Actually baseball is much more popular than cricket in Latin America, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Canada as well as many other countries. These countries account for quite a large percentage of the worlds population. Therefore I would argue that baseball is as popular or more popular worldwide than is cricket. I would also wager that there are as many or more people worldwide that know of Jackie Robinson as there are people who know of Bradman. I had never heard of Bradman prior to this thread.
Some of you guys seem to automatically discount anything that originated in the USA as strictly an American phenomenon. This is simply not true in the case of baseball. Sometimes there seems to be a distinct anti-American sentiment on this forum.
Our "football" on the other hand is definitely a North American sport. It's supposedly gaining some popularity in other countries but it has a long way to go. I have to say that we should have called it by some other name, since practically every other country knows football as what we (for some unknown reason) call soccer. And "football" describes the sport much better since the foot is used to move the ball. But whatever!
No offense intended but I watched part of a cricket tournament here once and it was... not very exciting. In fact watching the grass grow rivaled the excitment of the match IMO. Granted I don't know the sport and it's difficult to enjoy a sport that you don't understand. As I recall one specatator explained to me that in one match, which already seemed to have gone on all day, one of the "teams" (or clubs or whatever you guys call them) had technically already won because, by the rules, it was impossible for the other "team" to win. But they were playing out the match anyway. Is this actually possible? This didn't make sense to me.
