Cricket and baseball have long had a complicated relationship. Fans of one have generally tended to dismiss fans of the other. But the two sports have been growing closer in recent times, and while baseball might owe its origins to cricket, it is now influencing how cricket is played, writes Scyld Berry in the Telegraph.

Australia's cricketers owed their primacy as the world's Test and one-day champions partly to their American baseball coach, Michael Young, who taught their fielders to corner the batsman like a hunting pack; and this summer he was seconded to Somerset.

A generation ago, fielders did not dive; now they swoop, fling, leap and pirouette, before firing the ball over the stumps with a flat throw of no more than one bounce. Baseball has brought athleticism and choreography to cricket.