Basically, there's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.
The bariet takes a pull at the fumbler, and then one of two things happens: Either he misses, or hits it (towards the flange or along the foul line to the base). There are three spichies who can try to deflect the fumbler, either towards the simulcum or out to the field.
The simulcum is the more audacious play, giving an instant spiel if they succeed in darving the bariet. But it runs a serious risk of a spurn, so unless a spichie is particularly strong, the field is the safer play.
I have tried it many times and failed.
Personally, playing a few games of cricket is the best way to learn the rules of the game.
As an example, in your explanation ( which is good to this lifelong cricket fan from India) your first sentence starts "A cricket pitch..." And when a baseball fan reads it he is probably asking "What is a cricket pitch?"
Instead of 9 innings there's one inning, at least in ODI or T20 formats (best to watch anyway).
Instead of 3 outs there's 10 outs (called wickets).
An out is having a ball caught after you hit it (same as baseball) or the ball hitting the wickets when at bat (kind of like strikeout) or a fielder knocking the wicket off with the ball before you reach the line, which is basically the same as being thrown out in baseball.
Scoring is similar, you score runs when you run the bases. When it gets hit out, it's basically the same as a homerun except if it goes out after bouncing it's only 4 points, straight out is 6.
If anything it's easier to understand than baseball. No strike/ball count, it's basically you hit it, miss it, or are bowled out. Running is easier to understand too, anytime you reach the other side it's a point.
Most of the complication is during test matches because of tactics/tradition. The basic rules are a lot like baseball.
Also, to get anyone into cricket, just show them a T20 match. More action than baseball.
Yup, batter runs towards the bowler (and the "inactive" batter runs the opposite direction).
In baseball terms, a cricket run is more or less equivalent to running a single base (the bowler is 22 yards away from the batter, which is more than the distance from the pitcher's mound to the home plate, but less than the distance from home to first base). Just like you can run multiple bases in baseball, you can do multiple runs in cricket. From a scoring point of view, you're effectively scoring how many bases you ran, so a baseball run is roughly equivalent to four cricket runs.
Scoring 100+ runs is called "a century", and it's pretty impressive, but, because you keep batting until the bowling team sends you out, you can just keep scoring all day long if you have the endurance for it. Baseball doesn't have a mechanism for a single batter to hit multiple back-to-back home runs.
They can run more than one (get to the other side, turn around, run back, etc) but the chance of the wicket you're running to being hit with the ball (so you're out) becomes larger so they usually manage 1, sometimes 2 or even 3. And both batters have to run the same amount.
If the number of runs is even, they end up on the same side as they started from.
On the larger grounds, it tends to be a decently-sized foam triangular prism (covered in advertising, obvs.) rather than a plain rope which leads to "if it hits the triangle" rather than "goes over the rope" (I believe "hits the rope" also counts but is much harder to judge for obvious scale reasons.)
Also, IIRC, the ball can go over the boundary without hitting the ground but a fielder can knock it back inside for a catch to be performed to get the player out[0].
Sorry, I'm just making this more complicated for the baseballers, aren't I?
[0] If they comply with the changes around that last year - https://www.cricinfo.com/story/mcc-changes-rule-to-make-boun...