Whenever a sport discovers a frontier beyond the edge of the known world, you have to ask who benefits. Who watches? Who – to ask non-rhetorically – cares?

To baseball's credit, bringing the opening series to Sydney shows a consciousness of a world beyond the World Series. The Dodgers and Diamondbacks will be able to echo Derek Smalls in This Is Spinal Tap: ''We toured the world – and elsewhere.''

On closer examination, these sporting crusades are less a matter of conversion than consolation. Most of the crowd have been American expats, enjoying a care package from home, brought to them quite literally, down to the 800 tonnes of San Diego's finest clay sand and terracotta.

Thousands of Australians also came to soak up the event in good spirit. There was no modern Yabba to call out, ''What, isn't our dirt good enough for yers?'' In the sideshow alley outside the SCG, it was all about atmosphere, not colonisation. The stalls to ''Learn more about baseball'' and ''Support the ALB'' might as well have been swept by (specially imported) tumbleweeds. By contrast, in the food court the only thing longer than the hot dogs was the queue to buy one. At $40, they were a lesson in the price inelasticity of demand. If they'd been $80, the queue would have been twice as long.

Many locals interpret baseball through the prism of the familiar. Some of the hitting showed why Twenty20 batsmen are called ''batters''. The cohesion of the ground fielding and the dart-like throwing was a reminder of why our finest cricketing fieldsmen, from Neil Harvey through the Chappell brothers to Allan Border, were also top-class baseballers. Now do it without a glove.

Obviously there are fewer parallels between pitching and bowling. It's hard to tell why Clayton Kershaw and Hyun-jin Ryu were so effective, other than from their results. There might be a future on the mound for Marlon Samuels and his fast ball.

In an age when reverse swing has revolutionised cricket, it's also a moment to mourn the death of the spitball 100 years ago. The spitter, in which a dousing of tobacco spittle weighed down half of the ball to produce ''freak'' curve, was the grandfather of cricket's reverse swing. Same cause, similar effect. Outlawed in 1920, the spitter and other ball-tampering twists have periodically resurfaced, such as when, in 1987, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Kevin Gross was caught with sandpaper in his glove (sound familiar?) and Joe Niekro, of the Minnesota Twins, was found to have a nail file in his pocket. He argued that he used it to file his nails.

Philip Roth, in his incomparable 1973 work of fiction, The Great American Novel, tells an alternative history of the banning of the spitter. The great pitcher John ''Spit'' Baal ''drowns'' legions of unhappy batters, and is just too good. ''Come on now,'' Baal says, ''a little wet ain't gonna hurt you.'' The batters reply: ''It ain't the wet, Baal, it's the stringy stuff.'' Baal dismisses the complaint: ''It ain't nothin', just got me a little head cold.''

Women refuse to attend Baal's games, and ''even the heartiest of male fans showed signs of squeamishness pocketing a foul tip to take home as a souvenir to the kiddies.'' After Baal is caught doctoring a ball with ear wax, the spitter is outlawed as ''unnatural, uncouth and unsanitary''. The crowds come back and, like those at the SCG, leap on foul balls as if it's lolly-bag time at a kids' party. The great Baal loses his powers. His final response to the ''dryball bastards'' is a final atrocity of ball tampering.

''For years afterwards,'' Roth writes, ''they talked about the route that ball took before it passed over the plate. Not only did it make the hairpin turns and somersaults expected of a Baal spitter, but legend has it that it shifted gears four times, halving, then doubling its velocity every 15 feet it travelled. And in the end, the catcher, in his squat, did not even have to move his glove from where it too was frozen as a target. Gagging, he caught the ball with a squish, right in the centre of the strike zone.''

That is the history of the one and only ''pissball'' ever thrown in pro baseball. Baal calls ''Stee-rike!'', walks off the mound and out of the game, and, by nightfall, is ''asleep in a boxcar headed for the Rio Grande, his old stinking glove his pillow and his only pal.''

Mitchell Johnson, Dale Steyn and the rest ought to enjoy it while they can. There's one thing baseball and cricket will always have in common: the rules are made for batters.