Our somewhat plain but very genteel sister

(Not Kate Middleton.  She’s not our sister, and whether she’s plain or not is up to you. But she probably is about as genteel as they get.)

(Certainly not MY sister!  Linda is the good looking one of us siblings, although she definitely fits the genteel criterion. I meant OUR sister… you know, baseball’s sister.)

 

Yesterday I got this text message from Ryan:

ESPN3 has the Ashes!

Actually, the message was much longer than that, but similarly giddy and breathless , all about how being able to watch the Ashes is such a godsend for a man studying for his bar exam.

What’s that? You aren’t quite sure what the Ashes are?  Sheesh.  What planet are you from? The Ashes is the nickname for the international test match between England and Australia. You know, the test match — all five days of it?  Where they start playing each day at 10 am and end about 6:45? With, as Ryan so enthusiastically pointed out in his text,  “built in breaks for tea/coffee!” And, yes, of course, for lunch, too. (Although I will point out that the “coffee” part of Ryan’s exultation was his own invention;  the English and Aussies refer to it as “tea” even though, from the video I watched, no one was drinking either tea or coffee.)

Still not getting it? Oh, come on, man, it’s baseball’s sister sport: cricket!

 

 

Old Detroit: W, 5 – 3.  .194, .286, .323;  8 ip, 2 er.  Trevor Bauer has been awfully inconsistent, which today was a good thing since he saved the W’s bacon with a nice 8 ip, 2 er performance. That’s a pretty good day in baseball, but if he’d been hurling for Australia it would have been an historically GREAT day.  108 pitches — that would be 18 overs in cricket where bowlers (pitchers are called “bowlers” in cricket even though they aren’t bowling but mostly sort of overhand slinging the ball) bowl (ie, pitch) in bunches of six, six balls being an over.  108 balls hurled is not out of line for a day’s work for a cricket bowler.  But in the process Bauer got 24 outs!  The best Australian bowlers each only got three outs yesterday in an entire day of bowling more than 100 balls.  You’d have to bowl three entire innings to even get a theoretical chance to get 24 outs. That’d be something like 600 – 1000 balls delivered. I think the record for outs gotten in a single day by one bowler in Ashes cricket is something like 5 (based on what they were saying on the BBC broadcast).

And Bauer only allowed 2 runs!!!  The stingiest of the main four bowlers for Australia allowed something like 50 runs in a single day.  Bauer is a fine pitcher, but not even the best in Cleveland.  He’d be the best cricket bowler in history if he brought those kinds of numbers with him.  (And five-day tests wouldn’t last 5 days, either.)

Haviland: L,  1 – 9.  .268, .333, .366;  9 ip, 10 er. In retrospect, this sentence might not make a perfect sense to a baseball fan:

“You’d have to bowl three entire innings to even get a theoretical chance to get 24 outs.”

Of course in baseball three entire innings is only 9 outs, about 30-minutes’ work on a typical day.  In cricket an inning is 10 outs. That can be 1 1/2 days’ work — and remember, the cricket day is 6 hours of play (not counting breaks for drinks).  So one inning is about four baseball games’ worth of action.

On the other hand, a five-day test is over when both teams have had two innings at bat.   So innings are a big deal — long, even maybe sometimes a little boring, and excruciating when the pitchers… er, I mean the bowlers aren’t doing well.

Haviland got a little taste of that feeling yesterday watching Chris Archer pitch: 6 innings (baseball style), 9 earned runs.

Cottage:  W 0, L 3; 8 – 19. .162, .244, .216;  6 ip, 6 er.  Yesterday I failed to update the NL Central standings at all, which means the Cheese are in for a surprise today.  Happy Surprise Day, Cottage!

No, the Cheeses’ surprise isn’t that they’re getting a dissertation on cricket.  Nor is it even the sorry pitching and sorrier hitting.  It’s that all on one day they have to deal with three games played — and not on a good day, either.  Sorry to disappoint you, Head Cheese.  But look on the bright side — you got in one day the equivalent of 15 days work in international test cricket!  So even if it was miserable, at least it’s over and you can enjoy the next two weeks.

