These are divisive times. It’s hard to avoid being sucked into a toxic debate on the major talking point of the past couple of weeks, and it’s difficult to resist the urge to pick a side – even though the two opposing factions seem to have an awful lot in common with each other.

Yes, whatever else may be happening at the moment, everyone is talking about cricket v baseball.

With the T20 World Cup part-hosted by the USA, and the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies duking it out in MLB’s London Series, the relative merits of the two sports have been thrashed out, online and on air, both sides of the Atlantic.

It’s a shame we can’t all just get along. As well as the overlap in techniques and tactics, the sports share some history. 

As you’d expect from a country colonised by the English, the early United States was dotted with cricket pitches, before its lower-maintenance cousin gained supremacy after the Civil War. 

As anyone who has watched a T20 game from New York’s Nassau stadium will confirm, a pockmarked, unkempt battlefield is no place for high-quality cricket to be played.

More importantly, both sports also share a sense of community among their devotees. 

They love their numbers – Ty Cobb’s 3.662 average and Nolan Ryan’s 5,714 strikeouts occupy the same mental space as Don Bradman’s 99.94 and Jim Laker’s 19/90 – and they love the unique ebb and flow of their own peculiar pastime.

They also devote astonishing amounts of time and effort to the game, and say things like: “It’s just part of my life now, I forget how long I’ve been doing it.”

“It’s just part of my life now,” says Liverpool Trojans’ general manager, Ian Blease. “I forget how long I’ve been doing it.

“I’ve been to all the MLB London games, it’s great seeing people come together. 

“It’s a minority sport, so it’s fantastic to go down there and see everybody. 

“Probably 40% of the people there are from America and have come over for it, they’re excited about it too and they want to see baseball succeed in the UK. 

“And maybe one day, we’ll have a professional team or two over here.”

Blease, 42, was a cricketer in his youth, playing for Heaton and Horwich RMI in his home town of Bolton. 

He says: “When I started playing baseball, I became very bad at cricket because I lost the patience and the discipline, and just tried to slog everything for six.”

The Trojans are based in Bootle, having been founded in 1946 as a result of a drunken row between demobbed soldiers in a West Derby pub. 

Other Liverpool sides – the Robins in 1948, the Tigers in 1962, 1971 and 1975, and the Yankees in 1967 – won the national championship before the Trojans’ first title, in 1976.

They followed that with two more, in 1978 and 1980, before recent competitions were dominated by two London sides, the Mets and the Capitals.

Last year, the Trojans fielded two sides – Navy and Army – in the British Baseball League’s AAA North Division. They finished first and second, with Navy pipping Army in the divisional final.

This year, after a reshuffle, there is just one Liverpool Trojans side in the AAA division, with two – Bootle Trojans and Halton Trojans – in the AA section (the more As, the higher the quality).

Blease adds: “We were a one-team club until 2014, when we started a second team. 

“Since then, having more people involved has opened the floodgates a little bit. 

“More people find out because more people are playing. 

“We’re hoping to get some youth activity going later this summer, with the hope being we can work with some local schools and hopefully get some kids along.”

The Trojans fill their roster with players from all over the world – Venezuela, Cuba, France and the Dominican Republic, as well as the USA.

But unlike in Liverpool Competition cricket, paid professionals are not an option, and moving on to higher honours is not on the amateurs’ radar.

“Professional baseball in the UK would be fantastic, but we’re quite a long way from that,” Blease admits.

For many cricket traditionalists in England, “baseball” has a meaning almost entirely unconnected to the sport of the same name. 

Back in 2003, it meant T20 – now it means the Hundred. 

And while sometimes it refers to baseball-like window dressing such as music at grounds, coloured kits, gaudy sponsors and names on shirts, most often it means hitting more sixes, and tilting the game in favour of the batters.

This is strange as baseball is massively weighted in the pitcher’s favour. Take a look at those stats earlier – Bradman scored almost 100 runs between dismissals, Cobb failed to get off the mark more than 60% of the time. 

