St Louis Cardinals played the Chicago Cubs, enhanced by the guest presence of Jimmy Anderson and Nathan Lyon
Cricket and its long‑lost rogue cousin, baseball, enjoyed an emotional reunion over the weekend. Jimmy Anderson pitched in front of a crowd almost twice as big as any he has bowled in front of in England, and in all more than 100,000 people attended a two‑game series between the Chicago Cubs and St Louis Cardinals at the London Stadium, constituting a mere 0.08% of the Major League Baseball regular season. Indian Premier League franchise owners no doubt cast envious eyes at baseball, dreaming wistfully of a 2,430-game regular season. Cricketers may be tempted by $350m (£275m) 12-year contracts.
The weekend offered everything sports watchers in Britain have come to expect from visiting American major‑league events – a large crowd with considerable enthusiasm for the sport, but understandably limited emotional investment in the result, an armageddon’s‑worth of cholesterol and a stadium announcer with the kind of deeply sonorous and unquenchably American voice that could imbue a village-fete cake competition with a sense of fundamental sporting gravity.
