It may be time for at least one of the sports to leave trees behind and move to a material that’s technically a grass.
The crack of a bat as it strikes a ball is the sound of summer in both the United States and the United Kingdom, albeit from a different sport in each — baseball in one, and cricket in the other.
The sound itself is also subtly different in each country because the two sports use different woods in their differently shaped bats. The reasons for this are mostly to do with history and tradition (you’d be hard-pressed to find two sports more wrapped up in their traditions than these ones), but there are solid performance-related reasons as well. Read more in Inside Science.