Some might say making a joke this obscure really isn’t cricket.
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The primary weakness of the “Horace” strips is that the premise needs to be (laboriously) explained every single time. However, the names of the fielding positions reveal that Horace has clearly described the point he is making in this strip in the very first panel.
He’s got a point there! 😂
The Wiktionary definition of “silly point” matches in large part just about word-for-word the puzzle description he gives.
BTW, I have gotten sucked in to sort of following another Weingarten online project, called something like “The Invitational” or “The Gene Pool” (Which sometimes runs a reader survey they call “The Gene Poll”.) I can’t give you simple links as I don’t know whether a website or a newsletter or Facebook group is the main thing. (Also it seems to be an offshoot of a very long running print newspaper feature that was discontinued, the “Style Invitational” from the Style section of the WaPo.) They have stuff like pun contests, and “replace the punch line” contests and so on.
He is describing the cricket position known as “silly point,” so-called because one has to be a bit silly (and brave) to stand so close to the batsman. Cricket has all sorts of great terms, like googly, and I loved watching it (and playing) when we lived in England.
I have been an avid follower of The (Style) Invitational for at least 15 years, and I highly recommend it. Gene Weingarten was the original (anonymous) “Czar” of the weekly contest, which ran in the Washington Post for nearly three decades, before it was summarily cancelled last December (in a brutal cost-cutting move that also torpedoed the Post’s Sunday “Magazine”, as well as a fair number of employees).
Weingarten quickly teamed up with Pat Myers (the “Empress”) to move the entire operation to his Substack channel: https://geneweingarten.substack.com/
There is absolutely no requirement to register OR to pay to read any of the Substack posts (which usually appear on Sundays, Tuesdays, with the Invitational appearing on Thursdays), but each new post does encourage people to register and/or contribute, and a paid subscription is indeed required to participate in the Invitational. A “free” registration is sufficient to submit comments and/or questions, including “Gene Poll” responses.
P.S. The so-called “Loser” community of die-hard Invitational participants does have a Facebook group (which I ignore), but that is just ancillary “social media”. The “official” Invitational contests and results are always found at the Substack address listed above.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The primary weakness of the “Horace” strips is that the premise needs to be (laboriously) explained every single time. However, the names of the fielding positions reveal that Horace has clearly described the point he is making in this strip in the very first panel.
He’s got a point there! 😂
The Wiktionary definition of “silly point” matches in large part just about word-for-word the puzzle description he gives.
BTW, I have gotten sucked in to sort of following another Weingarten online project, called something like “The Invitational” or “The Gene Pool” (Which sometimes runs a reader survey they call “The Gene Poll”.) I can’t give you simple links as I don’t know whether a website or a newsletter or Facebook group is the main thing. (Also it seems to be an offshoot of a very long running print newspaper feature that was discontinued, the “Style Invitational” from the Style section of the WaPo.) They have stuff like pun contests, and “replace the punch line” contests and so on.
He is describing the cricket position known as “silly point,” so-called because one has to be a bit silly (and brave) to stand so close to the batsman. Cricket has all sorts of great terms, like googly, and I loved watching it (and playing) when we lived in England.
I have been an avid follower of The (
Style) Invitational for at least 15 years, and I highly recommend it. Gene Weingarten was the original (anonymous) “Czar” of the weekly contest, which ran in the Washington Post for nearly three decades, before it was summarily cancelled last December (in a brutal cost-cutting move that also torpedoed the Post’s Sunday “Magazine”, as well as a fair number of employees).Weingarten quickly teamed up with Pat Myers (the “Empress”) to move the entire operation to his Substack channel: https://geneweingarten.substack.com/
There is absolutely no requirement to register OR to pay to read any of the Substack posts (which usually appear on Sundays, Tuesdays, with the Invitational appearing on Thursdays), but each new post does encourage people to register and/or contribute, and a paid subscription is indeed required to participate in the Invitational. A “free” registration is sufficient to submit comments and/or questions, including “Gene Poll” responses.
P.S. The so-called “Loser” community of die-hard Invitational participants does have a Facebook group (which I ignore), but that is just ancillary “social media”. The “official” Invitational contests and results are always found at the Substack address listed above.