You need to read further into your own cite! Wicket is also used informally to mean the pitch.
Without this usage, we would be left without the term “on a sticky wicket”, a tragedy for all concerned, I’m sure.
I was at a Duke-Wake Forest basketball game a few years ago at Wake when Duke was highly favored. I was blessed with great seats; 5 or 6 rows back if I recall. As the game ended, with Wake in possession and a sure upset winner, the Wake guard fired the ball into the stands, toward me. It fell short, but the poor soul who caught it was immediately swarmed by security personnel. No way that ball was leaving the arena.
I did read my cite, particularly the bit where it says “this usage is incorrect”. You’re on a sticky wicket yourself. And I’ve never heard of “wicket” being used when talking about “bouncing the ball off the wicket”. It’s the “pitch” in that context.
What that Wiki page says is that “According to the Laws of Cricket, this usage is incorrect” This is just plain wrong. Here’s a link to the Laws of Cricket (warning: pdf).
Find this statement if you can. But I’ll save you some time: it’s not there, I already looked.
Simply, the Laws of Cricket don’t use “wicket” for the pitch, they use that term for it’s other meaning, namely the stumps. But what one has to do when drafting Laws is make them unambiguous. That means that when using words that have more than one meaning, you have to choose one meaning of that word and stick to it. It doesn’t mean you are making a statement that the other meaning is incorrect.
Don’t forget Wiki is just written by anyone who wants to write it. And frankly, that comment on that page is going to get rewritten by yours truly once this debate is over.
Usage makes language. Wicket is used to mean pitch. You just admitted as much by using the term sticky wicket. You know what sticky wicket means and the derivation of the term (as your own cite shows) is precisely concerning the manner in which the ball bounces off such a wicket ie the pitch.
Here’s another cite for you, this one Wiki’s own page on cricket terminology. Note the 2nd meaning of “wicket”.
Here’s a site that sells “wicket covers”. I’ll give you a clue: they are not selling dinky little covers that go over the stumps
Here’s a quote from that poorly known maverick little website known as Cricinfo: It is a fundamental principle that you cannot play good cricket on poor wickets. Do you thinkthey are talking about playing on top of the stumps?
Shall I go on?
Sorry, cocked up that last cite. It should read:
“It is a fundamental principle that you cannot play good cricket on poor wickets”.
Baseball’s an exception because a guy got killed, that’s why (too lazy to find cite…knock yourself out, gents). Back in the day, before batters wore helmets, before fans kept foul balls and before stadiums were artificially lit, a batter got beaned with a ball, was knocked unconscious, fell into a coma, and died a couple of days later. Shocked baseball officials convened to figure out a way to prevent such occurances in the future. In a rare display of wisdom, they actually asked the players’ advice as to what might help matters. Players told them that with repeated usage, the balls became so brown and discolored that they became hard to see as it got dark. It was decided that the rules would be ammended such that the umpire was to take the ball out of play if it were to become so discolored during play (this also helped cut down on “cutting” the ball illegally). To prevent the ball from getting to that point, it was decided to let fans keep the foul balls hit into the stands (one can also see the public relations advantage to doing this, too). They also came up with protective batting helmets, artificially lit stadiums, etc.
FWIW, I once saw a batter let go of a bat during the game, which promptly whizzed up into the stands. The fan who caught it gave it back… I dunno why, considering the danger involved in getting hit with a flying bat I woulda said, “tough shit, I’m keeping it.” But that’s just me.
It was Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians who was hit by a ball pitched by Carl Mays of the New York Yankees on August 17, 1920. Chapman died twelve hours after being beaned.
Batting helmets weren’t used in Major League Baseball until the fifties. Lights were first used in MLB in Cincinnati in 1935, and were not installed for safety reasons but rather to increase team revenues.
Back to the topic… all balls used for place-kicks are “K” balls, which are handled only by the game officials. They don’t count toward the number of balls allocated to each team.
