Swinging Away: How Cricket and Baseball Connect (review)

Swinging Away has been published to accompany an exhibition of the same name that explores common features in the development of two majestic sporting cousins: baseball and cricket. To achieve this aim, curator Beth Hise took the unique step of combining items from the revered holdings of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and supplemented these with riches from a less well-known institute in Philadelphia-the C. C. Morris Cricket Library and Museum-and private collections in the United Kingdom. The exhibition opened in May 2010 at the MCC Museum in London and crossed the Atlantic in 2011 to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

The accompanying book, which is the subject of this review, is technically a catalogue of the exhibition items. As such, one would expect to see large, crisp images of the collected treasures, bursting from the page with color. The beautifully produced large-format paperback offers just that, supplementing high-quality images of the two- and three-dimensional articles from the exhibition with other figures relevant to the subject matter. Moreover, it is clear that much thought has gone into the sequence and positioning of images in the book. For instance, where a figure from baseball has an analogy in cricket, or vice versa, careful juxtaposition in the layout has been used to demonstrate a particular similarity or contrast.

As a result of the exceptional production standards, readers may find it difficult to studiously digest the text that accompanies the images on each spread without their right hand-apparently acting on its own will-moving to turn the page and reveal the next set of wonders. In this way, the book offers a similar feeling to being at the exhibition itself. But this page-skipping tendency in no way occurs because the prose is of poor quality; in fact, the opposite is true. Swinging Away is an exhibition catalogue that, remarkably, could be successfully translated into a "talking book" format.

The text is written by curator Hise, a Yale-educated Cleveland Indians fan who relocated in her early 20s from the United States to Australia, where she developed a fondness for cricket. In Swinging Away, it would have been easy for her to present disjointed paragraphs relating to each of the exhibition items featured, but the result would have been a jarringly clumsy narrative, instead of the flowing prose that has resulted from Hise's extra-base effort in "joining the dots." Her narrative begins with a brief exploration of similarities and differences before turning to a more detailed examination of the overlap and distinctions in the origins of the sports, the evolution of equipment and rules, attempts at globalization, societal and cultural context, and relics. The weight given to discussion points is determined more by the extent of relevant artifacts in the exhibition than by their significance within the subject matter as a whole, but this is inevitable given the competing need to link the prose to the figures. Two of the most captivating topics presented by Hise are baseball's small but persistent presence on British soil and the rise and fall of cricket in the United States.

A small number of minor factual errors detract slightly from the book. For instance, the caption for the first figure presented in the main body suggests that the English cricketing legend Sir Ian Botham competed in a British domestic baseball competition in 1987 (13). In truth, his involvement was in a home run-hitting sideshow. Another mistake is the erroneous statement that 1895 was the first year in which an extra-innings baseball contest was played in England (101). Here, the source material used by Hise is at fault: the incorrect fact is taken directly from an article in one of the world's most prestigious newspapers, the London Times. Ignoring professional tours, it seems that the first extra-innings game in England that formed part of a formal competition was played...