Peshastin: “W”,  4 – 4.  .238, .304, .429; 1.3 ip, 0 er.  In cricket, the catcher is called the “wicketkeeper” and home plate is called the “stumps” and isn’t a plate. The stumps (also called the wicket) are three sticks stuck in the ground with two little sticks — the bails —  set on top of them. One of the ways the bowler gets a batter out is by bowling — no, let’s not kid ourselves, by hurling — the ball so that it hits the upright sticks and knocks the bails off.  Wicketkeeper is the premium defensive position because if he doesn’t catch a ball the batters can run.  Also because batters can run on foul balls — actually, there is no such thing as a foul ball.  So hits that go backwards are still hits, making the wicketkeeper also the shortstop, kind of. *  (Also because another way to get an out is for the wicket keeper, while in possession of the ball, to knock the bails off with his gloves. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the wicketkeeper wears gloves on both hands.)  So wicketkeepers are sometimes not premium offensive players.

Sort of like Welington Castillo.  Or at least, the Welington Castillo that used to play for the Wolverines and batted .079, .125, .109 in May.  The one that plays for the Pears now went 2 for 4 with a double and a homer yesterday. That Welington Castillo is batting .316, .435, .579 for July. How is this possible?   Maybe he’s secretly playing cricket and posting his cricket stats rather than his baseball stats! That would explain everything.

Pittsburgh: W,  9 – 8.   .351, .405, .568;  1 ip, 1 er.  The Alleghenys are good capitalists, including embracing the efficiencies in division of labor.  Dellin Betances pitched the inning, getting two strikeouts.  Robert Osuna allowed the run, surrendering a homer to the only man he faced.

Now, to be fair, runs are a lot cheaper in cricket. A single in cricket is worth one run. A double would be worth two, except I’ve never heard them call a two-run hit a double.  The rarest form of hit is worth 3 runs — this is a ball that stays on the playing field and the fielders can’t get it back to the stumps before the runners run between the bases three times. (There are only two bases in cricket — each stumps (wicket) is a base — and there’s always a man on each base.)  If a cricket batter gets the ball off the playing field on a bounce (or a roll — there’s no fence, just a rope around the field), he gets four runs — essentially four runs for a ground rule double.  And if the batter clears the fences, I mean, the boundary rope on the fly? That’s a six, the biggest hit in cricket.

So, for example, Mike Trout went 2 for 3 yesterday with two homers and a walk. That’s an outstanding day in baseball, an OPS of 3.417.   In cricket that would be “out for 13 runs” — not a good day for a premium batsman, but not a total embarrassment, either. Better than four of the 11 English batsmen did in their first innings (which were over hours ago, even though Day 2 of the test is just now winding up).  In fact, the English clean-up hitter… well, they don’t have clean up hitters in cricket.  The guy who bats fourth in the lineup is supposed to be really good like an American clean-up hitter, but he went out for 1 run after seeing only seven pitches/bowls/balls. Mike Trout outdid him by a long ways.  Get used to being shown up by Mike Trout, Ian Bell, like everyone else has had to do.

Flint Hill:  “W”, 3 – 6. .286, .318, .548;  0.7 ip, 1 er.  I have to compliment Flint Hill.  They alerted me last night that Dustin Pedroia was showing up on team stats as having 80 AB in July.  Pedroia is on the DL and has been all month.  Those AB are from his June stats.  He should have 0 AB in July.  Although the Top Tornado said it would be alright to just leave him there and forget about, considering Pedroia’s OPS in June was over .900, I decided to go ahead and zero Pedroia out for July and refer the matter to IT to figure out how Pedroia had wormed his way into the July stats.

Flint Hill did the honorable thing and refused to take advantage of a mistake by our game’s officials.  This is not expected behavior in baseball. If the man tags you out at third base, and you know it for a fact, but the ump calls you safe, you had better cling to third like a life preserver and not leave until the inning is over or you are driven in by a teammate.  If you walk off the base and into the dugout, you might want to just keep on walking into retirement for the vilification you’ll have to endure from fans, teammates and team management.

