Can baseball fans be won over by the world’s second-biggest sport?

OVER TWO decades ago, Bill Bryson, a writer from Iowa, wrote of cricket that the English did not invent it “as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect.” The world’s second-most-watched sport, he said, “is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players” (clearly Mr Bryson never watched a darts match, or saw Ben Stokes bat). His description of play compared it to a form of baseball, only with more absurd dress and far slower.