A few years ago USA Today claimed that hitting a baseball was the hardest thing to do in sport (the newspaper listed stopping a penalty in football as the ninth hardest). Was the statement American hubris or a fair assessment?

On Saturday the claim was put to the test as a team of cricketers, including Marcus Trescothick, Ashley Giles, Geraint Jones and Charl Willoughby, gave baseball a try, taking on the Great Britain team in Taunton as part of Trescothick's benefit year.

Ian Chappell, the former Australia captain, who is probably the only person to represent his country in cricket and baseball, once said that the idea of a team of cricketers playing a baseball game “wouldn't be worth it”. He added: “There would be no contest, absolutely no contest. Cricket's batsmen would struggle to get bat on ball, never mind hitting a home run.”

As a member of the Britain baseball team for ten years, I was hoping that Chappell would be proved right and that Trescothick and his crew would struggle to transform themselves from batsmen to batters and bowlers to pitchers. On paper at least, Chappell appeared to be correct in his assessment. The Britain team, who won the silver medal at the European Championships in 2007, won the game 21-1. The cricketers committed six errors to the baseball team's zero and the national baseball squad tallied 21 hits to the cricketers' four.

Still, those numbers are somewhat misleading. Personally, I took more than a passing interest in how well the cricketers could adapt their skills to the world's other major leading bat-and-ball sport. As the pundit on Five's MLB on Five television show, I spend a good part of my professional time analysing the performances of baseball's best players. Cricketers have dabbled in baseball before. In 1986 and 1987, Ian Pont, who was a medium-fast bowler for Essex, attended pre-season workouts with the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, but opted to return home instead of seriously pursuing a career in the US.

Ed Smith, a batsman for Middlesex and England, gave baseball a go with the New York Mets in 2001, but his efforts were less serious and more for the purpose of a book he was writing. In 2006 I gave Andrew Flintoff some pointers on baseball as part of a piece for Cricket AM, the Sky Sports programme, and while his form was rough, his athleticism allowed him to perform admirably, considering he had no experience.

But nothing had occurred like the event this weekend at the County Ground, which had been transformed into a baseball diamond. The cricketers showed the skill sets necessary to succeed at baseball, but the nuances of the sport were elusive. While Flintoff might have hit a few balls well in batting practice, Trescothick's team (dubbed the “Bangers” after the Somerset batsman's nickname) were forced to learn which bases to throw to and such baseball-specific rules as the “force out” or the “sacrifice fly”.

In cricket, fielders have decisions to make when throwing the ball but unsure how to reconcile their instinct with a foreign sport, Trescothick's men rushed throws to incorrect locations. “When we play cricket we know the percentages when we throw it in from the field,” Giles said after pitching two innings and conceding 11 hits and 14 runs, although many of those runs were caused by defensive miscues. “It's different with baseball.”

Stephan Rapaglia, the Britain coach, said after the contest: “The deficit is in the knowledge of the game. Many of these guys are capable based on arm strength, fielding ability and hand-eye co-ordination and could be pretty good at baseball after ten or 15 games.”

Trescothick, who notched three of his team's four hits, was not as certain about a smooth transition. “The batting is quite different,” he said. “It would take a long time to get up to your boys' standard.” As for USA Today's claim for hitting a baseball, Trescothick's Bangers did strike out ten times in eight innings, but they also made sturdy contact a number of times. Giles did not address the American newspaper's claim directly but did acknowledge that in baseball “hitting is a difficult skill”.

While that proved true for the baseball neophytes in Taunton, Trescothick and his team-mates showed an enthusiasm that suggests that some may be willing to take another crack at the sport. And, unlike Chappell's admonition, I think it would be a worthy endeavour.

When America's national pastime crossed the pond

Marcus Trescothick chose to play a baseball game as part of his benefit year at Somerset, but he is not the first example of the intersection between UK-based athletes and baseball on British soil.

- In 1874 a group of American baseball professionals toured the UK, playing baseball and cricket. The Americans won all the contests, played with 18 players compared to the British clubs, which employed either 11 or 12 (depending on which reports you read).

- In the late 19th and early 20th century such English football clubs as Aston Villa, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, Nottingham Forest and Preston North End had baseball teams.

- Some of Britain's great football and rugby players have played competitive baseball, including Dixie Dean, the Everton goalscoring legend, Steve Bloomer, of Derby County and Middlesbrough, who won 23 England caps, and Jim Sullivan, one of the rugby league's greatest players.

- In 1938 England beat the United States in a five-game baseball series, which is recognised as the first World Championship. While the players on the England team were primarily Canadians, they played baseball in English leagues.

- In 1988 Graham Gooch, the England batsman, battled Ernie Banks, the baseball Hall of Famer, in a “home-run derby” at the Oval. Banks, 57, beat Gooch, 33, by three home runs to nil.

As well as representing Britain, Josh Chetwynd played at the highest level of collegiate baseball in the US before a brief professional career. His second book, Baseball in Europe: A Country by Country History, is published by McFarland & Co.

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