What about the RBI statistic?
As DPRK notes, baseball has the “run batted in” statistic. Season totals are important, with 100 RBIs over a season considered a notable mark.
But for whatever reason, “RBIs in a single game” don’t figure much into baseball lore. There’s nothing like, say, “How many five-RBI games has Aaron Judge had?” For RBIs, there’s nothing equivalent to cricket’s “nervous nineties” (e.g. a batter having a great game won’t sense a difference between having two RBIs or five RBIs or eight RBIs, etc.).
Again, for baseball pitchers there are, indeed, certainly events akin to the “nervous nineties”. Have a no-hitter or perfect game going for six, seven, or eight innings? There are all kinds of baseball rituals built around not jinxing the pitcher – no talking to the pitcher, no sitting near the pitcher, and more. There’s no equivalent ritual for any batter’s single-game performance.
Now, for longer-term batting milestones in baseball, something like “the nervous nineties” can set in. An especially tough one is the hitting streak – consecutive games with getting at least one base hit. The batter doesn’t think much about it until is starts to approach 30 games. The all-time record (one of the most famous records in American sports) is 56 games by Joe DiMaggio 82 years ago. The second longest hitting streak was by Pete Rose, 44 games in 1978. Without looking it up, streaks over 30 games are rare.
The RBIs in a game record may never be beaten but it’s not impossible. The record is 12 RBIs in a game and was set in 1924 and then tied in 1993 by Mark Whiten. Whiten hit 4 home runs in that game. I don’t know why it’s not a well known stat. Maybe because it’s half dumb luck. The batter gets the hits but he has to be lucky to have a bunch of base runners each time he gets up. The last guy to have 10 in a game did it in 2018.
you are asking the wrong person, I’m not sure what an “RBI statistic” is
I see now from the follow-on messages that RBI is to do with how many runners a batsman gets back to home plate.
Just to further clutter your mind with useless trivia about a sport you don’t follow, “RBI” is usually pronounced “ribbie”.
Yep. And the batter gets an RBI for him/herself when hitting a home run. The most you can get in an at-bat is 4, if the “bases are loaded”; i.e. there is a runner on every base.
By the way, they are currently showing an MLC game on CBS Sports Network. That is progress. Plus cricket plays have made it into ESPN sportcenter daily Top 10 plays.
Also called a “grand slam”.
This charming story (which aligns with my own childhood memories), reminds me of another cricket related game for when you’re short on space and equipment - French cricket. Basically, the ‘batsman’ stands in the middle of a group, with a cricket bat, and the people around them try to get them out by hitting their legs as if they are wickets (with a tennis ball - an actual cricket ball would end with the batsmen going to the ER). The batsmen uses the bat to defend their legs, rather than to score anything. I remember it was a popular game to play on the beach. NO idea why it was called french cricket.
Usually, when the UK calls something “French…” it means “degenerate and improper” (as in kissing, letters, leave etc.). For a very bastardised (but fun!) version of cricket, this would fit the pattern I guess.
When we played French cricket, we scored by passing the bat round our body while the fielders ran for the ball - 1 run for every orbit. Which meant you did have to weigh up going for the extra run vs the risk of having the bat behind your back when the next ball came in.
I think you played a more advance version than I did!
This reminds me of when I met my Brazilian ex-. We had just started dating, and at some point I turned the Willow tv channel on, and she immediately assumed we were watching a Brazilian channel. Apparently she grew up playing street cricket in Brazil, and figured it was a Brazilian sport. She’s not a sports fan at all, besides soccer, so I was surprised.
I’m not going to go all “4 Yorkshiremen” on you but…As a nipper, When we could get enough people together in the summer we used to nip onto the school all-weather pitch and host our own game (not sides, but just rotating batting/bowling and fielding).
We had stumps, a ball and two bats. That was it. No gloves or pads or protection of any kind and we played with a real hard, heavy ball. And it was as full blooded as possible with bouncers and close-in fielding.
People rarely died.
That’s a cool variation, might try that. Another rule that I think is fun, that we usually employ, is that the next ball is bowled from wherever the ball happened to end up, rather than there being a fixed bowling position. Adults are required to keep their feet in the same position at all times, and therefore often find themselves awkwardly twisting to defend the back of their legs. Children are permitted to turn on the spot to face the bowler each time. But in either case, the fielder with the ball can employ the dastardly tactic of appearing to bowl but instead throwing it to another nearby fielder, who may then be able to bowl at the batter’s legs before they realise what’s happening. For these reasons, hitting the ball a long way away, and in front of you, is desirable as the batter. To counter this, especially when playing with a tennis ball on the beach, you may draw a large circle around the batter (with a diameter, of, say, 15 yards) and declare that if a ball is batted such that it lands outside the circle without bouncing, the batter is out. This reduces tedious chasing after the ball time after time, if the batter is a good slogger.
Since the thread got bumped, here’s an article on the Texas Monthly site about the league and some of the backers
Good article. Just one flub I saw: “….with a practically unfathomable batting average of 51.3 percent.” I guess the writer didn’t get a real cricket fan to proofread it.
I don’t even know what that could possiby refer to.
Strike rate perhaps? expressed as a percentage? But in limited overs cricket a strike rate of 51.3 is far from remarkable. Or perhaps average score? but then the percent makes no sense.
Or perhaps it is a particulalry USA slant on the game and their love of stats has conjoured up something delightfully new and obscure.
I think it’s his average, they’ve just mistaken it for a percentage.
Agree. In baseball, a batting “average” is just the number of times a batter gets a base hit (a single, double, triple or home run) divided by the number of times they bat (adjusted for walks, hit-by-pitch, sacrifices, etc.). While it’s a percentage, it’s expressed in thousandths, so a batter who gets 27 hits over 100 at-bats has a batting average of .270. The writer probably assumed a cricket batting average is similar, which of course it’s not.