It’s not quite as jarring as when Babe Ruth tried cricket in 1935, but the Oakland Ballers are signing a professional athlete to attempt the rare sporting switch.
Former cricket pro and World Cup winner Liam Plunkett will suit up for the Ballers on Friday night against the Yuba-Sutter Freebirds. To his knowledge, he’s set to become the first England international cricketer to appear in a professional baseball game.
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“Who’d have thought I’d be doing this? I’m a guy from England who played cricket,” Plunkett told the Chronicle. “It is a dream come true.”
Plunkett, 41, signed a contract Thursday morning through the Pioneer Baseball League’s marketing player exception, which allows a non-prospect to temporarily join a team for promotional purposes. Last month, the RedPocket Mobiles rostered former Giants minor leaguer Eric Sim, now a content creator nicknamed “The King of JUCO,” for one game under the same exception.
The idea originally formed last year when the Ballers visited Oakland Coliseum and cross-trained with the San Francisco Unicorns of Major League Cricket. Plunkett, still playing at the time, remembers watching his teammates try to explain their sport to the baseballers, and vice versa. He thought it would be cool to one day step onto the diamond.
“It’s a unique opportunity,” Plunkett said. “As much as I’m coming here tomorrow and it’s my first time, you always want to help the team win. You don’t want to be terrible at the plate, you know?”
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Just to make sure that wasn’t the case, Plunkett, after putting pen to paper during an overcast morning at Raimondi Park, threw on a white Ballers uniform and trotted onto the field for a pseudo tryout. Sporting white sneakers, black sweatpants and no batting gloves, Plunkett went through a quick hitting crash course with assistant general manager Tyler Peterson.
“Feet about even width apart. Whatever your natural stride is, just make sure you’re turning your back foot as if you’re squashing a bug,” Petersen said, as if he were training an 8-year-old at the batting cage.
The only difference? Petersen’s pupil is 6-foot-3 and actually knows a thing or two about swinging a bat.
“I’m used to the ball coming at me, so you get used to your timing,” Plunkett said. “But it’s a different ballgame completely against these guys who do this for a living.”
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Hitting off a tee first, Plunkett looked the part. “That sounded good!” a team official exclaimed after a line drive up the middle. Plunkett then practiced off a pitching machine. With 70 mph fastballs barreling toward the plate, he made surprisingly consistent contact – some veered foul, while a handful floated into the outfield and even neared the warning track.
Plunkett isn’t the first of his kind to take a stab at baseball. Kieran Powell, a professional cricketer from the West Indies, attempted the switch in January 2016 when he tried out for a number of MLB organizations. Powell, 25 at the time, spent months training with a baseball immersion program. He never played in a professional baseball game.
Cricket is a sport on the rise in America. Major League Cricket was formed in 2023. The game is set to be featured at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
“There’s a lot of cricket fans in the Bay Area. There’s a huge cricket community, and we hope this kind of crossover event activates that,” Ballers CEO Paul Freedman told the Chronicle. “We’re also hopeful that a lot of baseball fans will learn a little bit more about cricket through doing this. The Oakland Ballers were founded on the belief that there’s a magic of sports in the way that it brings communities together, and we believe more sports is better.”
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Plunkett has focused a lot of his time since moving to the U.S. in 2021 on growing the sport. He played for the Unicorns in the MLC, and now living in New York in the back end of his playing days, he broadcasts and teaches the game to coaches so they can pass it along to young kids.
So, after calling the first match of an MLC doubleheader tomorrow afternoon at the Oakland Coliseum, Plunkett will trade his headset for a Ballers uniform and step into the box for the first time. Petersen expects some hard contact off of Plunkett’s bat.
“I’m excited. Who knows how I’ll feel? I want to have nerves,” Plunkett said. “I miss the nerves of playing sport. … I’m sure when I wake up tomorrow, eat my breakfast, I’ll get (those) nerves again.”
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This article originally published at Can a cricket player swing it in pro baseball? Oakland Ballers are about to find out.
