My whole month of August was defined by two things: getting ready for football season and wondering if Minor League Cricket was going to play this year.
There were rumblings at the time of the relationship between USA Cricket and ACE jeopardizing the tournament. I emailed three teams about schedules and players and got no responses. One team's email address, which is listed on their website, bounced back as undeliverable.
On August 4, we got some measure of clarity on whether the season would go forward when teams started announcing draft picks on Instagram. Poring over the rosters for familiar names brought joy and curiosity... but when the hell were they going to play?
I think it was August 25 when I found out opening day for MiLC 2025 was August 28, with games streamed on Major League Cricket's YouTube channel for free and featuring production values that ranged from barebones-but-competent to "Cricket Ireland can do one camera and no commentary so why can't we?" (They're actually slightly better than that. They’re minimum three-camera setups and nearly all of them are on level tripods.)
Minor League Cricket is a swirling nexus that showcases so many of the quirks of the sport worldwide. Some games are played in well-manicured grounds without much in the way of stands or visible facilities; some are played on newer grounds that have not fully developed their character yet, and others still are played in what are clearly city parks - including the occasional tree or hill right on the edge of the playing area (or even in it). It is the only place in the Western Hemisphere where an 18 year old from the Research Triangle can bowl to a second generation Test cricketer with a double-hundred to his name and no one bats an eye, or where that same former Test batsman flirts with a hat trick as a leg spinner. It pits national team stars against quasi-professional players who spend their weekends in parks with no expectations of glory or paydays. It’s messy, it’s gritty, it’s jagged.
If Major League Cricket is aspirational, a vision for the game’s glamorous future in the United States, Minor League Cricket is a vision of how the game is now: deeply imperfect, but charming in spite of or sometimes even because of those imperfections. MiLC doesn’t even so much as sell tickets, and sponsorship is so sparse as to be functionally nonexistent. It’s fun and satisfying in that way that a janky Early Access title with a great core loop does - the kind that sells way more copies than it should. It has everything from players with mismatched helmets to guys with commas on their jerseys where there should be periods. It’s the kind of mess that makes me want to call Marie Kondo.
But the cricket? The cricket has been fire, especially in the Central Division, where the standard of play feels a tad ahead of the other three divisions overall. Chicago is a viable repeat champion, while any of the four teams that claim Texas as home could all find success in any of the other divisions. The West is next, with the East Bay Blazers and Silicon Valley Strikers both putting on consistently strong performances and Seattle getting huge contributions from a veteran bowling group, including an MVP performance from Shadley van Schalkwyk. SVS has taken three wickets in an over twice this season and even knocked an unbeaten 65 batting fifth against San Diego.
But it’s the young players that excite me the most. Seeing the likes of Ansh Rai (Morrisville) and Sahir Bhatia (NY Titans) bowling to veterans who have played international cricket, or watching Amogh Arepally or Sahil Garg face Saurabh Netravalkar and seeing how they respond to being in an environment where they can’t just steamroll Argentina’s U19s in six overs offers a better gauge of where they are relative to their ability to contribute on bigger stages. It’s much easier to tell who is good, who is ready, and who still needs a little more time before they latch onto the tail end of an MLC roster. That doesn’t even account for players who are young by international cricket standards but are entering their primes, like a more settled Agni Chopra now batting in the middle order and the continually solid Kunwarjeet Singh, who impressed in a pair of cameos late in the MLC season with MI New York - including a 22* off just 13 balls in the title game that proved decisive in putting MINY back in front before Ugarkar’s final over heroics. Both Chopra and Kunwarjeet have looked really good with the Baltimore Royals, an outfit that has bulldozed the South.
Many people won’t see it, won’t hear Aaman Patel break out The Lord of the Rings references alongside Nate Hayes at Morrisville, won’t see that there are other excellent facilities in Texas besides Grand Prairie. It’s not flashy or glamorous, but that’s domestic cricket in most parts of the world. It’s why the franchise scene has been so different with its scale of spectacle and branding efforts. MiLC is the closest thing we have to a conventional domestic championship, not withstanding the haphazard and inconsistent 50 over tournaments USA Cricket has organized with teams that have names like “USA Green.” Players are largely local or at worst regional and the teams feel more like area all-star teams than the more global MLC. It’s plausible that some of these guys have played club cricket with or against each other in the past. They may or may not all like each other. That might show up sometimes. Even though the teams have funny names and cease to exist for a good 10 months out of the year, that feels more grounded and authentic in a way no big-time franchise league could ever pull off, even the Big Bash League (which is the closest one to that).
Cricket has been built backwards in a lot of ways in the US, with a disconnect between the robust investment at the top and the scattered grassroots leagues that is proving difficult to bridge. MiLC is not the whole bridge, but it can be a major feature of it if it allows young players from the regions these teams represent an opportunity to filter up the ladder against higher level competition. It’s one thing to say that as a vision statement in a press release, but MiLC does appear to be delivering on that in practice, giving our best and brightest an opportunity to compete solely among themselves and find the next batch of gems to form the nucleus of our future alongside players who clearly have the USA in their long-term futures like Krishnamurthi and Mukkamalla. A performance tier for young cricketers is so important, who cares if we don’t know when the games are until the week before they happen?
I do. I hate surprises. I’m writing about one next.