Last week, I slapped on a pair of headphones and called a sporting event on the radio for the first time since I served as an occasional color commentator for boys’ high school basketball games on KDIO. This was much the same thing, except it was on the internet and not on terrestrial radio, it took place at 1am, and it was for a cricket broadcast.

Stephen Rooke, David Mutton, and I sat down and did what has to be called half podcast, half broadcast. We spent much of our time discussing American cricket and its future, with the rest of the time spent trying to describe the USA-Namibia match at the World Cup Qualifiers in the United Arab Emirates.

If you’d like to listen to us feel our way through, the audio is available here. I warn you that the broadcast was three hours long, and we spent much of the time talking about how the USA was getting waxed. Nevertheless, a fun experience, and something I hope we can do more of.

For those that are in the market for a new favorite player on the Twins, I’ve put up a helpful guide to the new arrivals at Twinkie Town.

It’s spring training for the writers, too, so I’m still working out my inept characterizations of all of these guys. Josh Willingham has an Alabama accent, which makes things easier, and Jamey Carroll is 72 years old, but beyond that I’m having to work hard to come up with jokes.

This week, I defend the honor of our state. It’s really not you, transplants. It’s us. As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, your home for strange pictures to accompany weekend posts.

This week, I would like to take this space so generously allotted to me to speak to those readers who are not, as we say, “One Of Us.” As a Minnesotan of long standing, I feel qualified to speak for the people of this fine state, and so when I see an article like this, it pains me. In the past few years, the idea of “Minnesota Nice” has been challenged by a competing idea: the idea that Minnesotans are “nice, but not friendly.” According to the writers who talk to transplants to our state, they feel that Minnesotans are unfailingly polite and kind, but also slow to warm up to newcomers, and so I’m afraid that we Minnesotans are developing a reputation for being passive-aggressive, cold-hearted, and two-faced.

I want to explain what’s going on here, for those of you who are new to our state: It’s not that we don’t like you. We actually think you’re pretty great. You’re from interesting places, places that we have never been. Your cuisine extends beyond hotdish. You can think of things to talk about besides the weather and the Vikings. In fact, now that we mention it, I’ll bet we were boring you, weren’t we? We just rambled on about any silly thing we could think of, and while we were taking about the new Target that’s going in over by the mall, we thought we saw your attention wander for a second – you just glanced over our shoulder, a little bit like you were wishing that there was somebody else you could talk to, maybe somebody that wasn’t talking about a high school hockey tournament.

We’d love for you to come over for dinner, we really would, but what would we talk about? You were asking about the theater scene here, and we haven’t been to the Guthrie for years now. You don’t have an opinion on Joe Mauer yet. You seemed bored when we were talking about the winter of 1997 when we got all that snow. And what would we make for dinner? Something tells me that mushroom soup and tuna-based foods do not pass for acceptable dinner in your house. You seem classy and with it. We feel like you can do better. We wish we had Craig Finn’s phone number, or somebody like that – they would interest you. They would make you like it here, not boring old us.

So we’re sorry, newcomers. It’s not that we’re not warming up to you. It’s just that we figure you wouldn’t like us very much, and that you would rather be left alone until you can find some people that are more your speed. (We were also raised to believe that politeness involves turning down any offer at least twice before accepting, just to make sure that you really mean it, so you’ll have to keep on us for awhile if you’re really interested in being friends.)

On with the links:

*Suhrith Parthasarathay, writing for the great Run of Play, has an interesting look at some of the latest research in psychology and sociology regarding the function of fandom in today’s society – especially regarding those of us who are fans of overseas teams that effectively do not exist in our own worlds. Key quote: “Merely because fans today choose their teams due to marketing via newer media, as opposed to supporting a team that is from their locality or that their family supported, doesn’t necessarily make fandom inherently less pure than it was earlier.”

*Over at Twinkie Town, Brandon Warne has a chat from last fall with Twins prospect Joe Benson, who gives an interesting interview despite being quoted as saying, “I’m not that interesting of a guy.”

*You may have missed Clark Kellog’s interview with President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron, but I think the key takeaway from the whole thing is that the President is interested in learning about cricket.

