Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner

“Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.” So spoke George Bernard Shaw, the sharp-tongued playwright and philosopher of the modern age, whose wit often cloaked deep reflections in laughter. To many, this line appears a jest — a teasing remark about the length of cricket matches compared to the brisker pace of baseball. Yet beneath the humor lies a subtle meditation on time, efficiency, and the human craving for conclusion. For Shaw was no mere jester; he was a thinker who saw in every custom a mirror of the human condition.

In the literal sense, Shaw’s quote contrasts two games — cricket, beloved by the English, and baseball, cherished by the Americans. Cricket, with its sprawling matches that stretch across days, reflects patience, endurance, and ceremony. Baseball, on the other hand, is swifter, marked by clear beginnings and tidy endings. Shaw, who was both amused and weary of human pomp, favored the latter — the game that ended “sooner,” where victory and loss came before the sun grew tired. But his jest carries more than sport within it; it is a metaphor for life itself.

For is not much of life a cricket match — long, drawn out, filled with pauses, rituals, and endless waiting for the next play? Humanity often hides behind tradition, taking pride in complexity, mistaking duration for depth. Shaw saw this tendency and mocked it gently. He admired the spirit that prefers action over ceremony, decision over delay. Baseball’s brevity, its sudden bursts of brilliance and its swift resolution, mirrored the kind of life he respected: one lived with clarity, not wasted in the shadow of indecision.

Consider the story of Thomas Edison, that restless American inventor who failed a thousand times before the light bulb burned steady. Edison did not wait for perfect conditions or elaborate rituals; he worked, tried, and failed — again and again. His genius was not patience in idleness, but patience in motion. His life was not a cricket match of deliberation, but a baseball game of bold swings. Shaw’s wisdom speaks through such examples: it is not the length of effort that makes it noble, but the intensity and purpose with which it is lived.

Shaw’s remark also holds a quiet lesson about the nature of art, work, and ambition. Many people, he observed, lose themselves in endless preparation, rewriting, and overthinking — they make their lives an unfinished match. But the master, the doer, the true craftsman, knows when to strike, when to end, when to deliver. To finish something — to give it a clear boundary — is an act of courage. The weak prolong; the strong conclude. In this, baseball’s ending becomes a symbol of completion — a reminder that closure is not the enemy of greatness, but its proof.

And yet, Shaw does not mock cricket without affection. He understood that both games, in their contrast, reflect two temperaments of the human soul: the contemplative and the decisive. The contemplative seeks depth through duration; the decisive finds truth through swiftness. The wise man learns to balance both — to act with speed when action is called for, and to wait with grace when patience bears fruit. Shaw’s humor, then, is a teacher’s smile — he invites us to laugh at our delays and awaken our will.

So, O listener, take this jest as wisdom veiled in laughter. Do not make your life a match that drags without purpose; do not worship slowness as if it were virtue. There is beauty in the ending — in doing what must be done and stepping forward. Whether in work, in love, or in the quiet pursuits of the mind, strive not to linger endlessly in thought, but to act, to finish, to live fully within the bounds of time. For as Shaw reminds us, brevity can be a form of brilliance, and the deed that ends well, though brief, is more glorious than the one that never ends at all.

Thus, the lesson endures: be not the cricketer lost in the ritual of waiting, but the player who swings with purpose, knowing that life’s game is short and sacred. In every field, whether of sport, labor, or spirit, let your actions have clarity, your thoughts have speed, and your heart know when to end — not in haste, but in triumph.