James Ralph
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 England (Eng) |
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| Batting style | Right-handed batsman | |
| Bowling type | Leg-break | |
| First-class | List A | |
| Matches | 1 | 11 |
| Runs scored | 0 | 329 |
| Batting average | 0.00 | 41.12 |
| 100s/50s | 0/0 | 1/2 |
| Top score | 0 | 102* |
| Balls bowled | 0 | 66 |
| Wickets | 0 | 2 |
| Bowling average | - | 14.00 |
| 5 wickets in innings | 0 | 0 |
| 10 wickets in match | 0 | N/A |
| Best bowling | - | 2-19 |
| Catches/stumpings | 1/0 | 5/0 |
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Debut: 9 August 1996 |
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James Trevor Ralph (born 9 October 1975) is an English cricketer who played one first-class match for Worcestershire and later played minor counties cricket for Shropshire. He was born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire.
Ralph played many times for Worcestershire's Second XI between 1994 and 1996, and a run of good scores in the latter year earned him what turned out to be his only first-class appearance, against South Africa A in August. He failed to grasp the opportunity, however, being dismissed for a pair, and his brief first-class career ended almost as soon as it had begun.
In 1998 Ralph returned to representative cricket with Shropshire in the Minor Counties Championship, and made a number of List A appearances for them in the NatWest Trophy and its successor the C&G Trophy. Perhaps his best performance came against Somerset at Telford in 2000: although Shropshire lost the game by 27 runs, Ralph's unbeaten 102 gained him the man-of-the-match award. He took his only two List A wickets against Buckinghamshire in 2002.
He currently plays for Shifnal Cricket Club in the Birmingham Premier league, and was recently elected captain of Shropshire. For the 2007 cricket season, he came out as top run scorer for the Birmingham & District Premier League.[citation needed]
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James Ralph, a boyhood friend of Benjamin Franklin, was a minor poet and political writer who has the distinction of being the only American with an entry in England's venerable Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He accompanied Franklin on his first voyage to England in 1757, when Franklin wrote most of his Poor Richard's Almanack while at sea. Ralph had outsized ambitions to become an epic poet like Milton, but was never taken seriously. Franklin reported that he was generally personally ridiculed but once got a good response from a literary group when he asked Franklin to pretend authorship and read one of his poems. Ralph is reported to have abandoned a wife and child to leave for England, and he was at first dependent on Franklin for living expenses in London. But he did publish some poetry and became known when ridiculed in Alexander Pope's Dunciad, for his poem, Night (Pope: "Ralph to Cynthia howls/O answer him, ye owls."). As England saw the growth of the popular press, Ralph had a remarkable career as a writer of vicious and sometimes scatalogical political diatribes and made a good living at it, sometimes being paid a stipend by party leaders to refrain from writing for the opposition. He may have been the first American to make a living as a "Grub Street writer."
