Photo of the Day: Jiminy Cricket—What Sport Is THIS?

For a number of years, I have walked around the track in Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, and have seen a number of other park users, many of whom were involved in athletic activities. This weekend, however, I was startled by what you see here in this photo I took.

It started with the players, in particular the ones toward the foreground of the shot: Why was there that contraption in the ground around that? And that bat—why was it wider at one end than just about every baseball bat I could recall, and colored differently?

And then it hit me: I wasn’t watching baseball, but an impromptu game of cricket. And the voices in the field were laughing and shouting encouragement with a marked accent. Though not English, they bore every sign of having adopted their longtime colonial rulers’ voice intonations and even national game.