In cricket, the batsman is the player who stands with the bat and tries to hit the ball the other side has bowled. The job is to score runs and not get out. There are usually two batsmen out on the field at once, one at each end of the pitch; they run between the wickets to score. The word is cricket’s old, ordinary word for that player, and you will still hear it all the time in match reports and from older speakers. Though actually, many people now say batter instead, so that one word covers men and women without fuss — batswoman was the older pair for a woman. This is not a baseball word. In baseball the same kind of player is a batter, never a batsman, and mixing the two sports is the usual slip.