Philadelphia Reflections

Cricket Fanatics Say Baseball is for Sissies!

Alan Lawley

Philadelphia still has six cricket clubs, and used to have more. The game of cricket was invented in 1200 AD and had its rules established in 1749 at the Marylebone Club. Baseball, on the other hand, was established in 1849 by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown New York, with the convention of confining the runners to a diamond infield. Modern rules and established leagues of players only came along twenty years later. Actually, no one disputes that cricket is older. The question is one of manliness. Having listened for centuries to American jibes about tea and watercress sandwiches, the crickets have had enough. Their champion, Alan Lawley, recently threw down the challenge to baseball-crazy Americans at the Philadelphia Right Angle Club, where Lawley is Recording Secretary. Pardon me, blokes, but why do you tough guys consider it necessary to catch the ball with those big leather gloves? Don't you notice that cricket players catch the ball with their bare hands? Most of the excitement comes at that moment when the player is circling to catch the batted ball. He'll get it all right, but will he drop it? The essential inferiority of baseball to cricket has been documented for pages and pages by legions of British subjects, but the main point is about those gloves.

So the challenge is out. Let's see you gashouse beer drinkers take off those big protective mitts, and then try to catch the ball. And while you're at it, let's hear you pronounce Marylebone.

Originally published: Sunday, March 11, 2007; most-recently modified: Wednesday, May 15, 2019