The Don and The Babe for the first, and only, time in July of 1932. The two took in a game together from Ruth's private box at Yankee Stadium. Bradman, looking sharp in his three-piece suit, was supposed to have said at one point "Jove! A double-play!" The turn of phrase suggests a little licence on the part of the reporter, but still. "Hey! What's this?" Ruth is supposed to have shot back. "I was told to point out the tricks of the game and you holler 'double-play'? You don't need any teaching!" Ruth was garrulous and gluttonous, Bradman taciturn and teetotal. They must have made an odd couple. Apt, given the uneasy kinship between their two sports.

The link between baseball and cricket is at the heart of the new Disney movie, Million Dollar Arm, which is released in the US this week. The trailer makes it look terrible, though early reviews have actually been quite good. (An irresistible aside – The Spin's top three so-bad-they-make-me-want-to-watch trailers for cricket movies: 1) – I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer, 2) – Main Hoon Shahid Afridi, 3) – Hit For Six! Sorry where was I?)

Million Dollar Arm tells the (true) story of Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, two Indian cricketers who won a reality TV contest designed by sports agent JB Bernstein to find the best pitching prospect in India. Both of them ended up signing professional contracts with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Patel was released in 2010 after two seasons with their affiliate team, Singh is still playing. Both Singh and Patel had played a little cricket, but more pertinently they had also both had a little practice throwing javelins at college. It was their grounding in that sport which gave them their natural aptitude for throwing fastballs.

For all the ostensible similarities between cricket and baseball, techniques used in one don't necessarily carry over to the other. In baseball, for instance, you have to open the hips as you swing to provide the torque to hit the ball. Do that in cricket, and you square up and play across the ball. Pitching has more in common with throwing than it does with bowling, as Singh and Patel showed. And even catching is a different proposition when you're doing it bare-handed rather than wearing a mitt.

Which has never stopped people trying to switch between the two. In 1874 a group of 22 baseballers, including the great 'Cap' Anson, toured England to play a series of exhibition games. They fitted in a few cricket fixtures while they were here. They were unbeaten in all six games they played. But then they were allowed to field 18 men against the oppositions' 11.

Ruth is supposed to have told Bradman: "I'll try this cricket business. Maybe it's my game." Ruth did, eventually. He came to England in the winter of 1935, and played a little cricket when he was in London. He struggled while he was taking an orthodox guard, so he switched back to his baseball stance and started walloping some net-bowlers to all parts. "Sure I could smack the ball alright," he told the press afterwards. "How could I help it when you have a great wide board to swing?" All the same the game, Ruth decided, wasn't for him, just because "they tell me $40 a week is top pay for cricket".

As for Bradman, he never did play ball. A few of his team-mates did, though, back in the days when it was a winter sport in Australia. Neil Harvey played Grade A baseball, as did, later on, Norm O'Neill, Bill Lawry, and all three Chappell brothers. In Australia there has been at least a little cross-pollination between the two sports. That hasn't been possible in England, though some have dabbled. Ian Pont had a trial with the Philadelphia Phillies back in 1987. "I am doing it purely for the money," he said at the time. He didn't make much. Ed Smith wrote an entire book, Playing Hard Ball, about his try-outs with the New York Mets during their pre-season training in 2001.

During his benefit year in 2008 Marcus Trescothick organised a baseball match between Somerset and the Great Britain national team, who are, as you might imagine, a fairly amateur bunch. The cricketers were hammered 21-1. Oddly enough it was the better batsmen who found it hardest to adjust. James Hildreth, his instincts honed by a lifetime spent practising with a high left elbow couldn't help but try and play cover-drives. Hard to do when you're holding a Louisville slugger. Graham Gooch had a similar problem when he took part in a home-run derby against the Chicago Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks back in 1988. "I tried to teach him to swing up and get the ball in the air," Banks said. "He was used to a low, straight swing of cricket, and every time he tried to swing up, he'd pop the ball up."

Things have just got interesting, thanks to a man named Julien Fountain. He played a little cricket as a kid in the 1980s, and when that didn't work out he took himself off to the USA to try and make it as a baseballer, simply because "I saw the World Series on TV in 1987 and it was beautiful." After a season playing with the Arun Panthers in Bognor Regis (really) Fountain, only 18, headed off to the USA to attend Major League try-outs. He never made the grade. But he had a long amateur career with the British national team. And in between he qualified as a cricket coach. He's gone on to enjoy a good career as a specialist fielding coach, working with the West Indies, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Fountain has always believed that there is a cross-over between the skills used in the two sports. Now he has the chance to prove his theory. While he was on holiday in Sri Lanka this summer, Fountain went to watch a match between a local side and a touring team from, you'll never guess, South Korea. This year's Asian Games are being held in Incheon this September, and, as with the 2010 edition, the 2014 Asiad will include a T20 cricket competition. As hosts, the South Koreans have decided to enter a team. Trouble being that outside of the ex-pat scene, the country isn't well stocked with cricketers. But what they do have, of course are plenty of baseballers. They won the Olympic gold in 2008, and silver at the 2009 World Classic. Well, you can see where this is going.

Fountain is now the head coach of South Korea. He is trying to create a T20 team out of a bunch of baseballers. He remembers that match in Sri Lanka, he told Al Jazeera, because "the funny thing was that they made a lot of basic mistakes but they still posted 165 in 20 overs. And they even had 59 dot balls. It's monstrous – they just hit." Fountain says: "They're beginners but it's cheating to call them that. Show me a beginner cricketer who can hit the ball 110 metres. I've got an opening batsman who hit 90 runs last week. He took the opposition apart."

South Korea only played in their first cricket tournament in 2012, in the ICC's East Asia-Pacific Division 2. It will be intriguing to see how they stack up against the likes of Hong Kong and the UAE when they get the chance at the end of the summer. Some of what Fountain says about their progress should perhaps be taken with a little pinch of salt – "I've also got players who bowl world-class off-spin at least one or two balls an over – proper, proper Graeme Swann or Saeed Ajmal stuff." But there's no doubt that T20 has narrowed the gap between the two sports, and made it easier for a player to switch from one to the other. "We're working on more cultured shots and running between the wickets but we'll keep it simple," Fountain admits. "There'll be no Don Bradmans here."

This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian's weekly cricket email. To subscribe, click here