The important thing to understand about JB Bernstein is that he is no charlatan. Because when this sharply dressed American sports agent says that he is going to turn an aspiring baseball player into the first US citizen to win a contract in cricket’s Indian Premier League (IPL), at first it is difficult not to scoff at him.
But Bernstein is serious. And for those who need evidence of his sanity, the fact that exactly the same feat of sporting alchemy is being attempted by Julien Fountain, a former fielding coach to international cricket teams, should provide it.
Between the two men, the race is on to create the first professional baseball-to-cricket convert. If one of them hits the jackpot, Twenty20 cricket fans could be watching a baseball player taking guard against world-class bowlers such as Dale Steyn and Lasith Malinga as early as next year.
Of the two projects, Bernstein’s will be the most high-profile. Starting at the end of this month, around the time of the 2015 World Series, this New York-born, self-made multimillionaire will tour US schools and campuses putting cricket bats in the hands of 50,000 wannabe baseball players. A select few with electric hand-eye co-ordination and a natural propensity to hit the ball on the bounce (or “off a pitch”, as Bernstein puts it) will be hot-housed in a training camp next summer with a clutch of cricket coaches. The batter who impresses most will be offered to the IPL.
Ambitious? Certainly. But when it comes to adopting a talent from one sport and turning him professional in a foreign country – in a sport he has never watched, with techniques he has never used – nobody has a track record like Bernstein.
In 2007, he arrived in India searching for kids who could throw at 90mph. In the backwaters of Uttar Pradesh he discovered Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel. Less than two years later, Singh and Patel were pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, a Major League Baseball organisation. They were the first Indians in history to earn professional sports contracts in the US and their story became a Hollywood movie, Million Dollar Arm. Bernstein simply aims to repeat that trick.
“We’re optimistic that a baseball player can transfer his hitting skills to cricket as effectively as a cricketer can transfer his throwing skills to baseball,” he says. “The guys that are used to hitting with a baseball bat are going to look at a cricket bat with eyes wide open. It’s a big hitting area, and there are going to be guys backing themselves to hit a six every time.”
The basic statistics support Bernstein’s theory about the comparative ease of hitting cricket balls. At the smallest stadium in Major League Baseball – Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox – the fence at left-field is 95 metres from the home plate. The biggest fields require a hit of more than 130 metres for a home run. By contrast, for international Twenty20 cricket, straight boundaries must be no bigger than 82 metres. In domestic tournaments, most are much, much shorter.
Almost all baseball franchises have a pitcher with a 95mph fast ball, delivered from a mound 60ft 6in away (a little more than 20 yards). The men trying to hit those 95mph thunderbolts are using bats with sweetspots measuring about a quarter of an inch across, which is why a hitter who connects safely with 30% of his swings would be one of the top talents anywhere in the world. While the bouncing ball presents its own problems, only a tiny number of the very fastest bowlers in cricket approach 95mph; and the bats are bigger – and not round. Described in those terms, the arrival of a baseball batter in Twenty20 cricket begins to sound like a matter of time.
Indeed, the first world-class convert is probably long overdue, given how the sports have always cast curious glances at each other. In 1874, a team of baseballers won six games of cricket in England, albeit with 18 players to the cricket teams’ 11. In 1935, Babe Ruth, baseball’s original demigod, visited London and took a group of net bowlers to the cleaners.
“Sure, I could smack the ball alright,” the Babe shrugged afterwards. “How could I help it when you have a great wide board to swing?” Ruth had splintered the edges of his cricket bat, such was the force he swung with, but Alan Fairfax, the former Australian cricketer who had been watching, told the assembled press: “In a fortnight, I could make one of the world’s greatest batsmen out of him.”
Only last year, in preparation for the cricket tournament at the Asian Games, a team of South Korean baseballers played a Twenty20 match against a Sri Lankan club side. The South Koreans – not a cricketer among them – made 165 in 20 overs, a sizeable total, despite failing to score off almost half their balls. “It’s monstrous: they just hit,” said Fountain, who later became their coach.
A year later, the seed that was sowed in Fountain’s mind that afternoon in Sri Lanka has grown into Switch Hit 20. Essentially, Fountain’s project is no different from Bernstein’s. The Shoreham-born Englishman has been scouting for disillusioned talent in the minor baseball leagues in the US. So far he has collected about 100 professional batters keen to give cricket a try, enticed by an earning potential that far outstrips professional baseball outside of the major leagues.
That cohort will be whittled down by coaches in much the same way that Bernstein’s will be. Fountain says that he in discussions with “well-established” cricket administrators about the potential of his US recruits.
“Hitting a ball is hitting a ball,” he says, basing his confidence on 20 years in and out of the international cricket coaching circuit. “One of the biggest challenges is getting them to hit straight. It’s all very well taking a huge swish, but the swish has to be in a vertical plane. I had a couple of the South Koreans who could smash the ball a stupid distance … but they were also being bowled swinging across the line.” (By trying to hit the ball with a horizontal bat, rather than a vertical bat, batsmen leave themselves at great risk of being dismissed.)
He adds: “I’ve got a lot of minor league players who have said they will leave baseball at the drop of a hat. These guys are paid next to nothing, so a cricket team that throws around millions and millions of dollars could write a very small cheque and make a guy extremely happy, even if it’s only for a three-week contract. The investment for the club would be easily outweighed by the marketing opportunities.”
