Where David Gower and Leonardo da Vinci meet: on the left

For Garfield Sobers, the crease was the back seat of a car at a drive-in, steamy windows and all, under the nudging, winking cover of darkness.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

JIMI Hendrix, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, David Bowie, Oprah Winfrey, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, Aristotle, Annie Lennox, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, Bart Simpson, and Bills Clinton and Gates. Not forgetting Chewbacca the Wookie.

But, eish, also Napoleon, Jack the Ripper, Osama bin Laden, George HW Bush (W’s dad), FW de Klerk, the Boston Strangler. And Celine Dion.

They were and are left-handers all, people who would struggle to use a pair of scissors or a pen tethered to a bank counter. But they could do a stupendous paint job on your chapel’s ceiling, fight you a damn fine war, slit your throat in an eyeblink, be elected president, including apartheid’s last, make us laugh, make us cry, make us think, make us better human beings, and play a mean guitar. 

Left-handers have also been 19.37% of all 2 932 men who have batted in test cricket. More than half of them, 57.57%, have taken guard in the top four — 37.85% as openers, 32.04% as No. 3s and 30.99% as No. 4s.

Considering us of the sinister hand (aweh: this reporter, too) amount to only 10% of the global population, we are outrageously over-represented in cricket.

We’re also full of left field logic. Here’s David Gower: “The fact is both [left-handers and right-handers] have been horribly misnamed because the left-hander is really a right-hander and the right-hander is really a left-hander — if you work out which hand is doing most of the work.

“My right arm is my strongest. And therefore it’s the right hand, right eye and generally the right side which is doing all the work.

“So, if there is anything about this, then the left-handers, as such, should be called right-handers.”

Weirder still, not all cack-handers are created equal, and some of them are made not born. The Graemes, Pollock and Smith, bowled leg spin and off-spin: so, using their right arms. Smith plays golf left-handed but writes with his right.

Sourav Ganguly batted from the left side of the crease because he grew up using his left-handed brother’s gloves. Snehasish played 59 first-class matches but never cracked the nod for India. Sourav played 113 tests, scored 16 centuries and averaged 42.17. Thanks for the gloves, boet, he might say.

Hanif Mohammad told the youngest of his four, also right-handed brothers, Sadiq, to bat left-handed to help his chances of selection for Pakistan. Sadiq’s 41 tests and five centuries later, having opened in 41 of his 74 innings, that proved to be sound advice.    

There are less subtle difference between some left-handers and others. Dean Elgar comes to the crease mean as a junkyard dog awoken by a howling drunk in the miserable blackness of a wet winter’s night. For Garfield Sobers, the crease was the back seat of a car at a drive-in, steamy windows and all, under the nudging, winking cover of darkness.

Sobers always drew a crowd, and who wouldn’t want to watch his genius dazzle in the sun. But who wouldn’t want to see the consummately cussed Elgar dare the world, or that part of it tasked with bowling to him that day, to do its worst.

Cricket has changed since Sobers strode the world’s ovals like the god he was. Rather than wonder how he might have taken white-ball cricket by storm — he made nought in his only ODI — we should be relieved that the red-ball arena had him to itself. Elgar doesn’t play the game Sobers did, but a version that has had parts of its soul excised and sold off to the highest bidder like muti.

Hiding in plain sight, too, are the facts that Elgar opens the batting and Sobers spent most of his career in the middle order.

As anyone from Kepler Wessels to Geoffrey Boycott will attest, there is no harder job in cricket than what you must do after you dare to walk to the middle when the pitch, the ball and the bowlers are all rudely fresh and new.

So there should be another level of understanding for Alastair Cook and his technique; a haphazard collection of moving bits and pieces, none of them in the same direction. Also for Gower, whose elegance would have convinced you he could make flossing his teeth look as if he was playing the violin. Vivaldi, of course.

Gower also had a thing for teaming his whites with pink socks. In good company, or what: Da Vinci always painted his mountains blue.

Shohei Ohtani makes baseball fear to tread where cricket has always gone

Garfield Sobers is cricket’s only genuine, unarguable, bulletproof allrounder. Wasim Akram? Bowler. Jacques Kallis? Batsman.

Times SELECT

TELFORD VICE in Florence

A nice young man is scaring the bejaysus out of Major League Baseball (MLB). His name is Shohei Ohtani and — make sure any kids who play Little League are out of the room if you’re reading this aloud — he hits as well as he pitches.

That’s right: he hits as well as he pitches, a fact that is causing shock, horror and not a little amazement from California to Connecticut.

Thereby hangs a lesson for cricket, which is decades behind its American cousin in how to get the best out of its players.

