Baseball

[smc]

Originally Posted by dauls

But if you think baseball has a nice slow pace, try Test Match Cricket (the five day version of the game). You play roughly 6 hours per day, and after five days you can still have a drawn match. Sometimes, for one team, holding on for the draw actually feels like a win.

Hey, dauls, thanks for your post. I've actually played cricket. I went to college at a very, very small liberal arts school that happens to be just across the street from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. A high school acquaintance was at the Academy concurrently, so we kept in touch. There was a group of "exchange students" there who were junior officers in the Royal Navy, and they were looking to organize some cricket matches. They were having a very hard time getting U.S. Navy guys interested, so my friend came by and asked me -- he knew I am a big fan of baseball -- whether I wanted to learn and play. I said yes, enthusiastically, and helped find others until we were able to organize a first match over a weekend about a month later. We played Test and determined that we'd start on Saturday, play on Sunday as well, and at the end we'd decide whether to continue if the match "technically" wasn't yet over.

It was a great time. And we did it a few more times over the year.

An important point about "slowness": a large part of cricket's slowness is actually "duration." Breaks for lunch, tea, drinks ... those all make the game take longer. No one was slowing the match while waiting for some TV ad to be completed.