Wouldnt one major reason be the chance for a second ball to be tossed into the field of play or court? A basketball or football doesn’t travel very far out of bounds. In baseball or hockey, if the ball/puck is projected out of bounds, it is likely to be fairly far away from the action. A basketball or football is likely to end up in one of the front rows thus making it likely to be tossed back into the game.
Good, but not the whole truth. “Cut” is not the same as “seam” movement off the pitch, which is what you have described correctly above. In bowling “cutters”, a medium-paced or quick bowler uses a grip that is similar to his normal one, but holding the seam at an angle to give his fingers purchase to spin the ball one way or the other. It’s a different grip to that used for a genuine spinner and it does not impart as much spin, but it is easier for the quick bowler to use with his normal bowling action. It gives more movement than simply hitting the seam and, usefully, a grip which will swing the ball one way in the air can easily be adapted to cut it the other way off the pitch, making this a surprise delivery.
Fred Trueman once used off-cutters to great effect on a wicket 
that was very responsive to spin, but where the batsman were playing the slow bowlers easily. I’m not sure how many times he hit the wickets but I know he took quite a few wickets in that match.
There is an interesting variant of swing bowling known as “reverse swing” that requires an old ball and is effective only at very high speed.
That net is there to protect fans from foul balls, not to keep fans from getting their hands on them. In the area behind home plate, a foul ball may come flying off the bat at a crazy angle and going a gazillion mph, and the very short distance to the fans doesn’t leave much time for reaction. So people are much more likely to get popped in the face with a baseball there, as opposed to the rest of the stadium where you have more chance to react and catch the ball.
You are correct, of course.
I conflated cut and seam in my post, implying they were the same thing, a mistake resulting partly from forgetfulness (living in the US, i haven’t actually watched a game of cricket in over 5 years) and partly from trying to condense a whole bunch of cricketing terms into a relatively short space.
Thanks for the correction.
Do they re-use footballs for pro games, or or does every new game start use brand new footballs?
The cost to install, maintain and operate the netting is probably more than the cost of replacing lost balls anyway.
From Gfactor’s cite:
I vaguely recall hearing the same thing about used game balls.
Many baseballs that go into the stands are within throwing distance of the field. It’s common for fans to throw back home run balls from the visiting team.
The way I understand it as a Bills season ticket holder, if you get the ball you can keep it. Over the last 14 years I’ve seen a few dozen balls go in the stands one way or another. Sometimes there’s a scrum over it among the fans, but I’ve never seen security go retrieve the ball.
As an aside, one of the jaw dropping moments I remember from the Jim Kelly four-Superbowls-in-a-row-era was a game where Kelly was so jacked up at winning one of the games he launched a ball into the stands. I was sitting on the 32 yard line 12 rows from the field and he threw that son of a bitch 2000 million mph over our heads into the upper deck.
A whole different perspective on the arm strength those guys have.
Yet it does tend to do both.
When I was at Michigan, the ball would end up in the stands on occasion(Bad kicker combined with windy days at Michigan stadium). Ushers would immediatly converge on the ball to take it away. In the student section it quickly became a game of monkey in the middle with about 12,000 players and 12 ushers in the middle. Until either they got the ball back, or someone threw it up over the back wall, where I’d imagine either security got it, or someone tried to run it home through the gates.
True but irrelevant. The catcher’s glove also tends to keep the ball from going into the stands, but its purpose isn’t to keep fans from getting a ball. Same thing with the home plate net.
Not at all. You did a great job of condensing some very complicated information into a short-enough-to-read post. One point worth mentioning about seam movement is that it’s very easy for the bowler to have no way to predict which way the ball will deviate on pitching - it’s all in which direction the seam happens to fall when the ball hits the wicket, which with a little wobble can be completely random. This gives the batsman an extra problem to counter as the bowler can appear to be doing exactly the same with a whole string of deliveries, and yet some go one way and some the other. As one bowler put it, “If I don’t know which way it’s going, what price the batsman?”.