Cameron Gilson’s Reviews > The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports > Status Update

A pitcher is nowhere near the skill of a fast bowler in Cricket. While, there’s a difference as bowlers use pitch (especially seam bowlers), yet baseball is no way near Cricket in terms of skill-set and variety.

I have a high amount of respect for cricket and agree it’s skill level required is one of the highest in all of sports but I have to disagree here. A couple things put baseball slightly above cricket for me. First, the field of play being 360 degrees around the batter makes it easier to put a ball in play compared to the small slice a baseball batter has. Second, 84 pitchers last year threw at least one pitch over 100 mph from a stagnant position compared to the just three in cricket with the running start. The bouncing of the ball does add an element of difficulty baseball doesn’t have but I think the sheer amount of various pitch types in baseball and the way the can manipulate the movement of the ball in all directions balances it out.

What cricket definitely has over baseball is it’s a much more natural movement for the arm and safer. This book is about the epidemic of elbow injuries in baseball over the past thirty years.

Yes, baseball is a subset and one needs to be highly skilled in it. The equivalent of pitch (without bounce) in Cricket is a "full-toss" and it’s the easiest ball to hit, hence pitchers require a lot of skill.

It has just made me think. While fast bowlers have all sorts of injuries from back to ankle, baseball's is definitely going to be elbow.