The Dilemma: You’ve heard watching both these games feels like an eternity. But which mind-numbing sport is the right one for you?

People You Can Impress: Mystified fans of either sport who don’t understand the other.

The Quick Trick: Is the bat round? You’re watching baseball. Is it flat? Then it’s cricket. (A slightly slower trick would be to hang around for five days. If the game’s still going on, it’s cricket!)

The Explanation:
The technical aspects of these games are very different. Base- ball has nine players, cricket has eleven; cricket has two bases, whereas baseball has four. But their foremost difference is philosophical. In short, baseball favors defense, while cricket favors offense. Consider the 2003 baseball season in which the prolific Boston Red Sox scored 961 runs in a 162-game season. By comparison, the average cricket team scores 320 runs in a single match. There is also a faster rotation of players in baseball. A rotation of nine batters will have their chance at the plate, or be “put out,” four or five times in a game. In cricket, however, it takes about six hours to retire (or call out) eight men.

A cricket batsman can be retired in one of three ways: The bowler (pitcher) can knock over the offense’s wickets—a set of sticks set up behind the batsmen; a field player can catch a battled ball before it bounces; or a fielder may tag the base the batter is trying to reach before he gets there. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. In fact, since a cricketer bats until he’s retired, it’s not uncommon for a batsman to drive in 50 to 100 runs in a single turn. (Can you imagine Barry Bonds hitting a homer, trotting around the bases, and then picking up the bat to hit again, and again, and again?)

So why are these cricket batsmen so hard to call out? Number one, they never have to swing. In baseball, if you let pitch after pitch go by, you’ll either walk or be struck out, ending your time at the plate. But in cricket, you can swing whenever the mood strikes. Plus, even when a cricketer does make contact, he’s not required to run. If he doesn’t like his chances of making it safely to the other base, he can just stay there and try again. Other cricketer advantages include the ability to hit the ball in any direction (no foul lines here) and a hefty 6-run score for batting the ball over the fence. Six runs? That means Barry Bonds’s record-setting 73 single-season homers would have been worth 438 runs. Wow. Then he wouldn’t even have needed steroids (allegedly).