h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Before the BBC switch, I enjoyed a long discussion with some folks here trying to explain cricket to me. Having lived my entire life in the USA, I've seen every baseball situation at least a hundred times. But on my first visit to London, during the World Cup in '99, I was exposed to cricket for the first time. Baffled, I bought a little Collins Gem book titled "Cricket".

After reading the rules - no, LAWS of cricket, sorry - I was even more baffled. One in particular seemed interesting: "Usually a batsman's individual total is made up of ones, twos, threes, fours and sixes. ... (However) if he strikes the ball and it hits a fielder's helmet which has been left on the ground - usually directly behind the wicket-keeper, the umpire will signal that five runs should be awarded." Now, there's an example for baseball, which I've read is trying to attract more fans.

I'm afraid that cricket also holds a few less beneficial examples for baseball. The recent pitch invasion at Edgbaston and match fixing to name but two.

One improvement that cricket could take from baseball is the serving of food and drink in your seat. It's always annoying to miss a wicket just because you needed another drink.

However, I don't think that closing the bar for the last sixth of the game would go down to well with cricket crowds.

On a more serious note, I don't think I've ever heard of any crowd trouble at an American sporting event. I wonder why not ?

Whoever wrote the phrase "Usually a batsman's individual total is made up of ones, twos, threes, fours and sixes. ... (However) if he strikes the ball and it hits a fielder's helmet which has been left on the ground - usually directly behind the wicket-keeper, the umpire will signal that five runs should be awarded." certainly had the intention of keeping the delights of cricket for themselves. They appear to have a genius of making the simple complicated.

Distant Shores -

Exactly right on the author of the five run cricket text. It made me wonder at the time how the clerk in the London book shop recognized me as an American, before I said a word, and put out the "special" copies of the book.

I'm not sure if your question on no fan problems at American sporting events was tongue-in-cheek, but we do have some problems. Maybe not on the scale of the European football hooliganism, but certainly some.

Steve

Not tongue-in-cheek, I don't think that I've ever heard of crowd trouble at all at a US sporting event. I've only been to one sporting event in the US, a baseball game between the NY Mets and Pittsburgh (I think). It was a beautiful summer's afternoon and a high scoring game. The Mets lost 9-1 to a team including Bonds and Bonilla. I couldn't have wished for a better intro to baseball though there was only one home run, surprisingly scored by the Mets.

Not a hint of trouble, the atmosphere was very relaxed similar to that at most cricket games. The polite banter between the rival teams bans, which is one of the great parts of cricket, was missing. I suspect that this was because the crowd was made up of 99.99% Mets fans.

It seems that the vast majority of sporting crowd trouble around the world revolves around football. The trouble is appears to be at it's most intense when local rivals are involved. I understand that football (soccer) is starting to gain popularity in the US but the teams are so widespread that a visiting fan is a rarity and local rivalry impossible.

I'm sure there are a host of other reasons why the US is saved from widespread sporting voilence.

From Distant Shores

You may have hit upon part of it, Distant Shores. At most U.S. sporting events, the vast majority of the fans are from the home team. The few teams with crosstown rivals in the same sport are usually in different leagues, so they rarely play each other.

For instance, the New York Yankees and New York Mets both have very devout fans, but the Yankees are an American League team and the Mets are a National League team. But even when the two teams met in the World Series last year, there was no violence.

Why? Hard to say. Baseball may no longer be the king of American sports, but it certainly has the most revered history. In the earlier days of the sport, in fact up until the 1960s, crosstown championships were quite common, and a single family could have fans of several different teams. This was back when a few specific cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis) thoroughly dominated the sport. It's part of the unspoken tradition of baseball, I guess. You back your team to the bitter end, but ultimately it's the love of the game that matters.

Even though football (the American kind) may get more attention in the USA these days, baseball still has a capacity possessed by no other American game to stir the emotions even of people who are generally not sports fans. Every American uses baseball metaphors, consciously or not. The game has changed enormously in its 100-some odd years of existence, and been eclipsed at times by other sports, but in a fundamental sense it remains the national pastime. Get violent over baseball? Only the players would ever do such a thing.

