It’s surprisingly simple, actually.

A cricket pitch is a long strip. Bowler bowls from one end, batter strikes the bowl from the other. Scoring is done by running from one end of that strip to the other (the unit of scoring is literally called a run). Six legal bowls make an over.

There are two batters in play at each point in time, one at each end of the pitch, and they both must run towards the other end of the pitch (therefore swapping places) to score.

Bruce Edgar had scored 102 runs, was not out (in the same sense as baseball — meaning he was still in play), but, because they either didn’t manage to score any runs, or scored twos, he spent the whole over on the non-striking side of the pitch.

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adastra22 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It’s surprisingly simple, actually.

Basically, there's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.

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kstenerud 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's surprisingly simple, actually.

The bariet takes a pull at the fumbler, and then one of two things happens: Either he misses, or hits it (towards the flange or along the foul line to the base). There are three spichies who can try to deflect the fumbler, either towards the simulcum or out to the field.

The simulcum is the more audacious play, giving an instant spiel if they succeed in darving the bariet. But it runs a serious risk of a spurn, so unless a spichie is particularly strong, the field is the safer play.

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senthil_rajasek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Explaining Cricket to a Baseball fan only makes it worse.

I have tried it many times and failed.

Personally, playing a few games of cricket is the best way to learn the rules of the game.

As an example, in your explanation ( which is good to this lifelong cricket fan from India) your first sentence starts "A cricket pitch..." And when a baseball fan reads it he is probably asking "What is a cricket pitch?"

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Eisenstein 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So the batter runs towards the bowler? 102 runs? Can a run score more than one? What was the down by 6 thing? It's not really that simple?

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pdpi an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Down by six is literally that — they were six runs (points) behind. Six is a "magic" number, because that's what you score for knocking the ball out of the park (so the cricket equivalent to hitting a home run).

Yup, batter runs towards the bowler (and the "inactive" batter runs the opposite direction).

In baseball terms, a cricket run is more or less equivalent to running a single base (the bowler is 22 yards away from the batter, which is more than the distance from the pitcher's mound to the home plate, but less than the distance from home to first base). Just like you can run multiple bases in baseball, you can do multiple runs in cricket. From a scoring point of view, you're effectively scoring how many bases you ran, so a baseball run is roughly equivalent to four cricket runs.

Scoring 100+ runs is called "a century", and it's pretty impressive, but, because you keep batting until the bowling team sends you out, you can just keep scoring all day long if you have the endurance for it. Baseball doesn't have a mechanism for a single batter to hit multiple back-to-back home runs.

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Scarblac 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a rope around the field, if the ball goes over it without hitting the ground (like a home run) it counts for 6. If if it did hit the ground it counts for 4.

They can run more than one (get to the other side, turn around, run back, etc) but the chance of the wicket you're running to being hit with the ball (so you're out) becomes larger so they usually manage 1, sometimes 2 or even 3. And both batters have to run the same amount.

If the number of runs is even, they end up on the same side as they started from.

	▲	zimpenfish an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> There's a rope around the field, if the ball goes over it without hitting the ground (like a home run) it counts for 6. On the larger grounds, it tends to be a decently-sized foam triangular prism (covered in advertising, obvs.) rather than a plain rope which leads to "if it hits the triangle" rather than "goes over the rope" (I believe "hits the rope" also counts but is much harder to judge for obvious scale reasons.) Also, IIRC, the ball can go over the boundary without hitting the ground but a fielder can knock it back inside for a catch to be performed to get the player out[0]. Sorry, I'm just making this more complicated for the baseballers, aren't I? [0] If they comply with the changes around that last year - https://www.cricinfo.com/story/mcc-changes-rule-to-make-boun...