidated or the faint-hearted.