… but he wouldn’t be much good at baseball.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
DAVID Miller makes for a powerful argument against the view that T20 is closer to baseball than cricket, an opinion the lusty left-hander disproved not for the first time while master-blasting Gujarat Titans to victory over Rajasthan Royals in their IPL qualifier at Eden Gardens on Tuesday.
The last two sixes Miller hit in a hattrick of maximums that sealed victory would not have counted had he been playing baseball. Instead, they would have been foul balls. Or balls not hit into the 90 degrees between, in cricket terms, a straight line from middle stump through cover and to the boundary, and another drawn from middle stump through wide mid-on to that fence. All a foul ball earns you in baseball is a strike against your name — though it can’t be strike three — or dismissal: you can be caught off a foul ball.
Two of Miller’s three fours and 17 of his total of 26 singles and twos would also have been declared foul. He would have had two strikes against him from swings and misses, and one ball in his favour because it was outside an imaginary strike zone. He was twice hit by deliveries, which would have earned him walks to first base. The first of them was the fifth ball he faced. That would have ended his innings without him having achieved much.
Pitches come to baseball batters on the full, but they should not be confused with cricket’s full tosses, which are often easier to hit than deliveries that bounce first. The seams on a baseball, which follow a similar pattern to those on a tennis ball, are noticeably more raised than on a cricket ball. That makes a baseball dip and swerve every which way through the air significantly more sharply than a cricket ball, and at between 150 and 160 kilometres an hour. MLB pitchers have fine control even at that speed. Also, a baseball is always new — it’s replaced whenever a pitch bounces or is hit out of the playing area.
So, had Miller been playing baseball on Tuesday, his scintillating 38-ball 68 not out would have been reduced to a middling 35 off 38. And probably fewer than that considering hitting a baseball properly is exponentially more difficult than dealing with a cricket ball. A baseball bat does not have a cricket bat’s flat face, which tips the balance between bat and ball firmly in the former’s favour. The opposite is true of baseball, where the bat is as round as the ball you’re expected to hit. This is the most important point of departure between the two sports. It means that in cricket, particularly in T20, the finisher is a batter. In baseball, the role is played by a pitcher — a relief pitcher or “closer”.
Mariano Rivera, who played for the New York Yankees for 19 seasons, was the finest closer of them all. His total of 652 saves — awarded to a pitcher who preserves his team’s lead in a game, subject to certain conditions — is an all-time MLB record. His busiest summer as a reliever — he was a starting pitcher in 1995, his debut season — was 1996, when he threw 1,602 pitches. He was paid USD131,125 that year. In 2002, he threw only 724 times to get the job done and was paid USD9.45-million.
Also in 2002, the Yankees’ most used starting pitcher, Mike Mussina, threw 3,350 pitches and was paid USD11-million. So Rivera earned 85.91% of Mussina’s salary for shouldering only 21.61% of his workload. All told, Rivera threw 19,438 pitches and was paid almost USD170-million. Mussina’s 53,509 pitches across 18 seasons for the Baltimore Orioles and the Yankees earned him USD144.5-million. Rivera’s pitches fetched USD8713.95 apiece, and Mussina’s USD2701.11. Why was Rivera worth more than three times as Mussina to his team despite working almost three times less than the starter? Because he was available for most games — typically starters pitch only once every five games — but mainly because, as the closer, he nailed down wins. He was the cool-headed finisher.
Cool-headed big hitters of Miller’s calibre do with the bat what pitchers like Rivera do with the ball. Miller has been at the crease 17 times when his IPL teams, Kings XI Punjab and Rajasthan, have won batting second. In that scenario, he has scored five half-centuries — among them efforts of 80 not out and 94 not out — and a century. Only three times in matches in which his team have chased has he finished on the losing side despite scoring an unbeaten half-century. When he has been dismissed in the single figures with his team hunting a target, they have won four times and lost 10 times. The upshot is that, like Rivera, finishers like Miller are good for business.
Can there be any surprise that the most consummate of the ilk in cricket history, MS Dhoni, holds the record for not outs in the IPL with 79? That’s in 234 matches, 26 of which his team have won with him at the crease. In those terms, he has reached 50 five times.
Connecting the dots between baseball players like Rivera and cricketers like Miller and Dhoni may seem, well, dotty. But it offers an avenue for understanding the similarities and differences between the world’s two greatest bat-and-ball games, neither of which can be seriously considered superior to the other.
Even so, there is a stark degree of separation between these three stars. Miller has earned USD9.5-million from his dozen IPL campaigns. Dhoni, who has played in all 15 editions, has made USD21.2-million from the tournament. So playing for the Yankees earned Rivera more than 15 and seven times as much as Miller and Dhoni have been paid by the IPL.
But that equation isn’t settled there. Dhoni has also played 538 matches across the formats for India and, of course, guided them to World Cup glory. Miller has won 238 white-ball caps for South Africa, and turned out for 13 teams — aside from his IPL franchises and South Africa — based in seven different countries. There’s more to them as professionals, and thus their bank balances, than their IPL exploits.
Maybe the buck stops with their estimated net worth. Miller’s is USD11-million, Rivera’s USD90-million, and Dhoni’s USD113-million. But even that isn’t conclusive, because Rivera retired in 2013. What might Dhoni’s net worth be nine years after he calls it quits? Or when cricket’s finest finisher finally finishes finishing.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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