The sport of baseball has always been a bit of a mystery to me, with its detailed statistics and multiple leagues of players. The sporting accomplishments of prominent baseballers are definitely worthy of admiration. There is something unique about hitting a home run, and doing it consistently.

Another athletic endeavour requiring skill and stamina with statistical complexities is cricket. Wildly popular in Australia – similarly to other former British colonies – cricket is regarded as a national sport, the cricketing team players as role models for the younger generation (let’s not talk about the cricketers who cheated).

Let’s unpack this subject.

No, I do not want to subscribe to a baseball news feed. There are enough newsletters, substack articles, email subscriptions and multiple online news sources to read. I do not think that anyone gets up in the morning and says ‘I’d like to read another email newsletter on my day off!’

There are numerous statistics in baseball, metrics that measure the success or otherwise of individual players. For instance; Runs batted in (RBI) – is a crucial metric. A batter’s success, runs scored, is measured by counting the plays that allow making a run. This is not just an individual batter knocking the ball out of the park, though that is counted. Let’s say that a batter hits the ball, allowing a player at a forward base to complete to home – that run is credited to the batter.

There are similar statistics in softball and cricket.

Scoring runs is not the only story in American baseball. Overcoming racial discrimination is also an important part of understanding baseball in the US. Making it into the major leagues, becoming an All-Star, is a culturally significant event in the sporting world.

Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the major leagues baseball, overcame rigid racial barriers and cultural stereotypes imposed his career. The only other player who arguably faced as much discrimination and ethnic hatred as Robinson was a contemporary of his; Hank Greenberg (1911 – 1986).

Greenberg was Jewish, and Jews were regarded as the ultimate outsiders. Vilified as Christ-killers, Jews were considered an internal threat to the mainstream Anglophone American community. While Jewish people eventually came to be regarded as white in the capitalist racial pyramid, they still faced racial barriers in the wider society.

Nicknamed the ‘Hebrew Hammer’, Greenberg was a strong, competitive, 6 feet 4 inches tall athlete, who won an athletics scholarship to attend college. While he excelled in a number of sports, he shone most brightly in baseball. Playing in the Major Leagues mainly for the Detroit Tigers, he served in the US Army Air Corps in World War 2.

A prodigiously talented batter, he rivalled Babe Ruth in his batting averages.

His courage at the batting plate was matched by his bravery in confronting antisemitic hatred. He is described in The Conversation as the best baseball player you have never heard of. Initially, Greenberg resented being described as the best Jewish baseballer. He wanted to be know as simply a great baseballer. In time, he realised how important it was that his ethnic background was accepted by the wider community. He was one of the few players to support Jackie Robinson publicly.

He was never a religiously devout person, but he embraced and defended his cultural identity as a Jew in a time when antisemitism was rife.

Afghanistan’s cricketing success

Cricket, another sport which requires batters to score runs for their team against a fielding opposition, has a massive worldwide following in the former colonial possessions of the British empire. Afghanistan is one such nation.

The Afghan cricket team has performed exceptionally well; they defeated the Australians in 2024. We like to think that our cricketers are endowed with remarkable superhuman prowess – losing at the hands of nonwhite nations is too horrid an outcome to contemplate. I always cheer for the underdog, in this case, Afghanistan.

Let’s leave aside the defeat of the Australian cricketing superpower to the Afghans, and concentrate on a more important issue.

The Afghani cricketers, who emerged from the refugee camps in Pakistan in the 1980s, are from the majority Pashtun ethnic group. Fleeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the ‘80s, they absorbed a love of cricket while in exile. The Afghan national team, triumphant on the international stage, is made up exclusively of Pashtuns.

The other ethnicities that make up the Afghan population – Hazaras, Tajiks – are dominating the soccer team. While the cricket is regarded as a national sport, the Taliban regime has largely excluded ethnic minorities from the cricket, and thus exacerbated the ethnic and religious schisms dividing the nation.

While Pashtun refugees mostly fled to Pakistan, where cricket is encouraged, the non-Pashtun refugees fled to Iran and Central Asian states, where soccer is the national sport. From 2001, returning refugees brought their socially inherited particularities with them. This sporting schism is reflected in the makeup of post-2021 Afghanistan, after the Taliban regained state power.

We all know that the Taliban enforces a rigid gender apartheid in sporting and cultural activities. Women are banned from playing cricket. They also enforce an ethnic schism, a kind of Pashtun supremacism at the expense of ethnic minorities. The Afghan soccer team, while ethnically mixed, is not promoted as heavily and consistently as the cricket team.

The spiritually uplifting success of the Afghan cricket team, however, notable, is overshadowed by the ongoing gender and ethnic segregation that divided the Afghan homeland. Let’s work towards a world where sport is not only an avenue of upward social mobility, but a genuinely inclusive level playing field.