Oh that’s fabulous. I do hope they also sponsor the impact player in the IPL. Imagine:

“The entire Rajasthan team looked hopeless till the arrival of the White player”.
“White player rescues Delhi again”.
“Indian team clueless against the White talent”.

Manjrekar on TV: “Oh that’s another game decided by the impact player. IPL is clearly demonstrating White superiority”.

I am all for this development. I stopped pretending IPL was about cricket a long time ago.

Yes I was intending to mention the recreational game implications at the end, next to the soul-destroying nature of being a pro batter who almost never bats and the commercial problem of getting hold of someone who isn’t going to do very much, but forgot to. But some of the recreation issues are analogous. Aside from the difficulty of getting a team of 15 together when 11 is hard enough, the very low order batters will have very little to do. They might field I suppose if the bowlers are only sent on for their overs – but however you arrange it, there’d be a lot of sitting about for someone.

If you really wanted to go this route, it might make more sense to either retire batters out after a certain number of balls, or at a certain score, as you might see in youth leagues. Or more likely, go the baseball route and have batters on rotation somehow – maybe at the end of every over or two, two fresh batters have to rush out of the dug-out. (Unless you’re nine down, in which case one of the active batters stays on.) Once you’re out you stay out, but otherwise you’ll come back on again once your turn comes around.

That would be a faff but it would solve the perpetual “spent all day playing the game but didn’t get a chance to bat or bowl” problem so it wouldn’t be crazy for the recreational game. At the professional level you’d see a stronger batting line-up, but batters wouldn’t have much chance to get set (even in T20 that’s a thing and often a prelude to the big tee-off we love to watch) and you’d likely see a bit less of the star batters who are supposedly the main draw.

Something like that would change the rhythm and nature of the game, but it might be worthy of more consideration. One place it would clearly help is the safety issue of bowlers who aren’t very good at batting, facing some very fast bowlers. Pitchers getting injured batting is one reason baseball has gone for the universal DH. Cricket has all kinds of discussions about what’s acceptable for a nasty quick to do to tail-enders. And at the recreational level, there are definitely bowlers who drop out of the sport, or prefer to go down and play at a lower level, because they don’t enjoy facing fast bowling.

Oh I do hope so. I especially enjoyed the fact that the TV reviews in Bangladesh these past few weeks were/are sponsored by Mr White Detergent Powder.

https://www.jyothylabs.com/products/mr-white/

It just seems such a shame that the sponsors couldn’t persuade teams to play those cricket matches in whites, as an additional opportunity to highlight the benefits of the sponsor’s products. That would have felt like a great leap forward, to me.

Indeed! The Japan-Mexico game yesterday was very good indeed.

I’m going to keep taking excuses to pimp Seattle Mariners content, not that most of you are interested. The “British” baseball team isn’t very good, but Harrison Ford (really! But he goes by Harry, understandably) is going to be very good in a few years. He’s sort of British, both his parents are, but he’s from Atlanta. Some of the attempts at celebrating were somewhat cringey.

https://twitter.com/MarinersONtap/status/1635026619881623552?s=20

This change is clearly an attempt at one of those. It should please the broadcasters, plus the gambling “industry” (legal and illegal), as it increases the chance that the trailing side might steal a win from defeat – assuming that side has “held back its joker” for such a circumstance.

My beef with it as an idea is that it doesn’t readily translate into the recreational or casual game, whereas shorter form cricket generally does feel more like the fun cricket that we mere mortals get to play.

Comments above talking about designated hitters in baseball are interesting in this context, not least because baseball (professional and recreational) is in decline in the USA right now. I hope this minor innovation in the IPL is not a similar sign of desperation to maintain interest / seed growth.

When does the county championship start?

Despite supporting an American league team, I don’t like the universal DH. It was kinda neat having different rules between the two leagues – and the occasional home run hit by pitchers who were clearly no good at batting was always fun to see. I’m not really a fan of pinch runners either, I liked seeing the people slower than molasses on the base paths.

(slightly off topic but a recent example from Spring Training, an inside the park home run scored by a man who really didn’t want to – https://twitter.com/RyanDivish/status/1635765576181362690?s=20)

Bunts, eh. I don’t much like them but that’s really because they almost never work. That said, baseball is a bit stuck in Moneyball statistical overanalysis leading to too many batters taking the three true outcomes approach (home run, walk, strikeout). Hopefully some of the tweaks they are making this season will lead to a few more balls in play and more base runners.