Incidentally, it's interesting to note that in the history of the game, only one major-league baseball player has lost his life in the line of duty. On August 16, 1920, in New York, Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman was hit in the head by a pitch from New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays. Mays was a surly player known for his "submarine" pitch, which started low and came up at batters toward chin level. This generally wouldn't be a danger, except that Chapman had a tendency to crowd the plate. The pitch that killed him was far from being wild -- in fact, it was barely outside the strike zone. But because of Chapman's stance, the ball struck his skull and he died in the hospital later that night.

Not meaning to butt into your conversation, but doing it just the same ... I've been to a few of those Mets vs. Yankees games (I'm going to the one next Saturday, as a matter of fact), and although there is the occasional shouting match between fans (which you even find among drunken fans of the same team), it is a surprisingly non-violent occasion! I think it's because New York fans really know their baseball, and the teams they are rooting for are the ones their parents rooted for (in the case of the Mets, it would be if your parents were Dodgers or Giants fans). Since baseball fans know that you're basically born into your team preference, you're not going to hold it against someone if they're a bit "misguided" and rooting for the other team!

Too true, too true... but I too am from New York (originally), and I can say that not all Dodgers fans became Mets fans. My father, despite growing up in Queens and being a passionate Dodgers fan, became a Yankees fan on That Dismal Day when Ebbets Field fell, for reasons that are perhaps unfathomable. His only brother, my Uncle Rich, became a Mets fan. So it came to pass that my father raised me a Yankees fan, while my uncle got to my brother at an early age and turned him into a Mets fan. This was The Great Schism in my family -- where once the Grieco clan had been united behind the Brooklyn Dodgers, we became a family Torn Between Two Teams.

Then the Mets and Yankees finally met in the Fall Classic last year, and we won. It would have been a heck of a lot more exciting if this had happened BEFORE they started with the interleague play. (Don't get me started).

Perhaps I need to do an entry on The Guilt of Being a New York Yankees Fan, to complement the entry someone wrote on The Agony of Being a Chicago Cubs Fan. I was born into rooting for the most dominant team in the sport. Sometimes I forget that the World Series isn't my birthright...

Oh, don't be so smug ...

I'm very surprised that your father became a Yankees fan! My father spent some dry years there before the Mets came around, because he absolutely refused to be a Yankees fan after how much they dominated his beloved Dodgers!

I have to agree that when I go to a pro game here in Houston (a rare event given the prices, e.g. $5.25 for a beer), fan violence is not a factor. But there are instances of "fan" violence, generally not at the event itself. After some pro championships (basketball comes to mind), roving bands of "fans" will burn & loot stores, cars, etc. Also, some youth gangs have been videotaped fighting in the stands at school games. And recently a college crowd rioted after their team lost in the finals (basketball?). OK, I realize these are generally thugs who just need an excuse to riot, but it sounds a little like the European football hooliganism, which I think does not necessarily happen in the stadium?

A great story on Yankee fans (I grew up in the Midwest a Yankee fan, we had no team so we pulled for a winner, along with many others across the US): Dave Barry, the humor writer, was living near Pittsburgh when the hometeam Pirates played the almighty Yankees in the World Series, many years ago. Dave was in grade school, and says half his classmates were Pirates fans and the other half were complete morons. Dave listened to Pirate Bill Mazeroski win the final game with a homerun (Bill Mazeroski? The shortstop?) on his little transistor radio with an earplug, smuggled into class like a lot of us did, and says it was the best game he ever saw.

I think there are several factors in the lack of fan violence, particularly in baseball. Distance, of course, although at Cubs-Cardinals games the crowd can be virtually half & half. Respect for the game & its traditions are also involved --- it's a family sport, with all ages represented, as well as a date-night thing, and even a singles mixer.

Most important, however, is that all sports stadiums in the US have seats! You'd have to be pretty drunk and beligerent to try to climb around fold-up molded seats & a range of unrelated bodies to try to attack some opposing fan. And there's no danger of a surge of bodies during a crucial moment in the game. And, of course, Millwall (sp?) doesn't play here.

