Despite the millions earned in Major League Baseball, the minor leagues are filled with players only pocketing around $1,000 a month as they chase a dwindling dream of making it big.
It’s a breadline salary so low that it has sparked a class-act lawsuit against major teams.
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But one man thinks another way out is for minor leaguers to take their professional skills and switch them to another ball game.
Julien Fountain, the former fielding coach for Pakistan’s Test cricketers who also played baseball for Great Britain, is recruiting American players to a scheme he calls Switch Hit 20 — aimed at taking the inherent aptitude and athleticism of ballplayers and training them in the nuances of Twenty20 cricket.
“I’m not trying to take players away from a baseball career,” says Fountain, who had tryouts with the Royals, the White Sox and the Mets, before coaching some of cricket’s top international teams using skills learned in the ballpark.
“But any current minor leaguers who feel they aren’t going to make it, or guys who have recently been cut or quit because they simply cannot afford to carry on; they are perfect for a career in modern cricket. And the key things for these guys is that it pays considerably better than the Gulf Coast League.”
It’s something he’s already done once. After leaving his post with Pakistan last year, he converted a group of Korean baseball players into a national cricket team that reached the quarterfinals of the Asian Games this fall.
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“I know that I’m not going to be the best in the world in the first five years of playing the sport. But I’m also never going to go in and say, ‘I’ll just be OK.’
“I’m going to go and try and be the best cricket player in the world.”
Fountain says it will take less time than Collins thinks.
“These guys have the potential to take the world of T20 cricket by storm,” he said.
“For the last few years you have heard cricket announcers use the phrase, ‘That was a real baseball shot.’
“Well now you will be able to see those so-called baseball shots executed by guys who really can hit a ball 400 feet — with a bat whose hitting area is a fraction of the width of a cricket bat.”
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