Boria Majumdar
With a lot of talk around the forthcoming Major League Cricket in the US and the recently concluded draft, it is pertinent to look back at the origins of the sport in America and also ask the question why cricket lost out to a sport like Baseball?
Why Baseball and not cricket in the US?
The earliest record of cricket in the Americas was found in the ‘secret diary’ of William Byrd II of Virginia and the date, believe it or not, is 25 April 1709. Subsequent references to cricket date back to Georgia in 1737 and an advertisement in a New York paper for players in 1739.
The first recorded American cricket match was in New York in 1751 on the site of what is today the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan.
Cricket, records indicate, remained popular in the Americas until the 1860s and the first recognized international match between Canada and USA was attended by over 10,000 spectators at Bloomingdale Park in New York in 1844. Tours to and from the US were common until the 1880s, and the best moment for US cricket came when a United States side defeated the West Indies in an international match in British Guyana in 1880. Though matches between Americans and British residents were played on the American West Coast right through the 1880s and 1890s, cricket, by the turn of the century, had given way to baseball. By the end of the Civil War, baseball’s ascendance to the top of the American sporting pantheon was inevitable, if not already complete. Though cricket would experience a revival in the 1870s, it would never again compete with baseball as either a participatory or a spectator sport in the United States.
The most compelling question to emerge from this development is simply ‘Why?’ What were the factors that allowed baseball to prevail over cricket, despite the latter’s longer history both inside and outside the United States?
It is almost certain then that the adoption of baseball over cricket had much to do with nationalism. The establishment of an ‘American’ game was an extremely popular topic of the sporting media of the time.
It can be argued that the American reaction to the sport of the empire was simply the opposite of the colonial reaction to imperial sport. Despite American independence, English influence was still prevalent in the United States and cricket had a much longer history in the United States than baseball did. This made it imperative for Americans to appropriate/indigenize baseball to the extent that its British roots would be totally forgotten. On the other hand, in India, conditions of colonialism made it imperative for the nationalists to take up cricket as a way to compete with the British.
Why did American and Indian nationalisms necessitate the promotion of separate sports? Why baseball and not cricket in the United States? Why cricket and not wrestling/hockey in India? Answers lie in the George Orwell axiom ‘Serious sport . . . is war minus the shooting’.
If sport is in fact a metaphor (and in some cases a metonym) for war, then cricket simply was not necessary in the United States, as it was in India. The United States, having prevailed militarily already against the British (twice) had no need for ‘war minus the shooting’. The early date of American independence, coupled with the arrival of American nationalism in the 1850s and beyond, meant that cricket was inevitably the game that had to lose in the battle with baseball.
In India considerations were exactly the reverse. Prowess in sport wasn’t enough. Accomplishments had to be demonstrated in empire sport, which would mark a symbolic victory against the ruling colonial state. To substantiate the point: even when India won gold medals in field hockey in the Olympic Games in the years 1928–56, hockey could never rival cricket in colonial India. This is because Britain refused to participate in Olympic hockey contests in the years 1928–36 knowing that the Indians were favourites to win the gold. This is especially interesting because Britain had won the Olympic gold in field hockey in 1904 and 1920, the only years when hockey was played before 1928 and years when India did not participate. Absence of competitions against the colonizer, it can be argued, impacted on the position of hockey in the Indian sporting hierarchy.
In contrast, in America there was a need to move away from British sport in order to produce an American identity.