Like their distant baseball player cousins, these athletes wield bats, score runs, play innings and gulp Gatorade.
But the stars on this Van Nuys field Saturday weren't thinking about the impact of an averted strike, new team luxury taxes or a declining television audience.
These players were focused on a game of cricket, obscure in America, but close to their immigrant roots.
There they stood in their all-white uniforms--long pants, polo-style shirts--swinging a piece of equipment that is a cross between an oar and a bat, intent on scoring a run by hitting a hard red ball.
Players from Florida, New York, Ohio and Oregon who grew up in foreign lands such as Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan converged on Woodley Park this holiday weekend to pursue their version of a great American pastime: winning a national championship.
"Cricket Is Life," read Aijaz Alli's T-shirt. "When I came to this country, I thought my cricket days were done for good," said Alli, a 24-year-old Pakistani immigrant who lives in Santa Clarita. "Then I found the league."
The league is the 15,000-member United States of America Cricket Assn., the group that sponsors amateur weekend players, many of whom stumbled on the league as if it were a pick-up basketball game.
"I was jogging through Woodley Park, and I couldn't believe it. I saw guys playing cricket," said Nasir Durrani, 24, an Ohio college student in the midst of a Los Angeles engineering internship, who joined the L.A. league last spring.
Today at 10 a.m., all-star teams from New York and Los Angeles will vie for the title of American Cricket Champions. Then, a team with the best of the best will be selected to play other international amateur teams.
This is the league's first national championship, a rare chance for players to match their skills against the best in their adopted nation.
With a $200,000 annual budget--half from a professional international league and the other from U.S. donors--the American league paid for the players' air fare and hotel stays. Otherwise, their biggest expenditure this year was a $15,000 heavy-duty motorized roller to compact the prized Wood- ley Park Field.
"There is no way these guys would be able to afford to play in a tournament without help," said Atul Rai, president of the U.S. Cricket Assn. and a Santa Barbara dentist.