In cricket, Ohtani would not be a phenomenon purely because he is what baseball is calling, quaintly, a “two-way” player. Closer to the truth is that cricketers who are able to bat as well as they are able to bowl have always been rare. Of all the 2 899 men who have played Test cricket, Garfield Sobers is the only genuine, unarguable, bulletproof article. Wasim Akram? Bowler. Jacques Kallis? Batsman.

Fewer allrounders are produced now than ever because T20’s reliance on players who are jacks of all disciplines and masters of none has the equal and opposite effect of making Test cricket invest more heavily in specialists, if only to set itself apart from the terrible infant. One of these decades, if that trend continues, the poles of cricket’s core skills are going to be as far apart as baseball’s.

The 2018 MLB season, in which each team plays at least 162 games, was less than 30 matches old on May 9. But in his first US campaign Ohtani, at 23 already a household name in his native Japan, where he played for the Nippon-Ham Fighters, is attracting the kind of attention reserved for World Series stars.

He has made a decent beginning as a starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, winning three of his five games and losing one, allowing 20 hits and 12 runs in 26.1 innings.

So far, so understandable — for Americans. What’s startling them is that Ohtani has also had 20 hits, four of them home runs, in his 60 plate appearances for an average of .333.

The context of all that is that pitchers don’t bat at all during the regular season in the American League (AL), where the Angels play, because they spend so much time and effort pitching and practising pitching that they invariably make awful batters.

Since 1973 in the AL, instead of the pitcher going down looking at or swinging at strikes, a “designated hitter”, or DH, has batted on their behalf in the nine-strong line-up.

In the National League (NL), where pitchers still bat, Jacob de Grom, a right-handed starter for the New York Mets, was at the plate more times than any other pitcher in 2017. But 273 of all the 509 players who took a swing in the NL batted more than De Grom. That’s more than half. Forty-six players didn’t bat at all. They were all pitchers.

Starting pitchers will often take five days’ rest after they play a game, and rarely fewer than three days.

Scandalously, on some of what should be his rest days, Ohtani serves as the Angles’ DH. 

Not since Babe Ruth strode the diamond has something similar happened with any seriousness. Ruth arrived at the Boston Red Sox in 1914 as a pitcher who could bat a bit. A bit became a lot, and by the end of the 1919 season he was no longer pitching regularly — mostly because the Sox could put more bums on seats if Ruth played every day as an outfielder rather than once or twice a week as a pitcher.

Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees before the 1920 season, and in the next 15 years as “The Sultan of Swat” built his legend as the home run king, he pitched only 31 innings. In his six years in Boston, he had hurled 1 190.1.

So Ohtani is challenging 99 years — the difference between 1919 and 2018 — of how things have been done in baseball.

It’s early days yet, but his batting average is in the ballpark with that of last season’s AL batting champion, the Houston Astros’ José Altuve, who averaged .346.

If you know anything about big league ’ball, you know what Ohtani is doing is not unlike Galileo daring to suggest the earth isn’t flat.

Such is baseball’s belief in specialists that Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher the game has seen, was paid US$169.6-million over the course of his 18-year career. That’s good money for anyone, much less a player who threw an average of only 14.8 pitches per game as a reliever between 2002 and 2013. 

American high schools aren’t short of baseball players who can bat, can pitch, can field. But that’s how the scouts figure out who has the raw talent to make it to the majors.

After that, it’s each into their own pigeonhole: as pitchers or position players, and position players are parsed further. Outfielders and first-basemen are expected to do the bulk of the hitting, and next in that order come the middle infielders — second-basemen, shortstops and third-basemen. 

Middle infielders especially but also outfielders need plenty of pace around the bases, particularly if they don’t carry big bats. 

Catchers are almost as specialised as pitchers, some of whom will only pitch to their “personal catchers”.

Imagine Kagiso Rabada bowling only when Quinton de Kock is behind the stumps, and Heinrich Klaasen strapping on the pads for everyone else.  

That’s difficult to fathom, but South Africans who remember when sport had seasons and players had real jobs know it used to be feasible to play more than one sport to a high level.

Exhibit A: Errol Stewart, the former South Africa and Dolphins wicketkeeper-batsman and Sharks centre. He is the most recent example in a club that counts Herschelle Gibbs, Peter Kirsten and Gerbrand Grobler among its many members.

But rampant professionalism and specialisation has changed all that, and made the allrounder extinct in that sense and endangered in others.

Much more of that, and one day the kids will have to be sent out of the room before we can talk about that outrageous youngster who bats No. 6 and bowls first change. 

Scary stuff, isn’t it.