TRICKY WICKETS : Sons of the British Empire Cling to the Grand Old Game--Cricket

A batter was still up, but what a difference a day made in a weekend of national pastimes at Modjeska Park in Anaheim.

Saturday, quite naturally for this time of year, is the day for Little League games. The baseball diamonds in the park are filled with gum-chewing kids shrilling at the batter, and the stands are filled with parents growling at the umpire. True grit.

But about 3:30 the next afternoon, just a quick stroll across the lawn from the diamonds, 11 men dressed in white are sitting under a tree sipping tea and discussing the latest test match at Lord’s cricket ground in London. True Brit.

It’s quite a cultural shock in the course of a weekend, but with the coming of spring at Modjeska Park come the cricketers, armed with balls, bats, white flannels, wickets, bails and the ubiquitous tea.

They are members of the British Dominion Cricket Club, a group of expatriates from England, Australia, India, Bermuda, the West Indies--nearly everywhere the Union Jack flies or once flew--who feel that their current residence in the land of baseball and beer doesn’t necessarily oblige them to give up cricket and Earl Grey.

The club is Orange County’s only first-division cricket club and is one of 28 teams in the two divisions of the Southern California Cricket Assn., a regional governing body that oversees dozens of former cricketers who have come to live in the Southland but who continue to long for a few innings of their favorite game.

(The British Dominion Cricket Club was admitted to the SCCA in 1984 and became a first-division club two years later. Subsequently, some original British Dominion players broke off to form two second-division teams, Vijeta in Yorba Linda and Pacifica in Garden Grove.)

The British Dominion club was culled from men living mostly in the Orange County area, although some players live as far away as Carlsbad in San Diego County. They play all their home games on Sundays at Modjeska Park, and their unofficial home base is the British Dominion Club in Garden Grove, a social club for British-born citizens now living in Southern California.

The six-month season begins in April, and the day before the first game a small group of players are out at the park, watching a handful of groundskeepers prepare the central area of the field--called the pitch--for the next day’s match.

It isn’t as simple as laying down a few chalk lines on the grass, however. The 20-by-3-meter pitch must be flattened by a steamroller.

“The preparation of the playing surface is extremely important,” said Robert Hutchinson, captain of the club. “You have to have the surface absolutely clean and free from pebbles or debris that would affect the ball. In international competition, I’d liken the preparation to the way a golf course is cared for.”

The flat, true surface of the pitch, Hutchinson said, acts as a rebounding surface for the ball when it is thrown toward the batsman by the bowler. Unlike a baseball pitcher, the bowler usually attempts to bounce the ball in front of the batsman, allowing any spin that he has put on the ball to be accentuated when the ball digs into the grass on the bounce.

It’s difficult for anyone to explain cricket to an American novice without making frequent comparisons to baseball. The games do have similarities, although baseball did not evolve directly from cricket but from a kind of intermediary game called rounders.

Still, most Americans remain perplexed by the game, and many have never seen a match. They may say they have a fair idea of what isn’t cricket (calling the Prince of Wales Chuck, for instance), but invariably will admit they have very little idea of what is cricket.

The most pithy explanation of the game may be the one in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

” . . . game played with a bat and ball between two teams of 11 players each on a large field, which centres upon two upright wickets, each defended by a batsman. A bowler throws . . . the ball, attempting to put out the batsman by hitting the wicket or in other ways. Runs are scored each time the batsmen exchange positions without being put out.

“Cricket centres around a playing area about 22 yards long and 10 feet wide called a pitch, at each end of which is a gate made of three upright stakes, known as the wicket. Atop of the wicket sit two loose crosspieces called bails. The bowler throws the ball at the far wicket and aims to knock the bails loose; if this is done, the batsman is dismissed. To defend his wicket, the batsman tries to hit the ball out of reach of the fielders. On a good hit, the batsman and his partner at the other wicket attempt to exchange places by running the length of the pitch, thus scoring one run. They can repeat this up to six times on any hit and score six runs. The fielders will attempt to stop runs and dismiss either the batsman or his partner by throwing the ball at the wickets.”

Within that explanation, say the cricketers, lie centuries of history, lore and devotion.

“The roots of cricket are very traditional,” said Hutchinson, a graphic designer originally from Brentwood, Essex, who moved to the United States in 1983 and now lives in Santa Ana.

“In England, if you were a boy at school, you played either rugby, soccer or cricket. The English lad is brought up on those three. It’s as baseball is for us. And the (people from the) cricket-loving nations, wherever they go, always manage to find a game of cricket.”

Phillip David is one of them. The secretary of the club, David was a fast bowler in his native India, where, according to his wife, Pam, he was known to cause a few knocking knees with his 90-m.p.h. pitches. He moved to the United States nine years ago and is now an architect in Irvine.

“I grew up with cricket,” he said. “It’s the dominant sport in India. Here, it’s a familiar thing to me. If you know cricket and you go to a foreign country, sports like baseball and football are new to you. But when you see cricket being played, it’s like a taste of home.”