But in cricket, the standard is to “walk” if you know you’re out even if you aren’t called out. (“Walk” in this case does not mean taking a base on balls. It means walking off the pitch… sorry, the playing field, calling yourself out.)  It doesn’t happen as often as cricket devotees would like to believe, but the myth is very  strong of playing everything not only according to the Laws of Cricket (note the capitals) but also according to the Spirit of the Game (also capitalized).  So every now and then a cricket player does walk even though he hasn’t been called out because he knew he was out.

Flint Hill’s voluntary admission that it was benefitting from phantom Pedroia stats is a sterling example of someone playing by the spirit of our game.  If the Top Tornado gets any guff from any Flint Hill player, fan or executive, and the EFL Commissioner hears about it, that fan, player or executive is going to be very sorry.

Canberra:  DNP, 4 – (-4).   .333, .400, .815 ;   7.3 ip, 2 er.  Seven Kangaroos, inspired by their countrymen competing in the Ashes, went all cricket on opposing pitchers. Seven Kangaroo batters OPSed over 1.000 with 9 hits in 23 AB, including 2 doubles, a triple, three homers and 3 walks.  That’s the equivalent of 19 runs for 14 outs, disastrous by cricket standards but, you know, at least visible on the cricket scale of things and stupendous in baseball terms.

The eighth Kangaroo batter was Yonder Alonso, who went 0 for 4. While that might set him up to be mercilessly teased by his teammates, it is far from the worst humiliation a cricket batter can face.  At least Alonso survived for at least 6 pitches (he struck out once).  A cricket batter can go out on one ball — it’s called being “out for a duck.”  And it means the batter is done batting for the day.  He won’t come up again until the next innings — probably two days later.

Kaline:  W, 4 – (-1).   .229, . 325,  .343;  15 ip, 2 er.  There’s no such thing as erasing runs scored in cricket.  In fact, the only place I know of where it happens is in our EFL.  But if cricket did have a rule allowing runs to be erased, I am sure Kaline’s pitching yesterday would have been enough to invoke it. Think about this in a cricket context: 75 outs. Only 2 earned runs — and even if we switch it to cricket run equivilants (a single is one run, a double two, a homer over the fence is 6, etc.), it’s only 20 runs (6 singles, 4 walks, 3 doubles and a homer) over 75 outs (7 and a half innings).  Teams would be quitting in frustration half-way through innings at that rate, which,when you think about it, would be about the same thing as erasing runs.

May I note in passing that the two Drive starters who did most of the work yesterday were former Wolverines Tommy Milone (7 ip, 1 er) and Tom Koehler (6 ip, 1 er)?  Thank for indulging me.

Portland:  L, 1 – 6.  .132, .154, .132;  0.3 ip, 3 er.  Ouch!  A nonuple chulk from Joe Blanton.  But you know what, Joe? In cricket that would “1 wicket for only 9 runs” and you’d be a lock to be in the rotation for the next test.  Cricket really is a more genteel game.

 

* NOTE:  What we call a shortstop in baseball would be, I think, a mid-on or a mid-wicket in cricket.  If that player moved in about 80 feet to stand maybe 20 feet from the batter, he’d be a silly mid-on — a REAL shortstop. Which they do an astonishing amount of the time. He and his counterpart toward right field, the silly-mid-off, might not even be the closest to the batter.  There’s an even sillier silly point that stands just outside of where the opposite batters box would be, and a short leg that stands essentially behind the right-handed batter, about 10 feet away, trying to catch low line drives before they hit the ground.

Except not always.  Even though there are 11 fielders on the pitch (counting the bowler), only the bowler and the wicketkeeper are there for every ball.  The other fielders move around, covering various positions — you know, like second slip (or ninth), gully, cover, square leg,  fine leg, long off, long on, or third man — or leaving them uncovered as strategy dictates.  No, cricket does not have a shortstop, but sometimes it has a long stop playing maybe 150 feet behind the wicketkeeper.