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

I have here a piece of paper - not bearing signatures of Neville Chamberlain and Herr Hitler, but of the commentators and summarisers of Test Match Special during the 1991 match against the West Indies at the Oval. It's BBC headed notepaper, there's Johnners, Jenkers, Tony Cozier, F.S. Trueman, Don Mosey, Bill Frindall... and one other signature that I've never been able to decipher, until now.

Yep, it's It's Jonathan Agnew, in his first year as a TMS commentator. In fact, it was the very match that included the legover incident between Aggers and Johnners

But, there's one notable omission from the page and I'm wondering how I'm ever going to get it added - one Henry Calthorpe Blofeld - because with Blowers it simply isn't complete.

Cricket?

Seriously, I have no idea what language this is.

And BG goes up on his toes to play an immaculate backward defensive, keeping everything covered, after which he walks down the track a few paces to do a bit of gardening. Well played.

Makes perfect sense to me Old Chap

To be fair you can get your own back by talking Baseball, we haven't a clue beyond rounders.

Cricket has, possibly, the most arcane and esoteric vocabulary of any sport I know of.

Should that guy be at silly mid off, or silly mid on? Was he the one that bowled his maiden over? You see that slip cordon near the gully?

And we haven't even mentioned googlies yet

You know, it's quite possible to describe an entire family using only cricket fielding positions - long leg, short leg, fine leg , square leg (old Uncle George with the wooden prosthesis), backward short leg (it's not his fault he's not too bright, he's one of Bob's special children) and third man (the lodger, who may or may not be called Harry Lime).

Baseball is a little easier to understand, largely because there's only one batter in at a time instead of the two batsmen in cricket, and there's only one pitcher's mound and one home plate, rather than two ends and two wickets, but it has its own arcane language and idiosyncrasies, such as the infield fly rule (about which we have an excellent entry)*, which is every bit as impenetrable as leg before wicket.

*Or I thought we did. I'm sure I remember one going through PR when I was a Scout I certainly remember a PR discussion about it.

Or, how about the fact that every baseball field has different outfield dimensions. Minute Maid Park in Houston has a deeper center field than the previous one at the Astrodome. The Astrodome's dimensions were 330' left field, 406' center, and 340 right. Minute Maid Park has a 315' left field, 436' center and 326' right. Not only is it deeper at center, the center field has a 30-degree upward slope at the back with a flag pole on that rise that is in play, meaning that if a ball hits it that would have been a home run but lands back on the field, it counts as an infield hit. The Astrodome had large speakers hanging from the roof that were also in play and were hit at least once by what would have amounted to a home run distance well over 600' but instead landed in the infield (where the basemen are).

This is the sort of thing I like about anything that was devised before we got so bloody anal about precision and conformity.

Cricket and baseball are unusual in being two sports that don't have a fixed size for the playing field - only guidelines (can't bigger or smaller than given dimensions). The only hard-and-fast rules are for the playing area in the middle - the pitch (aka the wicket), as with the distances between the mound and home plate, and between the bases.

Lord's (some say the Home of Cricket, some say HQ) in London has a slope of about eight feet from one side to the other, and it isn't the usual oval shape of most grounds - it's a rectangle with rounded corners. The ground at Canterbury used to have a 90' high lime tree just within the field of play but it was weakened by disease and then blown down in high winds about ten years ago.

And 'wicket' can mean three (at least) different things