

Fritz is a known last name of many people in the USA, France, and Germany. Neither of these countries are obsessed with cricket or have any cultural or historical association with the sport. Neither there exists a popular cricketer in the game’s history who is named Fritz. Yet, there is a variant of a dismissal that is called fritz in the sport of cricket.
Spinners often get the wickets of batters by a mode of dismissal called stumping. Here, the batter fails to make contact with the ball and is outside the popping crease. The wicketkeeper collects the ball and dislodges the bails when the batter is outside the popping crease, thus deeming him or her out.
The regulations of a stumping dismissal are detailed in Law 39 of the Marylebone Cricket Club’s Laws of Cricket. A subsection of the law (39.2) states that if the bails are dislodged by either the wicketkeeper kicking the ball, or the ball getting deflected off the keeper’s body, the batter will be deemed stumped out if they are out of the popping crease. What the law does not suggest is that this variant of stumping is termed ‘fritz’ by cricket historians.
Literally, the word fritz indicates that something is defective. However, the etymology of this word with respect to cricket is unknown. It is simply a good talisman for the fielding side as the deflection of the ball from the keeper’s body to go on to hit the stumps at a time when the batter is not within the popping crease is never a planned event.
Since the origin of the word fritz is unknown, a broadcaster rarely mentions it. Thus, fans of the sport are unlikely to know the existence of such a word despite the fact that a fritz-like dismissal can be witnessed at times even in modern day professional cricket.