I now have an idea of how ridiculous I must have sounded.

A couple of years ago, early in my time in the UAE and at The National, I asked a co-worker of Indian origin whether Major League Baseball ought to make a push to penetrate the India market.

India is nuts about cricket, and that means Indians already are well aware of the concepts of throwing a hard ball, and someone trying to hit it with a hunk of wood, and some other guys trying to catch said ball. (Many cultures have no stick-and-ball sports of that sort.)

Plus, India has 1.2 billion people. If baseball could reach one Indian in 10 … that would be 120 million new fans!

I may have said something like, “India is halfway to baseball because of cricket! Couldn’t baseball make some inroads there?”

He looked at me like I was deranged.

And now I understand why.

Osman Samiuddin is our primary cricket correspondent. He is from Pakistan, and is an elegant writer, and a regional authority on the game.

Over the previous two weeks or so, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Sharjah were the host cities for something called the ICC World Twenty20 Qualifier.

In short, the world’s second-tier cricket countries competed here, with the top two sides being rewarded with a place in the World Twenty20 2012 tournament in Sri Lanka later this year — joining the 10 “test playing” nations. The global elite.

One of the national teams attempting to qualify was the United States. Yes. Yanks. In cricket.

Osman tracked down the American guys to ask them about cricket in the U.S., and that story is here.

The gist of what the Yank cricketers told him was … “this sport is about to take off in the U.S.!”

I found the whole concept preposterous. Which is not a reflection on the quality of Osman’s story, but the utter impossibility (as far as I am concerned) of cricket ever gaining any traction in the United States, barring a weird change in immigration patterns.

Most of the U.S. team are immigrants from the subcontinent and the Caribbean. One native-born Yank said: “I do sometimes feel like, ‘What am I doing playing cricket?’ But it’s the game I love.”

Another young U.S. player, named Andy Mohammed (only in America), suggested that “Cricket in the U.S. right now is where soccer was 15 years ago. Now soccer is big but I think in five to seven years we’ll be getting some sponsorships and that’s all we need.”

And Osman wrote this paragraph: “Major League Soccer is proof that sports sustained on an ethnic fan base can survive and grow into something beyond a pastime.”

Well, not really. Not at all. Here are the biggest problems with all of the above:

–Soccer was familiar to about 99 percent of U.S. immigrants over the past century. Every country that sent thousands and thousands of people to America during that time (Mexico, Italy, Poland, Russia, etc.) had domestic leagues 100 years ago. Almost every immigrant to the U.S. in that period (Cubans and Japanese being the notable exceptions) already knew soccer. They carried the germ of soccer with them.

–Cricket is popular in a surprisingly low number of countries, all of them in the British Isles or former British colonies. And none of them sent large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. of late (Brits mostly went to the U.S. pre-1900). Or ever. Talking about India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka here. Only now are a handful of people from those countries living in the U.S., representing a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. Much less significant than the immigrants from soccer-playing nations in the 20th century.

–The U.S. lies in what is nearly a cricket-free zone named “North America.” Well, actually, you could add “South America” to that. Only one of the 10 “test playing” nations, the multi-state concept know as “West Indies”, are in the western hemisphere.

And this is the biggest …

–The U.S. already has its own stick-and-ball sport, named baseball, and it is undeniably a superior game. Faster, easier to grasp, an orgy of action, compared to cricket.

Cricket is stultifyingly dull, and even great fans of the game rarely attend matches which, yes, can carry on for five days with no winner.

Cricket is huge in the UAE (because of India and Pakistan; Emiratis don’t care), but nearly all the matches in this ICC qualifying tournament were played in empty stadiums. That’s how cricket rolls. Nobody actually watches it in person, and they certainly don’t do it the way baseball is watched — with crowds in the tens of thousands for hundreds of games each year.

Cricket is a sport with narrow antecedents, and a very small number of countries that care about it. India and Pakistan care a lot, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Afghanistan (!) are somewhere not far behind, and then come the handful of First World adherents of the game — England, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, each of whom are more interested in another sport, whether it be soccer or rugby.

Baseball is also narrowly focused. The U.S., Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Japan, Venezuela, Colombia, South Korea … and we’re just about done.

Anyway, in none of those cricket countries … and in none of the baseball countries … is the other sport played to any degree.

Apparently, there is room for one stick-and-ball sport. And one only.  In America, it is baseball, the “national pastime.”

Cricket in the U.S. as a significant sport? When pigs fly. Not enough people care about it, and it will never take fans from baseball — because all the criticisms aimed at baseball are even more applicable to cricket.

And baseball is going nowhere in India. It is a ridiculous notion, and now I understand why my Indian colleague was so incredulous when I suggested baseball could be exported there. Equally preposterous.

By the way, Ireland and Afghanistan qualified for the Twenty20 World Cup. The Yanks? Not even close.