*And finally, I like to save something slightly less weighty for the last link of the week. But it’s been so nice out that everything seems airy, right now, so let’s just unload a ton of feathers:

*As a reminder that pretty much anyone could have been an NFL kicker forty years ago, here’s a photo taken from the goalpost of Vikings kicker Fred Cox shanking a field goal attempt.

Here’s Ricky Rubio trying to smile us all the way through the pain of losing him.

Ilya Bryzgalov is just, like, a citizen of this crazy universe, man.

Man, all that money has turned wheelchair curlers into doped-up monsters with no regard for the rules.

Join the American cricket community late Wednesday night / early Thursday morning for the 2012 Twenty20 World Cup Qualifying Tournament, as the USA takes on Namibia. Live coverage and ball-by-ball commentary will be provided by Stephen Rooke of USCricketer.com, David Mutton of Silly Mid Off, and me.

We’ll also be joined by some special guests. American cricket journalist Peter Della Penna of ESPNCricinfo and DreamCricket.com will join us, along with the president of the United States Youth Cricket Association, Jamie Harrison. In addition, Subash Jayaraman of The Cricket Couch podcast and Terry Coffey of American Armchair Cricketer will make appearances.

The match is at 12:50am Central Time. Live audio, as well as the recording for those of you who aren’t up all night, will be posted here.

Over at Twinkie Town this week, I wrote about Glen Perkins getting a big contract and being initiated into the club of famous, high-paid, native-son Minnesota athletes. Some of your favorites make appearances in this one – and Brad Lohaus, too, for reasons I’m not quite clear on myself.

One final note on this year’s high school hockey championships: The Class 2A winner, Benilde-St. Margaret’s, has fewer boys in school than does the Class A winner, St. Thomas Academy. (BSM has opted up to the big class.) This is why Chris of the Western College Hockey Blog has called the high school hockey tournament “a few hours of free advertising for a few private schools in some of the state’s largest cities”.

• As always, these links appeared first at at RandBall, your home for good times and good advice.*

It’s championship day in high school hockey – St. Thomas Academy vs. Hermantown at noon, Hill-Murray vs. Benilde St. Margaret’s at 7. It’s also a big weekend for conference college basketball championships, as anyone who watched the Gophers drop yet another heartbreaker last night knows. Watching the two of these side-by-side this year has made me realize that, for all of its flaws and foibles, and for as much as I’ve complained about it in the past, I actually like the way the Minnesota State High School League does the playoffs.

I have, in the past, sneered at the “everybody-gets-a-trophy” style of tournament. Some people are still miffed about having two classes for hockey, or four classes for basketball, or seven for football. Thinking about this, though, I can’t remember who I was sneering at. When I was a senior in high school, and again when I was a sophomore in college, my high school went to state in boys’ basketball, which traditionally is the most popular sport in Ortonville. As the entire town lined up outside the city limits to welcome the team bus back home, or as the town emptied on the day of the tourney so that everyone could make the drive to the Cities, I don’t remember anybody thinking, “Well, this is fun, but it’s sort of a joke because there’s four classes for basketball now, not two like when we went in ’82.” I like the idea that as many kids, and parents, and small no-stoplight towns like mine, get that experience as possible.

I’ve also complained about the fact that virtually everyone makes the playoffs in every sport. This does lead to some serious wallopings, especially in hockey; you can count on seeing scores like 14-0 and 26-1 in the first round of the playoffs every year. But the good thing about doing this is that it eliminates the smoke-filled back room where section administrators have to decide who’s in and who’s out in the playoffs. Tomorrow night, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Selection Committee will sit down and ruin the Big Dance dreams of teams across the country. Not even one-quarter of the eligible teams will make the tournament; I can’t imagine high school administrators having to cut the playoffs down to the same level. There’d be wild controversy throughout Minnesota. The argument against this would be to note that fifteen of the sixteen section #1 seeds in hockey made it to the State Tournament, so it’s not like section administrators would have had hard decisions to make. That said, the lone outlier – Benilde-St. Margaret’s – was the third seed in their section, and they’re in the state title game tonight.

