Pappus' plane

Gideon Haigh:

By the end of Ranji's debut series, the ramparts of Victorian England had yielded to him utterly. "At the present time," judged the Strand, "it would be difficult to discover a more popular player throughout the length and breadth of the Empire." And his fame would only grow: he published a string of books, was the subject of a biography by Percy Cross Standing, and a painting by Henry Tuke, and appeared in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake as "ringeysingey".

It is undoubtedly that appearance in Finnegans Wake which brought Ranji the greatest fame.

They've got better stories to tell. Here's a discussion between Joe Posnanski and Bill James. This bit's from Bill:

Back when I was a young wannabe sportswriter I sat in the press box for a game: Aug. 12, 1989. The Royals and Orioles are tied 3-3 going into the bottom of the ninth. ... It's first-and-third, two out, George Brett at the plate. Scottie McGregor is on the mound. McGregor and Brett were high school teammates, but McGregor was the kind of pitcher who gave Brett fits -- a lefty who throws off-speed stuff; Brett in his career was 12 for 54 against McGregor, .222, and he didn't hit anybody LIKE that very well.

But McGregor has pitched 8 2/3 innings and is weakening, so Earl Weaver replaces McGregor with Tim Stoddard, and Brett is hitting around .400 (I think he was still over .400 at the time) ... so Weaver intentionally walks Brett, bringing up Amos Otis with the bases loaded.

Stoddard's first two pitches miss, and it's 2-0. From that moment on, Amos Otis was GOING to walk. A walk wins the game; Stoddard has poor control, Amos is up 2-0. ... he's taking a walk. A long, long battle ensues, Otis fouling off pitch after pitch, the crowd roaring on every pitch. Must have been 9, 10 pitches. It's what makes baseball, baseball. Finally Stoddard misses outside, and the Royals win the game.

Why do I enjoy this story? Part of it is probably that Bill James is a top-notch writer. But part of it comes from the drama of the situation. Games of cricket that finish like this go down as all-time greats. The 1999 World Cup semi-final, the Tied Tests, etc. Baseball, because of its lower scoring, provides loads of stories like this every season. It's a vast goldmine of anecdotes, providing the tension-of-the-moment, "What's going to happen NOW?" gripping theatre that cricket only provides every couple of years. I don't even watch Major League Baseball^*, I don't care about the Royals or the Orioles, but for a couple of paragraphs there, I cared about what happened that night in 1989 in a baseball game between those two teams.

^*I would if I had the relevant channels on the TV.

Cricket just doesn't measure up in comparison. Instead of having a huge bank of close finishes to fall back on, we have a mini-battle in the middle of a game, a long innings under pressure, and so forth. There's drama, but it's almost always drawn out and it rarely has the finality of the baseball story that starts "bottom of the ninth, two out".

I hope my one baseball/cricket reader has found this post interesting.

Compared to some others, I didn't buy that much at the Alumni bookfair - about thirty books, a lot of them on cricket. Haigh, Frith, CMJ, Cardus, Fingleton, and some late 19th century equivalents of Steve Waugh's Captain's Diary (one by Ranjitsinhji, one by George Giffen). But I also picked up a book called English Cathedrals, by John Harvey.

It was first published in 1950, with my edition printed in 1961. The book doesn't explicitly tell us that English cathedrals are better than those in the rest of the world, but this suggestion is made strongly, particularly when comparing England to France. Let's see what Harvey has to say about France.

With the outstanding exception of Bourges, the greatest of the French cathedrals are cold and aloof, fired only by a detached mental fervour akin to the passion of the higher mathematician and the astronomer for their lofty subjects.

That's just as well - most of you can still enjoy French cathedrals.

No concession is made to human frailty, the quality of mercy is absent from their terrible judgments upon the puny beings who pass through their doors. At Chartres the glorious windows, many of them given by the gilds of local craftsmen, infuse a different atmosphere; but the statues of the porches appal the spirit by their chilly disdain of mundane affairs. The French cathedrals fall under the great condemnation of French thought, despite their grandeur and logic: having all things, they yet lack charity.

The strict adherence of French art to prepared schemes of iconography; the refusal of the architects to countenance decorative elements such as stellar vaulting; the overburden of heavy flying buttresses to which they were constrained by insistence upon height: all bear witness to this hidden spiritual weakness in France.

He then says that he doesn't want to disparage French cathedrals. Let's see a direct comparison between the two countries:

French logic and mental clarity were carried to such an extreme that the ideal of one perfect solution, and one only, of any problem was always kept in mind. The commonsense Englishmen, working by rule-of-thumb, was not deterred by theory from doing just what he liked.
...
The English temperament is uneasy upon the heights; at its best it still remains human, not bound to the earth, but firmly rooted in it; even in its flights of idealism it shuns the purely mystical abstraction and seeks some pratical expression of its fervour. Like the ideal Chinese mirrored in Confucius, the Englishman rarely spears of spiritual beings. Hence there is a warmth, a welcoming and homely quality in the English cathedrals which cannot be found elsewhere.

Probably should store this one up for a while, but I'll post this now anyway. No cheating by reading Cricinfo. What was unusual about this match?

I think that's what this piece is saying.