In Bentonville, Cricket Players Make Do With a Baseball Field – Wall Street Journal

BENTONVILLE, Ark.—Fifteen Pepsi
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workers flew here from three cities to play Wal-Mart
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on a rain-soaked baseball field in a small public park.

The crowd went wild as one of Pepsi’s batters faced down the bowler, swung his bat at what could have been a pace bowl, or leg spinner or even an off spinner—but probably not a googly or a flipper. He missed. The ball sneaked behind him, knocking the bails right off the stumps.

He was out.

And one of the highest-stakes cricket games ever played in northwestern Arkansas was getting tense.

Among the spectators: PepsiCo Inc. boss Indra Nooyi and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. chief Doug McMillon. Months earlier, Ms. Nooyi had dared her counterpart to accept a Pepsi challenge—to a game of cricket. Now the CEOs sat chatting on white folding chairs under a tarp waiting for the rain to relent.

But Wal-Mart’s team had a distinct home advantage, and it was showing.

The “cricket pitch” was a makeshift space, set up in the dirt between second and third base—far from the delicately packed and rolled turf expected of an official cricket wicket.

And traditional cricket grounds are large and oval. Not small and fan-shaped. The pitch—a rectangle at the center of the field—is where a player “bowls” overarm—no throwing in cricket—a firm leather ball toward a batter, bouncing it off the ground.

On a baseball diamond, the ball bounces with less spring. The classic wrong’un—a ball that spins toward a right-handed batter when it hits the ground—can become something entirely unpredictable.

Pepsi’s team members, who typically play on well-tended fields, were stumped.

“We are used to playing on a different field,” said Kuntesh Chokshi, a 39-year-old in a bright blue Pepsi uniform, who lives in Plano, Texas.

Thus is the charm and challenge of playing cricket in Bentonville, home to the headquarters of Wal-Mart. The city boasts a world-class art museum, 36 miles of bike paths and a new community center that houses a water park, a yoga studio and regularly scheduled pickle ball.

Yet the city’s 18 cricket teams regularly play on baseball diamonds, usually with unsatisfying results.

In a traditional cricket game, batsmen alternate hitting from opposite ends of the pitch in the center of the field. The ball can be hit in any direction to score runs. Playing on a baseball field wipes out one third of the oval, stopping play anytime a ball flies to that side of the field.

So the cricket players in Bentonville have adopted some new rules. When the ball flies over the baseball fence behind third base a batter gets two automatic runs—basically the ground-rule double of cricket.

“It was hard in the beginning,” said Gowtham Reddy, a 28-year-old who moved to Bentonville four years ago to work on Wal-Mart IT projects for Cognizant. Now he has learned to play in soft sand and within confined boundaries. “The Pepsi players are at a disadvantage,” he said from the sidelines.

Across the U.S., small cricket leagues are in similar skirmishes, faced with the annoyance of playing cricket on a baseball field.

“Lots of cricket is being played in baseball fields, in abandoned baseball fields and some soccer fields,” says John Aaron, secretary of the American Cricket Federation, a 25 league organization created in 2012.

He recommends turning any field into a cricket ground by buying a large coconut husk fiber cloth, known as a matting wicket, nailing it down into grass or dirt, establishing a firm pitch. “At the end of the game, yank it up with hammers,” he says.

Vishal Chheda, president of a 12-team league that plays in Tennessee and Arkansas, says his league convinced Memphis officials to provide land in 2008, then raised about $6,000 to build a pitch on the land, he says. Before the league started in 2006, he says, players created a makeshift pitch on baseball fields using carpets from Lowe’s.

Bentonville’s cricket fans—mostly part of a growing community of thousands of Indian expats drawn to the area by technology and software jobs at Wal-Mart or its vendors—say Bentonville (pop. 41,725) needs a proper cricket ground.

“This is a basic need,” says Sreeni Parise, an IT manager for Wal-Mart who moved to Bentonville 17 years ago, and helped found the league. The closest cricket ground is in Little Rock, Ark., three hours by car.

“We are not going to do that,” says Bentonville Mayor Bob McCaslin. “It’s not in the top 20 things we should be probably doing with our tax dollars.”

At a recent meeting between Wal-Mart workers and local officials, one person stood up to ask about building a cricket ground, says Mr. McCaslin. “I suggested…they might want to start thinking about private sector funding if it was important.”

There is only one internationally accredited cricket stadium in the U.S., in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., says Eddie Fitzgibbon. He is one of the organizers of the Cricket All-Stars Series, a tour of retired professionals that played exhibition games in three Major League Baseball stadiums in November.

“When you go to a Major League Baseball stadium and say we are going to cut a big rectangle out of your grass their initial response is, ‘No you’re not,’ ” says Mr. Fitzgibbon, whose group took over Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Citi Field in New York and Minute Maid Park in Houston.

To prepare the pitch, organizers hired a New Zealand-based “turf manager” to nurture slabs of ryegrass in steel trays at an Indianapolis nursery for six months. The pitches were dropped into a shallow outfield hole a few yards behind second base at each stadium.

Northwest Arkansas’s growing cricket league has flown under the radar for many locals. Wal-Mart CEO Mr. McMillon had seen people playing cricket on the weekends, but was unaware a full league existed until the Pepsi challenge forced him to search out local players, says a Wal-Mart spokesman.

As the rain cleared in Bentonville, players in Wal-Mart white and Pepsi blue took the field. Wal-Mart U.S. CEO Greg Foran, a New Zealand native, played with his company’s team.

Pepsi was struggling because the Wal-Mart players “have been playing in Bentonville for years now,” fine-tuning their baseball field playing skills, Mr. Reddy said. Indeed, Wal-Mart beat Pepsi by seven wickets, scoring 35 runs versus Pepsi’s 34. For the uninitiated, that means Wal-Mart suffered fewer outs and scored more runs.

Write to Sarah Nassauer at sarah.nassauer@wsj.com