Cricket
From BR Bullpen
"It's a funny kind of month, October. For the really keen cricket fan it's when you discover that your wife left you in May." - Denis Norden
Cricket is a member of the same bat/ball/base family of games as baseball. It has been played as an organized game for several hundred years, and as an international game, primarily between members of the British Empire and later Commonwealth, for well over a century.
Although cricket is an older game and might be assumed to be ancestral to baseball, this does not appear to be the case. Instead, it is likely that both games are descendents of even earlier games such as stoolball. Henry Chadwick, who was a cricket reporter for New York newspapers before switching to baseball, thought that baseball was based on rounders, an English game more similar to baseball.
A number of early baseball stars, in the days before baseball became professional, had played cricket. Among them were Asa Brainard and Jim Creighton who played on both cricket and baseball teams in the years 1861 and 1862. Baseball partisans attempted to slander cricket by blaming Creighton's untimely death on his cricket playing, even though the best evidence suggests that he was fatally injured while batting in a baseball game.
There is speculation that Americans readily accepted a game based on rounders as a way of distancing themselves from cricket, which was associated with the British upper-crust that had been seen by Americans as the enemy in two wars.