Sure, the big-tent, mutltiple-class tournament system is unwieldy and overlarge. But it’s fun. It’s fun for as many athletes, parents, students, and schools as possible. And really, isn’t that what this is supposed to be about?

On with the links:

*Tim Allen of Canis Hoopus went to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and has a recap of what he heard. It’s long, but it’s interesting for those of us who A) like sports research and B) couldn’t think of a good enough reason to spend all of that money to go.

*SB Nation has started its own YouTube channel, which leads to videos like this one, where Matt Ufford goes to curling nationals and discovers the exact same things that everyone discovers when they go curling for a story. However, he also has an interview with Minnesota’s Pete Fenson, long a nationally recognized curling powerhouse, and he found out something else interesting: Pete Fenson seems like no fun whatsoever.

*According to an ESPN survey, professional soccer is now the second-favorite sport of 12-to-24 year olds. More of these kids are avid fans of international soccer than of the MLS. This link is brought to you by my long-running campaign to remind you that soccer is not potentially a major sport in America in the future because it is a major sport in America already.

*And finally: I suppose that homophobia in professional sports will never completely go away, just in the same way that racism has never completely gone away. That said, the tide feels like it’s turning, helped in part by campaigns like the Burke family’s You Can Play campaign. I encourage you to read, and watch the video.

In 1988, FIFA was set to announce the host of the 1994 World Cup on June 30. But three months beforehand, they notified everyone that the announcement had been moved back to July 4, Independence Day, and it was then that everyone knew that soccer’s biggest stage was set for its very first trip to the USA.

It was a curious choice for FIFA to make. The USA national team hadn’t played in the finals since 1950, and the NASL, the country’s only stab at a professional league, had veered unsteadily between festivity, fiasco, and farce before dying ignominiously in 1984. One pundit summed the announcement up: “Soccer – football, as it’s known to the rest of the world – is coming to America. The only question is, ‘Does any American really care?’”

In the near-quarter-century since, soccer has risen to become a major American sport. The MLS, the professional league that was started as a condition of the ’94 World Cup announcement, boasts nineteen teams and an ever-growing roster of cities clamoring for a hometown squad. Fourteen of these teams play in stadiums built specifically for soccer, an impressive accomplishment given the mostly-empty NFL stadiums that the league once inhabited. The men’s national team has qualified for every World Cup finals since 1990, and its stars are standouts for some of the biggest club teams in the world.

It is this explosive growth that gives hope to those who wish for a similar development curve for cricket in the United States. Cricket has never been a popular spectator sport America, and immigrants are generally reckoned to be the sport’s only possible fan base, and the rules are confusing. But those who remember the arguments in the late 1980s will realize that these are the same reasons that people gave that soccer could never be popular here.

There are 47 adult cricket leagues across America, and cricket interests have claimed so often that there are “15 million cricket fans in the United States” that it’s become accepted as fact. The similarities between American soccer 25 years ago, and American cricket today, are evident – so evident that many American cricket interests can’t help but to compare the two, and come out with high hopes for the future of cricket in the USA.

Cricket, however, is not soccer. There are four reasons that cricket will always struggle to succeed in this country – and four things that those with high hopes for USA cricket will need to address.

1 – There is no infrastructure in place to support cricket in America.

In 2002, Japan and Korea combined to build sixteen new stadiums and refurbish four others to host the soccer World Cup, spending more than $7 billion along the way. In contrast, the 1994 soccer World Cup simply borrowed nine existing stadiums, five from the NFL and four from college football. When it came time to bid for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, US soccer identified 70 – 70! – stadiums with the potential to host a World Cup game or two. These were eventually whittled down to a list of 32, with an average stadium capacity of 74,000.

Converting a football field to a soccer field involves a couple of nets and a few extra lines painted on the field. It was easy for soccer to flourish in America – every town with a high school football field, on up to cities with football stadiums empty in the summer, could host soccer with virtually no effort.

