The Aussies have decided that’s not necessary 
Yes, but they tend to be popular in different places. Rugby Union is the game watched/played in southern England, for example, whereas Rugby League is popular in Northern England. People tend to watch one or the other, not both. It’s quite tribal.
And weirdly, as the sport drifts even further north and east in England and into the Scottish borders it becomes Union-based again. Go figure. Like you say, it is often quite tribal (though my late dad was a semi-pro union player and still watched and supported league, he was originally from the North-West of England)
Forgive me if I speak in ignorance, but the former Barbadian semi-pro cricketer who explained the game to me said that occasionally, albeit not intentionally, batsmen can get hits off the side of the bat, yes?
In any case, I would have made my point better if I had said, “using a flat bat”, since that is the one unequivocal area in which baseball is more difficult than cricket - hitting a round ball with a round bat. Which probably underlies the fundamental difference between the games - batting drives cricket, pitching drives baseball.
No problem, it is true that any surface or part of the bat is valid when it comes to scoring runs or indeed being caught out, but only one face of the bat is used for purposeful striking.
Yes, it is harder to hit the ball cleanly in baseball. The cricket bat has a flat face that is about 50% wider than a baseball bat and that difference brings about the hugely greater variety of batting strokes and styles in cricket.
It isn’t quite so straightforward actually. Batting plays a greater role in cricket than baseball but certainly, in test cricket, you cannot win the game unless you take all 20 opposition wickets on offer. An ideal cricket game comprises a fair balance between bat and ball.
Not if the opposition is captained by Stokes or Cronje!
harsh but fair
I was being a bit simplistic, yes. But when I spent an evening with my Barbadian friend, listening to him explain the game, that’s what I came away with; that on a fundamental level, cricket and baseball are almost the same game, save that one is slanted more towards batsmen and the other toward pitchers.
Indeed, that’s one of the reasons why I don’t think cricket could catch on in the U.S., or baseball in the U.K. for that matter; I suspect neither population has mental space to pay attention to more than one similar, highly complex bat-and-ball game.
I fancy you may be right, unlikely it’ll reach the heights of baseball but there may well be a big enough population with enough discretionary spending power to make it a mid-level success.
There would need to be a change in how immigrants assimilate in the US. Right now it seems like second or third generation South Asian immigrants aren’t any more interested in cricket than the general population.
Most of my generation’s kids have never played cricket and watching cricket is something dad and grandad do.
Golf clap.
The biggest difference between baseball and cricket is one that is difficult for baseball fans who are new to cricket to understand.
You don’t have to run.
Suppose in baseball, you hit a weak grounder straight to the second baseman - you are going to be out at first by 30 feet. In cricket, you have a look, quickly sum up the situation and decide “I’m not running”. That’s the end of that play. No strike is recorded, no ‘ball’ is counted, there is no change to the score. Nothing actually happened. The bowler goes back to do it again, the batsman shapes up again, and off we go. The record for the longest individual innings in Test cricket (ie - the longest at-bat without going out) is 847 deliveries - the batsman (Len Hutton) was finally out on Day 3 of the match.
When baseball fans say ‘hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports’, they really mean ‘hitting a ball safely, so that it isn’t caught by any of the 9 opposition players, travels only the 90-degree arc from home plate, and enables the batter time to get from home plate to first base before the fielders get the ball there’.
Back in the late 90s, early 00s I was living with a friend who had a satellite dish. One day I sat and watched a cricket match on what I presume to be an Indian channel and tried to figure out the rules just by watching with the sound off. I watched for a solid 4 hours at least and at certain times I thought I more or less understood what was happening and why, but then suddenly something, or seemingly nothing would happen and the score would change for reasons I could not account for. I’d be willing to give it another try with a little guidance.
Purely anecdotal, but to back this up involving a different ethnic group:
My small city in NY State has a significant though not huge Caribbean community, including a lot of people from Jamaica. When I came here a few decades ago, the members of this community had banded together to create a cricket pitch (field? zone?) outside of town. I’d bicycle by on occasion and see matches going on. It was kind of neat.
There’s been no drop in the size of the Caribbean community, but the field is gone–not replaced by housing or businesses, note, but just abandoned. That was pre-pandemic and probably closer to ten years ago than to five. I bike by today and it’s just an overgrown lot. I imagine the people who built it aged out of playing, and the next generation was more interested in soccer, basketball, or baseball than in keeping the place going. But I don’t know for sure, only that it used to be a thing and isn’t any more.
Well, yes. That’s what we mean when we say that baseball is slanted towards pitching, while cricket is slanted towards batting. It’s also why baseball fans will say that getting a hit off a major league pitcher, in the specific manner you described (and you forgot to mention that all of those nine players are wearing big leather gloves, to catch the ball. And you’re using a round bat) can be argued the most difficult act in pro sports.
In test cricket true but in a 20 over match there are only 120 good balls (6 balls per over) so in your situation the innings is one ball closer to the end.
As a second generation South Asian, I sign on to this whole heartedly. And my father is a massive cricket fan - I was named for Imran Khan for one! It was something dad watched or sometimes (strangly) played with other middle aged distant family members when they got together.
I watched a few T20 games on ESPN+ in the last few years, and it’s interesting enough… but I’m far more a soccer and baseball fan.
When I was in the USAF and stationed in Australia,I watched and didn’t care for cricket, though I did like Aussie rules football. I just didn’t care for cricket.
Not so fast…
I’m not sure this is entirely true if seen from another perspective. From a batter’s perspective, getting out in cricket is an immensely more severe outcome than anything in baseball. In a test match, you can be an opening batsman and get out on a blinder and be done for the day. You may not bat again for 3 days. Meanwhile bowlers can come at you all day long, over and over again.