Comparison of baseball and cricket
Baseball and cricket are the best-known members of a family of related bat-and-ball games.
Despite their similarities, the two sports also have many differences in play and in strategy. A comparison between baseball and cricket can be instructive to followers of either sport, since the similarities help to highlight nuances particular to each game.
Bat-and-ball games, in general, are sports in which one team (the fielding team) has possession of the ball and delivers it to a member of the other team (the batting team), who tries to hit it. The two opposing teams take turns playing these two distinct roles, which are continuous during a specified interval. This contrasts with "goal-oriented" games, such as all forms of football, hockey and basketball, in which possession of the ball or puck can change in an instant, and thus "attackers" and the "defenders" frequently reverse roles during the course of the game.
In both cricket and baseball, the players of one team attempt to score points known as runs by hitting a ball with a bat, while the members of the other team field the ball in an attempt to prevent scoring and to put batting players out.
Once a certain number of batting players are out (different in the two sports), the teams swap roles. This sequence of each team taking each role once is called an inning (plural innings) in baseball, and an innings (both singular and plural) in cricket. The single/plural usage in cricket is comparable to the baseball slang term for a single inning as the team's "ups". A baseball game consists of nine innings per team, while a cricket match may have either one or two innings per team.
Other present-day bat-and-ball games include softball, stickball, rounders, stoolball, pesäpallo or Finnish baseball, punchball, kickball, and British baseball, which has similarities with both cricket and baseball. Earlier forms include The Massachusetts Game of baseball, which was similar to rounders, and one old cat and two old cat.
Baseball is played in a quadrant of fair territory between foul lines. The official minimum distance from home plate to the nearest fence, stand or other obstruction is 250 feet (76.2 m), and the recommended distances are at least 325 feet (99 m) along the foul lines and 400 feet (120 m) in centre field. This produces a recommended fair territory field area just over 100,000 square feet (9,300 m2). Most Major League Baseball parks have fair territory areas in the range of 110,000 to 120,000 square feet (10,000 to 11,000 m2).
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