In contrast, there is exactly one purpose-built cricket stadium in the USA. Its field – circular and 500 feet in diameter – does not fit into the confines baseball or a football field. South Africa ran into the same problem after building six new stadiums for the soccer World Cup in 2010; after examining their boundaries, Cricket South Africa declared them all unfit for major cricket matches (though one did host an international match despite being far too narrow.)

Remove football fields and baseball fields from the equation, and the roster of places in America that can host cricket dwindles virtually to zero. Cricket must scrounge for stopgap solutions, like softball complexes and local parks, to make do, and as a consequence it’s difficult for cricket to grow at any level.

2 – There are virtually no Americans, at least that aren’t immigrants from cricket-playing areas, that have any experience with cricket at all.

Even in 1988, soccer was played by kids across the country. The men’s college national championship first took place in 1959, and at the time of the 1994 World Cup, there were 1.7 million adults playing soccer in the USA. Indeed, the questions about the World Cup’s viability were mostly about whether Americans that played soccer would actually watch it.

Cricket in the USA, however, is played almost exclusively by immigrants and their kids. Journalist Peter Della Penna says that the owner of a cricket training facility once told him, “You’re the first American that’s ever walked in here.” There are groups, like the US Youth Cricket Association, that aim to change this, one youth cricket program at a time. But other than the immigrant community, virtually zero Americans have any experience at all with cricket.

3 – Baseball is popular and always will be.

If not for arguments about the term “football,” soccer would seldom be compared to any other Stateside sport. Meanwhile, America already has a bat-and-ball sport in which the object is to score runs – baseball, the “national pastime.” There are thousands of baseball teams in America, from the huge stadiums of the major leagues to the fields in towns with fewer than 100 residents. In the spring and summer, there’s a baseball game somewhere, at some level, in every town in the land. Kids can start out in T-ball as toddlers and play all the way through school, whether male or female.

Rugby in America has similar problems; it will always fail in the comparison to football in this country. It makes the obvious question a very hard one to answer, even for those of us who like cricket: why would anyone watch or play cricket instead of baseball?

4 – It is quite impossible to be a cricket fan in America without having to look overseas.

To be a fan, in the abbreviation-for-fanatic original sense of the word, you need a team to cheer for. Major sports in America are ubiquitous on television and in the sports media; these days, a fan could pick any team in any league and get as much coverage as they could possibly dream.

This wasn’t true for soccer in 1988, of course. But soccer had one advantage – they had a national team, one that was on the rise, for all of America to get behind. The 1994 World Cup on home soil saw the home team earn a decent draw with Switzerland and score an improbable victory over Colombia, driving the team to advance in the tournament for the first time in 64 years. From that point on, every American had a team to follow.

Over in American cricket, there is… nothing.

Sure, there’s a national team, and there’s a national board, recognized by cricket’s governing body. But to cover all of the inexplicable decisions, back-room intrigue, and counterproductive behavior by the USA Cricket Association would take a post twice as long as this one. There’s no way to be a fan of the national team or watch them play. There’s no American league to follow. There are national championships for the local club leagues, which USACA manages to either cancel or postpone every single year.

Even if there were Americans ready to take up cricket fandom, their only choice is to pay for a premium TV or internet channel, and become a fan of someone else’s international team. It’s a poor state of affairs.

What is to be done

It’s easy to look at the four factors above and think that it’s hopeless for cricket in America. It’s certainly not in a good place, but all is not lost, because some – if not all – of the problems above are fixable.

It does not take much imagination to imagine a scenario in which American cricket is in a much better position. Begin with a governing body that can hold events when they’re scheduled and organize and publicize a national team. Move on to improved cricket infrastructure, with more than one field in the nation on which legitimate cricket can be played – including places for a national league on a small scale to play, something that’s already in the works (for the umpteenth time, but still) due to a partnership with New Zealand Cricket. And make this all available for fans and potential fans. Thanks to the internet, it’s not that hard to make broadcasts and decent coverage available.

There’s only one reason to be hopeless: all of this was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. And yet the country’s governing body remains in shambles, unable or unwilling to act. Until that’s not true, these four problems will remain. And cricket will remain stuck in limbo, just like American Soccer 1986.

