Cricketball:  Why Cricketers Make the Best Moneyballers

Outside of the Commonwealth, most of us think of cricket as a sport for the slow, the weak and cabdrivers. We mock cricketers’ starched white shirts and pants, ridicule their sweater-vests and laugh uproariously at the fact that half-time is actually called “taking tea”.  We marvel at the complete lack of urgency that surrounds the sport and the masochism that it takes to sit through, let alone play, a five-day game. Yet, absurd as it may sound, the Moneyball-disciples among us shouldn’t scoff at the sport with the outrageously high score-lines, rather, we should worship the ground cricketers walk on.

Recently, batsman Shivnarine Chanderpaul of the West Indies faced 168 South African pitches without ever making an out. His at-bat lasted more than five hours, a good but by no means exceptional feat in international Test cricket. Imagine the havoc Chanderpaul could wreak on a baseball pitching staff if you converted him to a lead-off hitter who routinely fashioned 100-pitch at-bats. Most starting pitchers would have reached their pitch-limit after facing just one batter. In fact, a closer study of cricket’s masters of defensive hitting would lead us to believe that the cricketer would actually make the perfect Moneyball hitter.

Grinding out long at-bats, regardless of their outcome, is one of the central tenets of Moneyball. A cricketer has ingrained in him the mentality that an out is a precious commodity and risk is something that should be avoided at all cost, largely because he gets only one or two at-bats per game. Baseball teams have tried, in vain, to instill this core value of Moneyball into free-swinging bigleagers for years, but cricketers don’t that to be taught to them. It’s in the nature of their game. In fact, a cricketer is the anti-hacker, nature’s antidote to Vladimir Guerrero. The cricketer avoids high pitches, like major leaguers avoided Sen. Mitchell, to reduce his chances of hitting pop-ups and swings only if he’s absolutely convinced that he’ll make solid contact – any other pitch he can give a slight tap since he’s under no obligation to run. He is helped by a 360-degree field which has no foul territory. This results in vastly superior bat-control. Good cricketers can hit to any direction at will. How easy it would be for them to foul pitches off endlessly, either until they draw a walk or, better yet, until the opposing team runs out of pitchers?

The similarities between the sports are well-documented and they make the conversion of a cricketer to baseball all the more feasible. Cricketers face pitches of roughly the same speed and with even more movement than baseball hitters do. Although there is a mechanical difference which arises from cricketers swinging at pitches that have just bounced and are thus coming up, as opposed to the downward plane of a pitched baseball. Their strike zone is narrower yes – the three wickets (vertical sticks) which support the two bails (horizontal bars), which have to fall off in order to make an out, are just nine inches wide, eight inches less than home plate. But the height of the strike zone is roughly the same, starting from the ground and measuring 28 inches to just below the waste, much like baseball.

Cricketers’ inherent discipline at the plate is due to the fact that they get just one strike. Moneyball says that each hitter should approach his at-bats like a lead-off hitter, which is exactly what the cricketer does. He hits well with two strikes, since he only ever gets one strike, so protecting the plate comes naturally to him.

Surprisingly, a cricket-to-baseball conversion experiment would not be all that novel. In 1970, the Kansas City Royals’ innovative owner Ewing Kauffman opened a baseball academy in Saratoga, Florida. It was the first of its kind and was based on the premise that there was lots of baseball talent out there that was untapped, primarily because the bearers of that talent didn’t actually play baseball. The Royals scoured the country looking for athletes who possessed exceptional speed, eyesight, reflexes and balance and began converting them to ballplayers. But the academy was closed after three years because it was considered too expensive and a failure, largely because the Royals’ management never bought into it. It did however yield 14 big leagers and pioneered the use of stopwatches, pitching machines and resistance strength training in baseball.

Knowing what we know now, thanks to the publication of Moneyball, it would be conceivable to open a second such institution to convert cricketers into baseball players. Now that baseball players perfectly suited for Moneyball are no longer affordable to the Oakland A’s, who became a victim to their own success, the logical next step would be to extract Moneyball hitters from other sports. So why not cricketers? They appear by all rationale to be better suited for Moneyball-style baseball than even baseball players.

And why would a cricketer want to do such a thing? Because a mediocre cricketer earns somewhere in the region of $45,000 per year. It might be hard for him to resist packing his starched whites and sweater-vests and head over to America when he finds out that a marginal major leaguer making the league minimum is paid almost $400,000 a year. And if it doesn’t work out he can always go back to taking tea.