Playing Hard Ball by ET Smith

How a cricketer was bowled over by baseball

Baseball and cricket are first cousins, sharing a common descent from numerous stick-and-ball games. Both are episodic spectacles, alternating spurts of action with intervals for reflection and anticipation. Both are team sports showcasing individual performances, in particular the confrontation of the player with the ball and the player with the stick. Both are enriched with legend, and proud of their pedigrees.

Only one, however, has inspired substantial fictions by major novelists, maintains a munificently funded museum and disdains commercial logos on uniforms. Cricket has produced nothing to match the baseball epics by Roth, Coover, Lardner and others. The Lord's museum is a feeble effort compared to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. And baseball's huge North American market means that it has no need to auction shirt-space.

Given the cultural interchange between Britain and the US, it's surprising that there have been so few comparative studies of these two related but fascinatingly different games. Credit, then, to Kent county cricketer Ed Smith for essaying this personal investigation. On visits to New York and further afield, Smith immersed himself in the game and even managed a spell in the New York Mets training camp.

As an English professional cricketer, Smith notes with wry envy the huge salaries and state-of-the-art facilities enjoyed by baseball stars. He is also impressed by the centrality of the game in US popular culture. Apart from an India-Pakistan contest, nothing in cricket generates the media attention and popular engagement of baseball's World Series.

Smith was fortunate enough to stumble into one of the most intense of all World Series face-offs – the "subway series" between New York's two franchises, the ever-victorious Yankees and those perennial underdogs the Mets. He effectively recreates the drama of this encounter, and makes a marvellous case for the sport. As a lifelong Yankee fan, I can afford to forgive Smith his sentimental attachment to the Mets. I was less comfortable with his laudatory take on the US response to 11 September, and in particular his willingness to celebrate uncritically the overnight transformation of New York's ball clubs into "America's teams".

Smith eschews the cheap-shots and snobbery that sometimes lace English accounts of US phenomena. But he falls prey to the opposite temptation. Swept off his feet by the gleaming surfaces, the affluence and energy, he accepts too easily the claims made by America's corporate boosters, barely hinting at the egotistical excesses of the multi-millionaire club owners, a source of outrage to fans. And his rejection of "the dubious forces of political correctness" renders him insensitive to the racial cross-currents that rip through this national pastime.

To get to grips with either baseball or cricket, you have to escape from Anglo-American confines and place both games in a global context. After all, 90 per cent of the world's cricket-lovers can be found in south Asia. And it's in Japan and Korea (despite World Cup fever) that baseball truly rules the sporting roost.