This week at Twinkie Town, I wrote up a history of the baseball playoffs that contained some facts that were not, strictly speaking, true.

You may notice, however, that many of the facts are indeed true – that I have the dates of westward expansion more or less correct. This is because I spent two and a half hours Sunday night writing a well-researched post about the playoffs. I aimed for thoughtful. By the time I was done, it was labored and awful, like a bad research paper or the first draft of an encyclopedia entry. I went to bed angry. And so I got up early Monday morning, scrapped the whole thing, and banged out jokes for half an hour and called it good.

Proof positive: I need to stick with what I’m good at, or anyway, with what I’m not awful at.

There are a few recurring themes that appear often in the weekend links, one of which is concussions. This week’s essay starts with hockey, goes to boxing and meanders on to concussions… which is a strange way of getting there, I admit. As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, who I really don’t thank enough for giving me a chance to write.

I invited a couple of friends over to watch hockey last night. As it turned out, this was a poor choice. Our plan was to watch the Gophers clinch the WCHA in style by beating Wisconsin, a plan ruined by the Badgers waxing the Gophers from beginning to end. The Wild didn’t save us, either, as they got comprehensively annihilated in Detroit. By the third period of the Gopher game, we were casting around for other entertainment options, eventually landing on “Friday Night Fights” on ESPN2.

We caught much of two different fights, both of which were mismatches. The first involved one skilled fighter and one who appeared to have been plucked out of a local fitness center about thirty minutes before the fight began. In the second, one of the fighters employed a novel defensive strategy in which he’d bend over at the waist until his torso was parallel to the floor, which protected his midsection but also meant that he blocked all attempted body shots with his face. Both of these bouts featured multiple knockdowns. Both featured blood. Both featured us encouraging one of the fighters to stay down before his head was separated from his shoulders.

For all of this, though, there was no doubt that I was entertained by the fights. Boxing was once one of America’s favorite sports, and while that’s nowhere near true any more, it’s still popular enough to draw big crowds for pay-per-views. It’s still popular enough that famous people still land ringside at big title fights. And it’s still popular enough that I can watch two palookas earn themselves a couple of trips to the canvas and a lifetime of health problems apiece.

I mention this because of this story. Chargers guard Kris Dielman, a Pro Bowler, got a concussion in a game against the Jets, and was “visibly staggered” and “struggled to maintain balance.” After a short examination, the Chargers sent him back into the game. On the flight home, he suffered a grand mal seizure; he didn’t play again the rest of the year, and is now retiring on his doctor’s advice. Now, to me, this story reads like the opening of a book titled “Bell-Ringer: How Concussions Ended Football In America.” But I’ll admit this: nobody has any illusions about boxing’s effect on brain health, and yet last night I watched two men get pounded into a pulp. If boxing still limps along in America, then football’s not going away any time soon.

On with the links, and there are so, so many good ones this week, so I’ll try to be brief:

*Make sure you read Grantland’s oral history of the Pacers-Pistons brawl in Detroit.

*Jesse Lund at Twinkie Town explores whether Trevor Plouffe – who according to RandBall, “reminds me of A-Rod” – can ever be the player the Twins need him to be.

*Spencer Hall has a guide to watching NASCAR, which I may need, if they promise to have a car crash into a jet engine every week.

*Benjamin Polk writes for A Wolf Among Wolves about the differences between the oft-compared Steve Nash and Ricky Rubio.

*Brian Phillips explores the fascinating Westbrook-and-Durant dichotomy in Oklahoma City.

*I’m pretty sure that duckpin bowling will be the next great hipster trend. “Want to go bowling? No, not cosmic bowling. (sniffs condescendingly) It’s duckpin bowling. You probably haven’t heard of it.”

And finally: you know, why wouldn’t J.P. Arencibia have a delightful Tim Kurkjian impersonation?

Joel Zumaya ripped up his arm again, almost before he had a chance to put on a Twins uniform, and while it’s not surprising that doesn’t make it any less depressing. Spring is a time for hope, but so far it seems like negative news has won the day so far for Minnesota.

With this in mind, I tried to find something to be positive about. (NOTE: I kinda failed.)