This let­ter is writ­ten in re­sponse to a piece by Noel Kalicha­ran pub­lished in your pa­per on Sun­day March 3, head­lined Olympic show­down be­tween crick­et and base­ball.My name is Elias Lu­go, a for­mer pro­fes­sion­al base­ball play­er with Philadel­phia and Hous­ton or­gan­i­sa­tions in USA, and now am a base­ball in­struc­tor at all lev­els in­clud­ing teach­ing chil­dren.

First of all, let me tell you that Eng­lish is not my first lan­guage but I want to try my best to tell you a few things. I just read your ar­ti­cle where you were talk­ing about too many in­ac­cu­rate things about the sport of base­ball. Did you know that base­ball is prac­tised in all five con­ti­nents and ac­cord­ing with In­ter­na­tion­al Base­ball Fed­er­a­tion, 165 coun­tries are reg­is­tered in this in­sti­tu­tion? Did you know that in every coun­try where base­ball is played, it is taught in pri­ma­ry schools, sec­ondary schools and uni­ver­si­ties?

A base­ball thrown by a pitch­er from the mound, which is lo­cat­ed at 60 feet, 6 inch­es away, will be ar­riv­ing to the hit­ter in 395 mil­lisec­onds. This caus­es the bat­ter to lose the ball in the last 15 feet of flight be­fore reach­ing the bat­ter's box. This leaves no time for any hit­ter to move the body in time to play fan­cy strokes like a dri­ve through cov­ers, mid-on, mid-off, sweeps, re­verse sweep, cut, scoop, or he­li­copters shots, as you list­ed ex­cept if he wants to get dam­aged.

There are many types of break­ing pitch­es which are very dif­fi­cult to hit: curve­ball, change up, fork­ball, sinker­ball, slid­er, palm­ball, knuck­le­ball, split fin­ger fast­ball and cut­ter. The ball comes off the bat at 120 mph, so it is im­pos­si­ble to catch the ball with­out gloves be­cause the punch would de­stroy the play­er's hand. Now my ques­tion is: is this an easy game suit­able for "girls" as you said? I don't re­al­ly think so.

In re­cent sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies it was found that is more dif­fi­cult to hit a base­ball than a crick­et ball and there is a ref­er­ence of this in a video Sports Sci­ence: Base­ball vs Crick­et, on youtube.Play­ing sports is a good thing for any coun­try and I am sure both base­ball and crick­et can be played in this beau­ti­ful coun­try. What's the point of de­stroy­ing such an ex­cit­ing sport like base­ball?

I want to per­son­al­ly in­form you that I will be in T&T dur­ing June to de­liv­er two train­ing cours­es for base­ball in­struc­tors and will hold sev­er­al clin­ics for any­one who wants to know some­thing about this sport, with­out charg­ing a pen­ny, be­cause I love this game and I think all the youth of T&T de­serve this op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Elias Lu­go,

el­u­gomon­ges@gmail.com