On a sunny Saturday afternoon, I walked onto the Green River baseball field, to see a game from which baseball got its roots being played. The scene I encountered was very different than the sport I grew up playing.
The team was practicing. Instead of playing from the pitchers mound to home plate, they had set up what I'd later learn were called wickets about 120 feet down the first base line.
The pitch, where the ball is bowled, is a little longer than the distance between the rubber and home plate on a baseball field.
The bowler, cricket's equivalent to baseball's pitcher, runs into the crease, and hurls the ball, with a straight-armed motion toward the wicket, where a batsman is waiting to hit the ball. Rather than sending the ball the entire distance of the pitch in the air, the ball bounced in somewhere between the bowler and batsman.
Seeing my first bowl was when I realized that the game I'd always assumed was something similar to baseball was actually a very different and complicated animal. Cricket was a sport I'd been decidedly ignorant to for my entire life.
Watching a handful of batsman step up to the wickets, Justin Runquist, The Current's news editor, and I began to circle the perimeter of players fielding the batted balls.
I played baseball throughout my entire youth, year-round towards the end, and assumed that what was going on was some type of batting practice.
We made our way around to what would have been right-center field on a baseball field when Runquist began to snap some pictures. A bowl later, a hard line drive was hit our way.
I've always assumed that intramural sports were low-intensity, moderately competitive club sports. I was soon taught that assumption was wrong.
I fielded the line drive on a hop, being a creature of habit, and threw it to Fez Khan, a 28-year-old Pakistani student.
"Don't touch the ball, come on man," came bellowing from the infield. Usman Mohammad, 24-year-old student and team captain was unhappy that I'd interfered with what I now realize was a scrimmage.
Intensity, check.
Khan caught my throw, smiled, and turned to the pitch and yelled "It's ok, it was four."
When a batsman hits a ball beyond a certain point in the air, his team is awarded four runs. Like baseball, runs are the means by which the game is scored.
Khan's tolerance of my mistake wouldn't go unpunished however. Three bowls later, the batsman at the time hit a pop fly to the right side of the pitch. Khan and Gurcharan Singh, an 18-year-old student from India converged on the ball at full speed.
In a collision that conjured memories of the intensity of Mike Cameron's collision with Carlos Beltran in 2005, when the two played for the New York Mets, Khan and Singh collided, the ball hit the grass, and both went down in a heap.
The field was silent, and everyone, Runquist and I included, rushed to the two players still lying on the ground. As the necessary checks were made, Singh arose dazed, and Khan sat up, mouth bloodied, and began to spit out streams of blood while looking for his glasses.
"See, this game isn't all that safe either," Mohammad said to me, laughing, between obvious jokes told in Hindi to the other players, all met with laughter.
Another player came with water, and as Khan was rinsing his mouth out, Rupinder Singh, a 32-year-old student started talking in Hindi about the care Khan needed. I was able to make out "Hydrogen Peroxide," which was met with laughter, as the team continued to rib Khan, and Mohammad retorted with "Jóse Cuervo."
The crowd around the players erupted with laughter, Khan left the field to repair his cut-open, still bleeding lip, and practice continued as though it had never stopped.
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