TONY LA RUSSA, one of the most tactically aware, intelligent and successful managers in baseball history, was asked in 1989 why his Oakland Athletics had just lost three straight games to the Baltimore Orioles, a team struggling with a notably inferior record.

There were any number of explanations for the success of a statistically weaker team, but La Russa kept it simple: “They are playing hard.”

There was no one from the cricket world in the bowels of Memorial Stadium, Baltimore, that day. But English cricket has gradually cottoned on to the merits of playing our game the way Americans play theirs. Such a trend may pain traditionalists (should that be nationalists?) who fail to appreciate the merits of baseball, but it is clear. And most welcome.

Exhibit A is the success of Twenty20 cricket, an English innovation that has obvious presentational links to Stateside sports.

Its razzmatazz is certainly vulnerable to derision, but railing against crowd-pleasing gimmicks misses the point. People no more turn up for a three-hour cricket match because it involves some music than football fans buy season tickets to watch a bloke dressed up as a fluffy mascot. Spectators packed the Bristol ground on Monday for England’s game with Pakistan because the format produces exhilarating skills.

The more interesting qualities that Twenty20 shares with its transatlantic cousin are subtle and rhythmic. Baseball is hugely watchable because the game changes after every pitch. When the ball leaves a pitcher’s hand it is destined to be either a ball, a strike or a hit, and each has direct consequences.

Because Twenty20 has only 120 deliveries in an innings, (about the same number of pitches thrown in nine baseball innings), the import, and therefore the excitement, surrounding each is enhanced.

But the real similarity is La Russa’s point. Baseball is a constantly snappy, aggressive, intense game. It does not meander. You play hard or you lose. The same now goes for cricket in all its forms, to the great benefit of spectators.

• SUCH is the national honour bound up in the trademark sports of the US and the UK that neither side would admit to being influenced by the other.

  Indeed, according to the England and Wales Cricket Board it was simply a happy coincidence that a group of officials travelled to Baltimore to watch the Orioles in 2003 shortly before Twenty20 innovations emerged.

  To be fair, the osmosis of style and attitude has been gradual. The first baseball gloves to appear on cricket outfields were worn in the 1970s by Ian Chappell’s Australians during informal warm-ups. It is perhaps no coincidence that Chappell’s Australians played the game with their noses thrust as close to those of their opponents as possible.

  The inheritors of such attitude were the 1980 West Indies. Not until Nasser Hussain became England captain in the 1990s and insisted on a steelier mind-set did English cricket emerge from the doldrums to become internationally competitive.

• CRICKET and baseball have more in common than monomaniacal fans of either are prepared to accept. Americans would understand Pakistan’s wounded pride at being fingered for ball-tampering because baseball inhabits the same position in US national life as cricket does on the sub-continent.

  But the real off-field speciality of both games is the spinning of myths that have elevated essentially pastoral games into metaphors for British and American national character.

  Just as the Victorians elevated cricket into a code of behaviour for imperial means, so baseball’s custodians romanticised its birth to idealise its supposed uniqueness. The “official” version is that it was devised by Abner Doubleday, a future Civil War general, at Cooperstown in upstate New York. Strange, then, that the word “baseball” did not appear in Doubleday’s New York Times obituary of 1893.

• CRICKET likes to think of itself as a global game and baseball as an insular affair. Next year’s World Cup will be contested by 16 countries representing a total population of 1.6 billion. The baseball equivalent (which may have passed you by and in which the US failed to make the semi-finals) was also contested by 16 nations. They represented 2.1 billion souls.

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