I've yet to read a satisfactory explanation of why crowd violence took such a hold on football and not on other sports (and it's not just the British game - it's just as bad, if not worse on the European mainland), and why it's almost unheard of in American sports, especially when you see that footage on programmes with names like "When xxxx Go Bad" of college kids ripping up a town centre one year because they were drunk at their end of year gathering, and completely trashing it the next because TBTB banned all alcohol and the spoilt brats couldn't get a drink. It's even more puzzling considering the amount of school and college sports in the US - peewee baseball, high school football, college football, college basketball - and the loyalty whipped up by the school by having cheerleaders, letter jackets, etc.
Things in my mother's family were very similar to the Mets/Yankees thing. She was from Liverpool, and of all her 6 brothers and sisters and their own families, everyone supported Liverpool FC like a religion, except for one of her brothers who supported Everton. Nobody spoke to him, and he lived at the other end of town. Stupid. Most large British cities have two or more football teams (Liverpool/Everton, Manchester United/Manchester City, Sheffield United/Sheffield Wednesday, Rangers/Celtic (Glasgow), Bristol City/Bristol Rovers), and I suspect that most families have one member who supports "the other lot"
If you believe that there's no violence in cricket though, just watch footage of any match between India and Pakistan. That's a rivalry unlike any other in the sport. Games frequently have to be stopped because of objects being thrown at opposing fielders near the boundary, and most of the big cricket grounds have crowd control fences. I'm trying to recall the details of a match which was brought to an early end because of crowd trouble, but I have to leave for work soon and I haven't got enough time to go and look it up.
Oh, and as far as the "runs" thing goes Steve, it all makes perfect sense to me

Gosho -

Yes, after a number of messages in an earlier conversation, I came to understand the five run rule in cricket ... sort of . I think baseball (which apparently is in trouble fan-wise, planning to disband two major league teams) needs to hire some cricket consultants to write some great rules like that. It would liven up the game, or at least liven up the night time sports talk radio programs, which long ago ran out of topics, but not callers. ("Who do you think was the greatest baseball pitcher born within 100 miles of the Mason-Dixon Line? I'll hang up and listen ...")

Just another example of violence in American sports: During his playing career, the coach of the Houston Rockets basketball team, Rudy Tomjanovich, got his face crushed by a blindside punch from an opposing player. Much reconstructive surgery was required to rebuild the bones. And another, there will apparently be a lawsuit after the current college football season due to an alleged attempt by the defense to step on the hand of a downed quarterback after the play was over. There are more ...

And I heard just this morning that Brigham Young were all ready to start a lawsuit against the organisers of college football if they went unbeaten for the season but were not allowed to play in the Rosebowl because of the crazy ranking system and the fact that 50-something of the more than 100 teams who play division 1A college football don't get any of the M-O-N-E-Y. If you didn't hear it yourself, there might be a link to the story on the NPR website (it was on Morning Edition), but they haven't put it up yet.

Yes, I saw the BYU story in the news. Their lawsuit plans evidently got shelved when they got stomped in their last game with Hawaii, 72-45. Hawaii! My alma mater, Rice Univ., beat Hawaii this year, and Rice is so small that if every living alumni showed up for a game, the stadium would be more than half empty.

Steve

On to look up in your book!

In the current test match between India and England, Michael Vaughan was given out "Handled Ball". A most unpleasant dismissal as it implies the use of foul play to protect your wicket.

DS -

Yes, the book does have that one - the 7th out of ten ways a batsman can be dismissed. "A rare dismissal ... (the batsman) handles the ball when in play and does not have his hand on the bat ... England's Graham Gooch was famously given out ... in the Lord's Test against Australia in 1993. He played a delivery ... and as the ball bounced back toward his wicket, Gooch knocked it away with his hand. The umpire, Dickie Bird, ruled that Gooch had 'wilfully' handled the ball while in play."

The only similar baseball situation I can think of would be a runner between bases interfering with a throw, e.g. to stop a double play. The runner can slide into the fielder making the throw, but can't just slap the ball with his hand, I think.