What baseball can teach cricket about expansion

The new film Million Dollar Arm tells the real-life story of how two young Indian pitchers - Rinku Singh and Dinesh Kumar Patel - travel from total novices to being signed up by the Pittsburgh Pirates. It took ten months, from picking up a baseball to turning pro. It is a warm-hearted feel-good movie, but beneath the apparently light-hearted and sentimental surface the film accidentally raises a central question for cricket. Is expansion - wider outreach, more countries and new markets - the safest way of preserving the game we love? So much energy is spent worrying about how to "save" and "preserve" cricket. Too often we forget about growing it.

As a Mad Men fan and an ex-cricketer who wrote a book about baseball, I felt a weird sense of pride seeing Jon Hamm - previously Mad Men's Don Draper, here playing a sports agent looking for his big break - watching an India v England ODI on TV with his Indian business partner. Not that he had anything nice to say. "It looks like an insane asylum was opened up and the inmates were allowed to create a sport," he suggests. His colleague points out that a billion people play cricket. "I don't care, that's only because anyone can play it. There are no rules. You can hit the ball wherever you want and apparently it's fair. And then you tag each other with bats. This is nonsense."

That is a fair summary of how Americans tend to think of cricket, which they call "baseball on valium". The only classic argument omitted during Hamm's tirade is the American default assumption that no professional cricketer could possibly earn enough to feed his family. When I lived in New York in my early 20s a common question was, "Surely you can't, you know, make a living as a professional cricketeer, can you?" (Cricketeer was made to rhyme with musketeer.) I'd reply that the hint was in the word "professional".

In Million Dollar Arm, however, this American cultural disdain is instantly trumped by entrepreneurial imagination. As Zaheer Khan is bowling on TV, the genesis of a business model is born. "How fast do they pitch in cricket - okay, bowl, how fast do they bowl in cricket?" the agent wonders. And, of course, the symmetries between cricket and baseball are extraordinary: a ball propelled at 90mph over a distance of 60 feet or 20 yards allows a reaction time of just over 0.4 of a second. But it is a simpler kind of maths that really excites the sports agent pondering these similarities. He envisages unearthing just one superstar Indian pitcher, who will then bring with him the last great market currently untapped by Major League Baseball. He looks at India, sees vast potential and boundless commercial opportunity, and devises an open talent competition. He dreams up a talent show for India: win a pitching competition and get $1 million, and I get to take you to the major leagues.

The only catch is that his financial backers insist the process happens inside one year. So this is sporting education on speed: he has 12 months to take the winners of a glorified coconut shy in an Indian backstreet to the majors. It is delightfully American: identify a new international market, then tap into it by channeling human competitiveness and ambition, before flying the talent back to the USA.

It is easy to ridicule American sports as provincial, with their "World Series" that always happens in the same country. But it is undeniable that they've been extremely effective at finding new audiences. When the two Indian pitchers entered pro baseball, they will have quickly found that more nationalities are represented in top-flight baseball than anti-American caricature ever admits. Elite football in the era of the Premier League and Champions League has managed the same trick. It is not only loved around world but increasingly played by the whole world. True, Europe, with its established infrastructure, hosts the top competitions; but the talent is drawn from the whole world.

Cricket, in contrast, is still restricted at the top level to countries that were once part of the British Empire. As membership clubs go - given that the British Empire is not exactly in expansionist mode in 2014 - that is a pretty hard fraternity to crack. And so, cricket remains almost exclusively a Commonwealth sport, rarely looking too far afield. The game has always had an archly gradualist approach, hoping that previously second-tier nations will eventually graduate to the Test arena. In time and with luck, Ireland, among others, may follow the same path.

But individual success stories do not prove that the wider strategy is right. What if times have changed? Sporting tastes and affinities are extremely fluid: people change interests and allegiances all the time. Sports rise and fall, take off and wither. Given the exceptional competition for our leisure time, sports cannot afford to stand still. It is adapt or die.

Ever since beginning researching Playing Hard Ball 14 years ago, I've wondered if cricket will finally crack the American market. It still might. But the strong likelihood is that American sports will get their teeth further into cricketing strongholds first - just look at Rinku and Patel. Cricket should look not only to shore up struggling and emerging cricketing nations but also to export the game, with an entrepreneurial vigour that matches the empire-building conviction that took cricket around the world a century ago. First priority: China, cricket's most exciting new frontier.

Million Dollar Arm ends up extolling human values over commercial ones. "Baseball shouldn't be just about business," the agent concludes, lamenting his previous narrow-mindedness, "it should also be fun." Ironically, however, spreading that fun around the world often relies on business savvy and commerce.