Maybe he couldn't get them interested until he threw in tobacco chewing.
 

Yes, but is it as dull as cricket?
 

Good old cricket. The Gold Standard for dull, complex and pointless games. Even the Brits have got bored with it now. That's why we let the Aussies win all the time...
 

But I thought cricket was never about winning. That was like the balroom for female debutantes, but with guys instead. Being taught how to socialize with your peers and shit, not win. Winning was so working class, was it not?

But no, Arlington, the guy in your thought experiment didn't first go into a bar. He must have caught sight of a bunch of cowboys leisurely laying about, and realized they were the perfect material for his foolish project. At least, that's how similar forms of baseball started elsewhere. Shepherds, my man. They have both requisites for a baseball team: plenty of free time on your hands, and not enough brains.
 

Desargues is right, especially since it was invented in the 18th or 19th century. Back then people probably considered it a leisure activity to stand around in a field all day scratching their nuts. You know, like a quilting bee or pulling taffy.
 

Now look here, I'm not having any of you dissing cricket. To talk about cricket you need to understand it, and I suspect that many of you are foreigners, so you will never understand it. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It is a way of life, a set of values.
It is one of the world's great games, and along with football golf tennis and rugby it was invented by Brits. To avoid any hint of arrogance for being so clever, Brits are total crap at playing each and every one.
 

It is a way of life, a set of values.

But that was precisely my point, Bystander. Or, I may say, it's the gateway to a certain set of life and a way of values. Or the other way around.

Now that I think of it, my hypothesis has the additional merit of explaining the scratching of the nuts. For shepherds and cowboys, with their long hours spent away from home, are chronically deprived of female companionship, which induces one to do a lot of scratching--unless, that is, your shepherd is (a) Welsh, or (b) herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain.

Since sport is the Christians' favorite alternative to masturbation, this may also explain why America, the West's last Christian nation, is so enthralled with the interminable, baroque game of baseball. Me, I've got smaller fish to sauté.
 

I thought the Chinese invented golf. Except they called it Gorf.
 

Happy New Year!
 

You fail to understand the beauty of evolution in the game which started as a means of ritual sacrifice of the heathen "red skins" where the "bowler" would fire a cannon at the defender, who would try to hit the cannonball with a tomahawk and then run in circles until someone knocked him down. The game has changed a bit since then due to liberalism and the Democrats but that is broadly speaking the "rest of the story"
 

They should bring back jousting. That was fun.