Base-Ball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between

two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs

by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series

of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot

square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team)

take turns hitting against the pitcher of the other team

(the fielding team), which tries to stop them from scoring

runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways. A

player on the batting team can stop at any of the bases

and later advance via a teammate's hit or other means.



The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team records three outs. One turn at bat for each

team constitutes an inning; nine innings make up a

professional game. The team with the most runs at the end

of the game wins. This game and the related rounders were brought by British

and Irish immigrants to North America, where the modern

version of baseball developed. By the late nineteenth

century, baseball was widely recognized as the national

sport of the United States. Baseball on the professional,

amateur, and youth levels is now popular in North America,

parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, and

parts of East Asia. The game is sometimes referred to as

hardball, in contrast to the derivative game of softball.

In North America, professional Major League Baseball (MLB)

teams are divided into the National League (NL) and

American League (AL). Each league has three divisions:

East, West, and Central. Every year, the champion of Major

League Baseball is determined by playoffs that culminate

in the World Series.




History:
The evolution of baseball from older bat-and-ball

games is difficult to trace with precision. A French

manuscript from 1344 contains an illustration of clerics

playing a game, possibly la soule, with similarities to

baseball;other old French games such as théque, la balle

au bâton, and la balle empoisonée also appear to be

related.Consensus once held that today's baseball is a

North American development from the older game rounders,

popular in Great Britain and Ireland.



The earliest known reference to baseball is in a

1744 British publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by

John Newbery. It contains a rhymed description of

"base-ball" and a woodcut that shows a field set-up

somewhat similar to the modern game—though in a triangular

rather than diamond configuration, and with posts instead

of ground-level bases.



The first known American reference to baseball

appears in a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts, town bylaw

prohibiting the playing of the game near the town's new

meeting house.By 1796, a version of the game was

well-known enough to earn a mention in a German scholar's

book on popular pastimes.










By the early 1830s, there were reports of a

variety of uncodified bat-and-ball games recognizable as

early forms of baseball being played around North America.

These games were often referred to locally as "town ball",

though other names such as "round-ball" and "base-ball"

were also used.










In the mid-1850s, a baseball craze hit the New

York metropolitan area.By 1856, local journals were

referring to baseball as the "national pastime" or

"national game".A year later, sixteen area clubs formed

the sport's first governing body, the National Association

of Base Ball Players. In 1863, the organization disallowed

putouts made by catching a fair ball on the first bounce.




Four years later, it barred participation by African

Americans.The game's commercial potential was developing:

in 1869 the first fully professional baseball club, the

Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed and went undefeated

against a schedule of semipro and amateur teams.The first

professional league, the National Association of

Professional Base Ball Players, lasted from 1871 to 1875;

scholars dispute its status as a major league.




The more formally structured National League was founded

in 1876.A modicum of peace was eventually established,

leading to the National Agreement of 1903.In 1905, the

Giants were National League champions again and team

management relented, leading to the establishment of the

World Series as the major leagues' annual championship

event.
Facing competition as varied as television and football,

baseball attendance at all levels declined; while the

majors rebounded by the mid-1950s, the minor leagues were

gutted and hundreds of semipro and amateur teams

dissolved.Integration proceeded slowly: by 1953, only six

of the sixteen major league teams had a black player on

the roster.The players' union became bolder under the

leadership of former United Steelworkers chief economist

and negotiator Marvin Miller, who was elected executive

director in 1966.In 1977, two more expansion teams joined

the American League. Significant work stoppages occurred

again in 1981 and 1994, the latter forcing the

cancellation of the World Series for the first time in

ninety years.Attendance had been growing steadily since

the mid-1970s and in 1994, before the stoppage, the majors

were setting their all-time record for per-game

attendance.The addition of two more expansion teams after

the 1993 season had facilitated another restructuring of

the major leagues, this time into three divisions each.
In 2001, Barry Bonds established the current record of 73

home runs in a single season. There had long been

suspicions that the dramatic increase in power hitting was

fueled in large part by the abuse of illegal steroids (as

well as by the dilution of pitching talent due to

expansion), but the issue only began attracting

significant media attention in 2002 and there was no

penalty for the use of performance-enhancing drugs before

2004.In 2007, Bonds became MLB's all-time home run

leader, surpassing Hank Aaron, as total major league and

minor league attendance both reched all-time highs.


