On the last Ashes tour I got talking to the Australia fielding coach, Mike Young, an American whose main expertise was in baseball. He was a figure of fun at times, prowling around the outfield shouting, “Let's play ball, Australia” and perching by the boundary rope in typical baseball fashion - left knee on the ground, right elbow on the other knee, right hand resting under a chin jutting forward in anticipation while regularly spitting out chewing tobacco and applauding the most mundane moments.

One evening I asked him, of all the international cricketers he had come across, who he thought would have the best chance of making it in baseball. He named three at once, with enough speed to suggest that he, too, had given it some thought: Andrew Symonds, of Australia, Dwayne Smith, the West Indian, and Kevin Pietersen, of England, were his picks. All three, he said, had the physical presence, ball-striking skills and speed to the ball to give it a go.

Young's comments came to mind this week after Pietersen gave us a sneak preview of what the future may hold, while at the same time confirming his outrageous talent. Once he has tired of cricket and England, could his talents transfer to baseball?

Switch-hitting is not unusual in baseball. It is a commonly held belief that right-handed hitters do better against left-handed pitchers and vice versa. The ambidextrous hitter, therefore, becomes a gem of a player and can take advantage of any idiosyncrasies in the size of the boundaries, while giving flexibility to the coach. All a switch-hitter has to do is take his place on one side of the plate or the other before the pitcher has stepped on to his mark. Once the pitcher has wound up, however, the hitter cannot switch.

Mickey Mantle, the great New York Yankees player of the Fifties and Sixties, was one of the most famous switch-hitters, described by Casey Stengel, the Yankees manager at the time, as having “more natural power from both sides than anybody I ever saw”. Mantle hit 372 home runs left-handed and 164 right-handed, taking advantage of the short boundaries for the left-handed hitter at the Yankee Stadium much in the same way that Pietersen calculated his options for the shorter boundary at the Riverside on Sunday.

John Buchanan, the former Australia coach, predicted some years ago (was this partly down to Young's influence?) that ambidextrous batting, baseball-style, would be the skill of the future. His comments were treated with scepticism and disdain, mainly because former Australia cricketers were suspicious of Buchanan's lack of international experience as a player. It didn't help that Australia lost the Ashes soon afterwards. Too smart by half, was the reaction.

But, as Buchanan well knows, cricket will continue to evolve. During the 1985 Texaco Trophy series, after poorly executed reverse sweeps by Ian Botham and Mike Gatting, Peter May, the chairman of selectors at the time, was forced to issue an edict that England batsmen should not reverse sweep. Such puritanism seems fanciful now.

This week Pietersen's audacity showed that Buchanan was not the crackpot some made him out to be. It also raises the question whether any cricketer has been better suited to trying to crack the United States. Botham had designs on Hollywood for a while, in a different guise, but they were not reciprocated. Will Botham, whose company manages Pietersen, encourage his client to go where he himself failed?

To my knowledge, no international batsman has played pro baseball in the US. Australian cricketers, such as Ian Chappell, often played amateur baseball in the winter months in Australia to keep their eye in, Ed Smith, the Middlesex captain, wrote an acclaimed book about the two sports, and Ian Pont, the former Essex fast bowler, had trials with six Major League Baseball teams as a pitcher, including an extended period with the Philadelphia Phillies.

Could Pietersen be the first? You cannot rule it out. After all, cricketers, even with the Stanford millions, really are playing in the minor leagues when it comes to earnings. Alex Rodriguez, of the Yankees, the leading home-run hitter of the past ten years, recently signed a ten-year deal for $275 million (about £140 million).

Why MCC was too hasty over great debate

It is tempting to applaud the swift and public-spirited reaction of MCC to Kevin Pietersen's switch-hit on Sunday. By Tuesday MCC had decided that no action would be taken to outlaw the stroke. It was, it said, “exciting for the game of cricket” and it reiterated its view that the shot, given the excessive risk involved, is “fair to both bowlers and batsmen”.

How carefully did MCC officials think through the ramifications? Not very, according to Michael Holding, who rang me in some distress after its pronouncement. His view is that MCC is not there to be public spirited and to pander to the prevailing public mood but to administer the Laws in such a way that the game is not held up to ridicule.

His point is this: imagine a scenario where a right-handed opening batsman comes out to bat in a Test match and takes guard as a left-hander. The opposition captain presumably sets his field accordingly, with slips and gully fielders positioned for the left-hander. Halfway through the bowler's run-up the batsman reverts to being a right-hander. Immediately half a dozen fielders have been taken out of the game, as has the leg-before decision to any ball pitching outside the off stump. The bowler, of course, does not have to release the ball; the batsman then repeats the procedure and stalemate occurs.

At the moment, because of Law 36.3, the captain cannot set his field with the notion in mind that the batsman will revert to being a right-hander because the leg side is dictated by the stance of the batsman at the moment the bowler runs up to bowl.

If, then, the captain sets his slips and gully fielders assuming that the batsman is right-handed, the ball on delivery immediately becomes a no-ball because there are more than two fielders behind square on the leg side. Still with me?

If all this sounds ridiculous and unlikely, imagine this scenario: there are ten overs left of a Test match and one team are pushing for victory against England. Monty Panesar comes out at No11 to save the game. What is to stop him taking guard as a right-hander and then switching to render a number of fielders redundant and improve his chances of not being caught in the slips, or being out leg-before, or, if the bowler refuses to bowl, of winding the clock down with the ensuing stalemate?

It is a tricky business administering Laws that were never intended to be held up to this kind of scrutiny. The validity of Holding's argument, though, is unquestionable and MCC partly acknowledges that by saying that it will continue to monitor other implications of the stroke. The answer lies somewhere in the suggestion in this space on Tuesday that greater latitude must be given to the fielding team, for field-setting and leg-before decisions, once a batsman has decided to switch. Maybe, for once in its history, MCC acted with undue haste.