Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. — George Bernard Shaw

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Insight: There's something deeply honest about preferring efficiency, and Shaw's quip about baseball versus cricket hits on something we all feel in modern life. We're drowning in time commitments. Cricket matches can stretch across entire days—even weeks for test matches—while baseball wraps up in three hours. In a world where we're already squeezed, the sport that respects your evening feels like the smarter choice. But there's a sneaky irony here. The things worth doing often take longer than we'd like. A good conversation can't be rushed. Building real skill takes years, not weeks. By always choosing what ends soonest, we might be optimizing for the wrong thing entirely. Maybe the question isn't whether something takes too long, but whether what we're doing is actually worth our time in the first place. Cricket devotees might argue their sport's length forces a different kind of attention and patience that makes it richer, not worse. The real tension Shaw's pointing to is this: we want depth without delay, meaning without commitment. That's rarely how life works. Sometimes the best things are the ones that refuse to be hurried.

Source: Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended