Archive for the ‘Baseball’ Category

No 1 ranking, Dhoni and new “consultant”

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

India is the no 1 ranked test team now with this win against Sri Lanka. I guess now the tough part begins - to maintain this ranking. But if some other team takes this away soon, it will be mostly due to that team’s results. This is because India doesn’t really have many tests planned until the next world cup. There is an away series against Bangladesh early next year and then I don’t know what’s next in tests.

With this win Dhoni now has gone his first 10 tests India’s captain without losing any yet. I first thought this might be a record already but then a quick search on Cricinfo Statsguru told me that Gavaskar had gone 18 matches like this when he started. Dhoni has been the main captain only for just over a year now after Kumble retired last year. Prior to that he led India as a stand-in captain a few times.

A couple of amusing news. After some decisions went against Sri Lanka in the third test Murali said the ICC needed to use the Umpire Decision Review System everywhere and not leave it to mutual choice as it is right now. On an unrelated note the use of UDRS irritated umpire Mark Benson so much in the second test between Australia and West Indies that he has decided to retire after this match. Tony Cozier then wrote that the review system doesn’t work.

BCCI has appointed Mike Young as a fielding consultant to the Indian team for three weeks. Mike Young is a former baseball coach. So I started wondering how he can coach the fielders to catch a ball without those mittens, whether he is going to make the fielders more efficient by asking them to not stop after running a batsman out, instead try to make the other batsman out as well (”not bother about that dead ball thing”) and whether he is going to pay any attention to the balls that are hit behind the wicket. But it seems he has been coaching the Australia team for a few years already and they turned out just fine. So we have nothing to worry about. In one of the documents referred on the Wikipedia page about him, he knows this much at least “The ball is about the same size (as the one used in Baseball) but harder…It’s been a real positive sport to be involved in and it is very popular. The players are tremendous athletes”. On the last statement there, do note that he was talking about the Australian fielders and not the Indians.

Posted in cricket, Australia, India, West Indies, Dhoni, ICC, Sri Lanka, BCCI, Baseball, Gavaskar, Kumble | 1 Comment »

John Madden on individual records

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Something I heard on radio a few days back made me take notice as it sounded the story of a typical Indian cricket fan. A radio channel here (KCBS 740) airs live chat with Superbowl winning coach John Madden- which are quite amusing to listen to even if you have no clue about typical American sports- and this was one of those discussions.

When asked about players like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds hanging around to reach their respective milestones (in baseball) and whether it is good for sports or not, Madden said something like:

…If the club wants them, (then they will be around). The thing I don’t like about this is the individual records in a team sport are not a big thing for me. It’s the team records and it’s about winning. Someone does this and their team loses… I don’t think that’s a big thing. Sometimes it’s a big draw for them (the clubs). May be that’s why people go see the Giants, there’s Barry Bonds. I mean, they are in the last place, How can you get excited about it? So you lose the team thing and you get interested in the individual thing and I have never been big on that part of it…

Now doesn’t that sound familiar? Especially to Indian cricket fans? Old players approaching milestones being retained because they are still a big draw?

There are a couple of factors here: May be you don’t need to focus on individual records more than the team records but these are reaching those milestones because they have been performing well over the years. If you discourage better performing players saying it’s the team result that counts what motivation they will have, as long as the overall team performance remains low?

Also, in some cases like Indian cricket team, the public probably has given up on hopes that this team will reach great heights on team performance and so the only thing they have to root for is individual talent that achieves statistical milestones. Tendulkar reaching 50 ODI centuries is more likely than India winning consistently abroad, isn’t it?

If you are interested in listening to John Madden more, the website of KCBS has the daily links here. But since the latest are on top, it might be difficult to find this particular post. This discussion aired on July 3rd.

Posted in cricket, India, Tendulkar, ICC, BCCI, Baseball | 1 Comment »