A cultural comparison of two national games—cricket, English in origin, and American baseball—written from the viewpoint of a top-class practitioner of both codes. E.T. Smith, the young Cambridge University and Kent batsman, has spent the winters since 1998 in Spring Training with the New York Mets baseball team. It has enabled him to contrast and compare arguably the two most iconic of sports from the inside. Apart from learning two very different techniques,he learned that the sports' ultimate heroes, the Babe and the Don, might as well have come from different planets,andbaseball's pristine Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is a far cry from the ramshackle cricket museum at Lord's.