Cricket and its long‑lost rogue cousin, baseball, enjoyed an emotional reunion over the weekend. Jimmy Anderson pitched in front of a crowd almost twice as big as any he has bowled in front of in England, and in all more than 100,000 people attended a two‑game series between the Chicago Cubs and St Louis Cardinals at the London Stadium, constituting a mere 0.08% of the Major League Baseball regular season. Indian Premier League franchise owners no doubt cast envious eyes at baseball, dreaming wistfully of a 2,430-game regular season. Cricketers may be tempted by $350m (£275m) 12-year contracts.
The weekend offered everything sports watchers in Britain have come to expect from visiting American major‑league events – a large crowd with considerable enthusiasm for the sport, but understandably limited emotional investment in the result, an armageddon’s‑worth of cholesterol and a stadium announcer with the kind of deeply sonorous and unquenchably American voice that could imbue a village-fete cake competition with a sense of fundamental sporting gravity.