A run has a different value, but even the most obvious comparison – a home run and a six – is instructive. 

Ben Stokes has hit a record 128 sixes in 185 Test innings, 0.69 per knock; MLB’s leader, Barry Bonds, batted 9,847 times and managed 762 home runs, a rate of 0.08. 

This year’s IPL featured 17 “maximums” per game; batters in last year’s MLB cleared the fences an average of 2.4 times a game.

This is not to say batting in either sport is easier or harder, merely that they are very different disciplines. And a good leave is much more important in baseball than it is in short-form cricket.

Blease says: “In terms of the horizontal bat being used more and the style of shot that gets played, I can understand why people come out with the comparison. 

“But in cricket, you can expect one of your top three or four guys to go on and make a score, whereas it’s not unusual in baseball for the top three to get one or two hits between them in a whole game. 

“Hitting comes more naturally to someone who’s not played cricket – cricketers have the hand-eye coordination, but they also have a predetermined muscle memory of how these shots are played. 

“In baseball, everything is a horizontal bat, swing from the hips – we’re pulling it from the type of place where we potentially wouldn’t in cricket. 

“If the ball’s coming inside on you [ie, close to the body], you’d leave it because it’s not going to be a strike – it’s more about being aggressive and taking the ball early.”

Once the ball has left the bat, the sports become more similar. And cricket has already learned a lot from baseball when it comes to ground fielding.

Watch old footage from cricket in the 80s and 90s, and look at how loopy and slow the throws from the outfield are – then compare them to the modern game, even at club level. 

“I first started playing baseball when I was 14, and as a youth cricketer I’d never been taught to throw,” recalls Blease. 

“I was always taught to take a knee behind the ball, make sure it doesn’t get by you, stand up and throw to the keeper’s end.

“I remember watching South Africa in the late 90s and they had some incredible fielders. 

“I saw them warming up before a game and they had someone standing at the wicket with a baseball glove on their hand. 

“As someone who had recently picked up baseball, I found that really interesting.

“And these days, in cricket, there’s much more emphasis on throwing and fielding than there was in the 90s and before. 

“There’s crossover in terms of hand-eye coordination, throwing, movement, even the thought process about using your peripheral vision to work out which the best end is to throw the ball to.

“One of the best baseball coaches in the UK, Craig Savage, took a job with Sussex in 2003, helping them develop their fielding using what he’d learned in baseball. 

“It was time for cricket to catch up and become more aggressive in fielding.

“These days, it’s much more aggressive, and about throwing at the stumps and on the run even, which you wouldn’t have seen very often.”

The main thing cricket people and baseball people share is a desire to see their sport grow, and enchant even more devotees.

Merseyside has more cricketers than baseball players, of course, and more clubs – but both sports, relatively speaking, are in football’s long shadow when it comes to attracting and keeping players.

Blease reckons they could help each other out. “It starts with developing facilities,” he says. 

“If you look at the facilities which a lot of cricket clubs have, a baseball club could only dream of them in this country. 

“I think there’s potential for cricket clubs and baseball clubs to work together on this.” 

We won’t see cricket and baseball teams taking turns on the same patch of grass any time soon. It’s more a case of training facilities – a net and a batting cage are not far apart – and off-field infrastructure. 

Blease adds: “When it comes to the playing field, the space requirements are kind of similar, but obviously they’re played at the same time of year. 

“A cricket club wouldn’t want dirt base paths on their outfield – and while there’s been a few quirky features at baseball fields, I don’t think there’s ever been a square on the outfield that the fielders aren’t allowed to go on.

“The very best diamonds in this country, every high school in America has a better one, and a lot of public parks too. So we’re a long way off in that regard. 

“It’d be great to have more baseball-specific facilities, but we’re a while away from that – it might be that there are other sports clubs with facilities they’re not using at the moment, which might be an opportunity.”

The Liverpool Trojans are on the road until August, but the Bootle Trojans are at home to Manchester Bees next Saturday, August 23. They play at the Norman Wells Ballpark, Maguire Avenue, Bootle.