Of the few cricketers who have swung a baseball bat in anger, Ed Smith is the most thoughtful. The former Kent and England batsman wrote a book about his experiences during preseason with the New York Mets in 2001. As Smith describes in Playing Hard Ball, the chief difficulty he encountered was dismantling the high elbow position and controlled play that mark the classiest cricketers, then using the basic building blocks – depth perception, lightning decision-making and timing – to create an explosive new baseball swing.
Like every other cricket expert I spoke to, Smith sees no reason to doubt that a baseballer could make the cut in Twenty20 cricket. And given the way that many (though not all) Twenty20 batsmen are becoming more aggressive, Smith says a baseball batter may even feel at home.
“It’s more likely that someone would make the transition from baseball hitting to T20 than from baseball hitting to Test cricket, because the swing is freer and less inhibited,” Smith explains.
The key, he adds, will be finding a hitter who has not been so thoroughly drilled in baseball that he can no longer swing a bat any other way. But as well as getting used to hitting the ball as it comes up towards him, Smith points out that a baseball-to-cricket convert will also have to adjust the way he watches the ball.
Unlike in cricket, where tests have shown that a batsman moves his eyes from the bowler’s hand to a predicted bouncing area on the pitch (rather than truly watching it come on to the bat), baseball batters fix their eye on the ball for the duration of its journey towards them. If Bernstein and Fountain end up with egg on their faces, Smith says, it will be because their batters will only ever be truly comfortable with balls that do not bounce.
“The baseball batter’s hitting zone will be knee-high to chest-high,” Smith says. In cricket, only deliveries that bounce further from the batsman will arrive in that area. “But the ball he’ll find easier to track will be the yorker or the low full-toss” – that is, the balls that arrive in his hitting zone without bouncing, and much closer to the ground.
Back with Fountain’s Switch Hit 20 project, Boomer Collins is one of the proteges identified as potential IPL material. The square-jawed Texan certainly seems ripe for conversion. As a minor league slugger with the Dunedin Blue Jays, his professional contract does not make him rich and his head has been turned by the scent of IPL dollars – the same scent that has been wafting through cricket since the first player auction in 2008.
Listening to some of Collins’ ideas about cricket, you fear for his safety (“The fast bowlers, they’re just trying to beat you by bowling as fast as they can, and there’s not that much movement to it, right?”). But it does not take long in conversation with the 26-year-old before flashes of promise cut through his boyish enthusiasm. When he describes the way he has been trained to read the ball out of the hand, for example, you could just as well be listening to the product of an MCC coaching academy.
“It’s all about training the eyes to see what you want to see. It’s all about picking up clues and focusing on the point that the ball is being released from. I’ve been training my whole life for that.”
Typical of an American sportsman, Collins does not lack confidence, despite not yet having swung a cricket bat, but nor does he underestimate how much he has to learn.
“I’ve just been trained to hit it as hard as I can,” he admits. “I don’t think I’m going to be the greatest in the world the first year I play, but I’ve been swinging a round bat at a round ball since I was four years old, so I think a square bat is going to help out a little bit. With time and practice, I’d like to think the skills that I possess mean that I could be one of the top players one day.”
For Collins and batters like him, the money in Twenty20 cricket is a major source of inspiration. There is, however, a much more innocent attraction for baseballers learning about cricket.
“The craziest thing is how long you can be out there hitting,” Collins grins. “In baseball you get one ball and if you put it in fair territory” – that is, into the areas where the ball is deemed in play – “you’re done. The thing that I’m going to enjoy the most about cricket is that you can make a mistake, mishit a ball and you get to continue hitting.”
Plenty of cricketers will feel uncomfortable about what Bernstein and Fountain are trying to do. After all, the last time an Amerian fixed such a starry-eyed gaze on the sport, his name was Allen Stanford, founder of the Stanford 20/20 tournament in the West Indies, and he is now serving 110 years in prison for fraud.
Indeed, given the bombastic marketing that governs US sport, it is difficult for anyone from that milieu to arrive in cricket without the smell of dollars clinging to him. Bernstein’s project is called Million Dollar Bat, and there is no denying that he and Fountain are attempting to open up a potentially gigantic market. Even if 2% of India’s cricket fans begin to take an interest in baseball, the audience would number in the tens of millions.
Bernstein speaks of the “Yao Ming effect”: the way that the 7ft 6in Chinese star almost singlehandedly exported the NBA to China. True, Singh and Patel, the Indian pitchers Bernstein uncovered, have not had quite the same effect on major league baseball, but it did not stop Disney making a 2014 film about them, with Mad Men’s Jon Hamm playing the part of Bernstein. For Million Dollar Bat, a Bollywood film is already planned.
For an agent, there could be gigantic profits in exporting baseball to India and cricket to the US, but both Bernstein and Fountain are cricket fans too.
“The two sports are coming back towards each other, and that’s a real evolutionary process,” says Fountain. “The pace of play in baseball is actually quite dull. In T20 cricket, there’s something going on every ball, because that’s what we coach.”
Bernstein adds: “Before Million Dollar Arm, I never knew anything about cricket. I knew as much as most Americans do – you play for eight days or something, and have tea breaks. But now I’m a huge Twenty20 fan.
“My real hope is that I can convince a bunch of cricket fans to get interested in baseball and convince a bunch of baseball fans to get interested in cricket.”
• This article was amended on 6 October 2015 to clarify that a hitter who connects safely with 30% of his swings would be one of the top talents anywhere in the world, not a hitter who connects 30% of his swings.