Southern California is naturally not the same wellspring of talent as, say, the playing fields of Eton, and Hutchinson said his team is always looking for experienced players. Still, David recalled a young American from Santa Barbara who once played briefly for British Dominion.

“He’d played baseball, and he was a big hitter,” David said.

Geoff White, an organ transplant and vascular surgeon originally from Australia who now lives in Torrance, said he has “played cricket since I was a kid. It’s a very enjoyable sport for me. You get to bash the ball around. It’s like playing baseball and being able to bat 50 times rather than just one.”

Cricket is egalitarian in that every team member bats, occasionally for a long time, until he is put out. In baseball parlance, he can be thrown out, can fly out or can, in effect, be tagged out if he is caught outside of the area in front of the wicket, which is called the crease. But if he continues to hit safely, the sun could set on him. White said he once batted for three hours before being put out.

This accounts for the frequent high scores in cricket. In a one-day match (like those played by the British Dominion club and their opponents), the team winning the toss and batting first may score 200 points before making the limit of nine outs and being retired.

Sometimes, said David, the first-batting team may pile up so many points that they simply retire voluntarily before nine outs have been made--known as declaring their innings closed--allowing the other team to bat on the assumption that the team will not be able to match the score before being put out.

It is, David said, one way to shorten a game that can often last seven hours (international matches sometimes are played over five or six days).

In its opening match with a Los Angeles team called the Corinthians, British Dominion suffered from cold bats. The final score: Corinthians 240, British Dominion 99.

“They declared their innings closed,” said Hutchinson. “We were annihilated.”

Fortunately, there is always tea.

The tea break begins about halfway through the match. For the British Dominion club, there also are sandwiches and fruit and cold drinks, but even in the humid heat of the April opening day, the players reserved part of their break for sipping hot tea with cream and sugar.

Tea time, said Hutchinson, “is very correct. It’s also a time to gather your wits and plan strategy.”

White, tongue perhaps only halfway in cheek, called it “the most important part of the game. It’s very polite. You play for a while, there’s quiet applause and then you drink tea.”

Things are not quite so genteel on the field, however, because cricket, with all its supposed propriety, can be a highly physical and even dangerous game.

The ball--which is about the size of a baseball but with a substantially harder cover--can come whizzing down on a batsman at more than 100 m.p.h. And because only wicket keepers (tantamount to a catcher in baseball) and batsmen wear protective gloves, when a ball comes rocketing off the bat, a bare-handed fieldsman may face broken fingers or worse.

As for the bowler, he is the center of the action. Unlike a baseball pitcher, who must maintain contact with the pitching rubber when throwing, a bowler takes a long run-up before releasing the ball in a windmill-like motion with no break at the elbow (breaking the elbow is a violation known as “throwing”). He is usually classified one of three ways: as a fast bowler, a medium-pace bowler or a spin bowler (specializing in curved pitches).

“They say never get a fast bowler irritated,” David said. “Never upset him.”

Still, said White, the bowling equivalent of a beanball is, well, just not cricket.

“That would be considered an absolute riot,” he said. “Although you can quietly abuse the batsman a bit.”

But, said Clyde Best, a former English professional soccer player originally from Bermuda, cricket remains a gentlemen’s game.

“The people you play with are decent people,” said Best, who lives in El Toro and coaches soccer at Woodbridge High School in Irvine. “In soccer, I found that sometimes people get more serious about it than they should be.”

The games also are good excuses for socializing, Hutchinson said. And seven hours out on the pitch sometimes isn’t enough.

He said they would be “repairing” to the British Dominion Club after the game to drink large glasses of beer and talk about the game.

The club occasionally picks up stray fans who aren’t quite sure what they’re seeing, David said.

“People come by and stop and watch for a while,” he said. “We’ve had this police officer who comes around quite a bit. A lot of American people, we find, are fascinated by the game and want to know what’s happening. As soon as they discover what they’re seeing, they say, ‘Oh! This is cricket! I’m going to stay and see how it’s played.’ ”

The English, in particular, can get as rhapsodic about cricket as Americans can get about baseball. English writer Godfrey Smith called it “the noble summer game” and asserted that the game was “one vast global village.” Novelist Charles Morgan, writing about batsmen getting put out at the fabled Lord’s cricket ground in London, said, “ . . . each withdrawal to the pavilion is the death of a warrior and each new entrant a David come to battle.”

And, in the first Eton-Harrow match at Lord’s in 1805, no less than Lord Byron played for Harrow. Harrow lost.

“I’ve had a total affair with cricket for 24 years,” Hutchinson said, “and I’ve never missed a season in all that time. Cricket is one of the most unpredictable mistresses in the world.”

He mopped his face in the California heat and looked off toward the pitch, in the direction of the Little League diamonds, getting himself ready to bowl.

“This is our little piece of England right here.”