C RICKET MATCHES between India and Pakistan are always heated. Their World Cup fixture on June 16th will be particularly fierce: in February an attack by militants on Indian police in Kashmir led to tit-for-tat airstrikes. Even neutral spectators, however, eagerly await pyrotechnics on the pitch. Scoring rates in cricket have been rising for decades, but in recent years they have exploded in the sport’s newer, shorter formats. The game’s evolution into a faster-paced, more exciting spectacle has been most notable in India. The Indian Premier League ( IPL ), founded in 2008, has become cricket’s most lucrative product by copying the franchise system of American sports and importing star foreign players in a huge country with growing TV viewership.

The IPL ’s other innovation was to adopt the T20 format, devised in England in 2003. Unlike Test matches—in which each team bats for two innings, taking up to five days—T20 gives each side one innings of 120 balls, limiting games to four hours. The rules are the same. Batsmen score as many runs as possible during an innings. Whacking the ball over the boundary rope yields four runs if it bounces on the field, and six if it does not. The fielders try to get the batsmen out by hitting the wooden wicket or catching an errant shot (among other methods of dismissal). Each side bats until either ten players are out or the fixed number of balls, or days, is used up.

In Test cricket batsmen often block the ball defensively, to preserve their wickets. But because it is rare for ten men to get out in just 120 balls, players in T20 try riskier shots in pursuit of faster rewards. The result makes baseball look sedate. Whereas an average night at Yankee Stadium produces two home runs, an average T20 match features 39 boundary shots.

These aggressive tactics have also been adopted in one-day internationals ( ODI s), the format used in the World Cup, which gives each side one innings of 300 balls. Boundary rates in ODI s have soared since 2003. In contrast, the long increase of run-scoring in Tests stopped just when T20 was invented. It may not be possible to hit much more than 6.4% of balls to the boundary, as batting teams did in 2000-03, while occupying the crease for five days.