At play with bats, wickets, and divot stomps

We've always felt guilty plunked down in front of the TV watching baseball on a summer weekend afternoon when we could be, as our mothers used to say, outdoors enjoying a perfectly nice day. (Neither mom was a baseball fan.) Given the scarcity of Fenway Park tickets, we thought it wise to explore other sunny options. As it turned out, we didn't have to look far to find front-row seats for other summer sports played in splendid outdoor settings that even a mom could love.

Learning what's cricket

Almost a century before the team that would become the Red Sox was fielded in the American League, Boston was on its way to becoming a cricket powerhouse. Perhaps presaging things to come, the Boston Cricket Club, organized in 1809, had a fierce rivalry with the New York Highlanders a full 50 years before the Sox showed up in 1901.

Although cricket seems to have slipped off the US sports radar, teams of the Massachusetts State Cricket League meet up at Franklin Park in Dorchester on most Sundays and some Saturdays. When we arrived about a half hour before the scheduled noon start of a Sunday match, members of Boston Gymkhana C, a Wrentham-based team, were warming up.

"We all played in India, where everyone knows the game," Devinder Khachi said. When we confessed that it was our first time watching cricket, he offered a basic explanation. "It's just like baseball," Khachi said. "You have to score more than the opposite team."

To the uninitiated, it's a bit more complicated. Orange flags in the grass marked the perimeter of a circle 450-500 feet in diameter. When the match with home team Middlesex S.C. began, all the action focused on the "pitch" in the center. This dirt rectangle of 10 by 66 feet was marked at each end by a wicket of two stakes in the ground with another stick (the bail) balanced on top.

The game's wide boundaries kept us farther from the play than we might have liked, but even from a distance we could admire the athletic prowess as a Gymkhana player would run 10-15 yards, bounce slightly, and go into his windup for an amazing overhand windmill arm motion to serve up the ball on a bounce. We would have called it a pitch, but in cricket it's a "bowl," with the intention of striking the wicket and knocking off the bail.

Rarely did the red-stained cricket ball make it to the wicket. The opposing batsman would wallop the ball, spraying hits in all directions since cricket has no foul ground. As the fielders chased the ball, the batsman and another member of his team ran back and forth between wickets, scoring runs. In the short form played in the Massachusetts State Cricket League, each team gets one inning, which can run as long as 240 bowls. The winning team usually amasses 200 or more runs.

As the umpire called "wide" (an unhittable bowl) or awarded runs for balls hit outside the park, we realized that cricket has many, many subtleties. Fortunately, players on the sidelines helped us out. André Seale of the Middlesex team, who has ambitions to play on the US national squad, happily demonstrated the proper stance with a cricket bat.

Seale and his teammates originally hail from Barbados. "You come up playing in the village as soon as you can run around," he said. Most of his countrymen (and many women) also played in primary and secondary schools. "The big rivalries" in local league play, he said, "are when both teams are from the same country."

Alvin Webster, who had just come off the field after scoring 40 runs for Middlesex, emphasized that the rivalries remain civil. "Cricket is a gentleman's game," he said. "You can't swear, and there's no talking back to the umpire. We don't tolerate bad behavior."

Even the uniforms of white shirts and white pants emphasize that cricket is indeed a gentleman's game. It's also played at a gentleman's pace, with most games lasting six or seven hours. There are no refreshments at the Franklin Park cricket grounds; seasoned spectators know to bring their own.

On your mark at polo

You'll have to do better than a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of soda if you plan to attend a match at Myopia Hunt Club in South Hamilton, the oldest continuously running polo field in the country. Spectators here break out elaborate tail-gate picnics all around the field, which is three times the length of a football field.

"It's like being at Tanglewood, but with horses," Cheryl Talbot of Georgetown told us as she offered a salad of fresh mozzarella, ripe tomatoes, and basil leaves that could have graced the cover of Gourmet or Bon Appetit. "The animals are beautiful."

Only the second match of Myopia's 120th season was getting underway as we arrived, parked on the perimeter, and walked through tall pines past a young teen waiting to hang number placards on the scoreboard. We gravitated toward the grandstand where announcer Jim Jones was giving the play-by-play. It was a little like watching a game and hearing it described on the radio; by putting words with what we saw in front of us, we actually had a chance of understanding what was going on.

Besides, the ultimate goal is sending a ball through posts that mark a goal, just like half a dozen other sports not played on horseback.

"Polo is marketed as a Great Gatsby sport," Crocker Snow Jr. told us as he sat out a chukker, one of the 7 1/2-minute segments of a match. "But in reality it's more of a dungarees sport." He was referring, in part, to the barn chores of keeping horses. But Snow, who was playing on the yellow team with his son Nick, captain of the Harvard Polo Club, was also talking about the rough-and-tumble nature of the sport. "I think of it as hockey on horseback," he said. "It's fast, it's rough, it's a team sport."

The more we watched (and listened to Jones's description), the more we could see Snow's point. Even in this friendly warm-up match, players jostled and bumped each other as they tried to establish the right-of-way to the lane of the moving ball. Once we understood right-of-way, the seeming chaos resolved into complex patterns of movement and strategy, as packs of horses thundered up and down the field.

Matches are fairly short, usually with six chukkers per game. Most players trade horses for each chukker. Spectators look forward to the half-time "entertainment" when they are called out onto the field for the divot stomp - mashing displaced turf back into place - to help prevent injury to the horses.

"The horses are 70 percent of the game," said Lyle Graham, captain of Myopia Polo and head of the red team that day. "Horsemanship is the most important skill. You have to have a good relationship with your horse, and the horse has to have confidence in you."

At the end of the match, spectators were invited to the bar and encouraged to watch the awards ceremony. Winners and losers lined up for photos and toasted each other with champagne. Jay Gatsby would have approved.

Patricia Harris and David Lyon can be reached at harris.lyon@verizon.net.