Rules and gameplay:

A game is played between two teams, each

composed of nine players, that take turns playing offense

(batting or hitting) and defense (fielding or

pitching).The game is played on a field whose primary

boundaries, the foul lines, extend forward from home plate

at 45-degree angles. The 90-degree area within the foul

lines is referred to as fair territory; the 270-degree

area outside them is foul territory. The part of the field

enclosed by the bases and several yards beyond them is the

infield; the area farther beyond the infield is the

outfield.

There are three basic tools of baseball: the ball, the

bat, and the glove or mitt:

* The baseball is about the size of an adult's fist,

around 9 inches (23 centimeters) in circumference. It has

a rubber or cork center, wound in yarn and covered in

white cowhide, with red stitching.
* The bat is a hitting tool, traditionally made of a

single, solid piece of wood; other materials are now

commonly used for nonprofessional games. It is a hard

round stick, about 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) in

diameter at the hitting end, tapering to a narrower handle

and culminating in a knob. Bats used by adults are

typically around 34 inches (86 centimeters) long, and not

longer than 42 inches (106 centimeters).
* The glove or mitt is a fielding tool, made of padded

leather with webbing between the fingers. As an aid in

catching and holding onto the ball, it takes various

shapes to meet the specific needs of different fielding

positions.

Personnel:

Player rosters:

Roster, or squad, sizes differ between

different leagues and different levels of organized play.

Major League Baseball teams maintain twenty-five-player

active rosters. A typical twenty-five-man roster in a

league without the DH rule, such as MLB's National League,


features:



* eight position players—catcher, four infielders,

three outfielders—who play on a regular basis
* five starting pitchers who constitute the team's

pitching rotation or starting rotation
* six relief pitchers, including one specialist

closer, who constitute the team's bullpen (named for the

off-field area where pitchers warm up)
* one backup, or substitute, catcher
* two backup infielders
* two backup outfielders
* one specialist pinch hitter, or a second backup

catcher, or a seventh reliever.

Other personnel:


The manager, or head coach of a team,

oversees the team's major strategic decisions, such as

establishing the starting rotation, setting the lineup, or

batting order, before each game, and making substitutions

during games—in particular, bringing in relief pitchers.

Managers are typically assisted by two or more coaches;

they may have specialized responsibilities, such as

working with players on hitting, fielding, pitching, or

strength and conditioning.Any baseball game involves one

or more umpires, who make rulings on the outcome of each

play. At a minimum, one umpire will stand behind the

catcher, to have a good view of the strike zone, and call

balls and st
rikes.

Pitching and fielding tactics:


The tactical decision that

precedes almost every play in a baseball game involves

pitch selection. Among the wide variety of pitches that

may be thrown, the four basic types are the fastball, the

changeup (or off-speed pitch), and two breaking balls—the

curveball and the slider.Pitchers have different

repertoires of pitches they are skillful at throwing.

Conventionally, before each pitch, the catcher signals the

pitcher what type of pitch to throw, as well as its

general vertical and/or horizontal location.If there is

disagreement on the selection, the pitcher may shake off

the sign and the catcher will call for a different pitch.

With a runner on base and taking a lead, the pitcher may

attempt a pickoff, a quick throw to a fielder covering the

base to keep the runner's lead in check or, optimally,

effect a tag out. If an attempted stolen base is

anticipated, the catcher may call for a pitchout, a ball

thrown deliberately off the plate, allowing the catcher to

catch it while standing and throw quickly to a base.so

attempt to bunt for a hit.)

Statistics:


Organized baseball lends itself to statistics to a

greater degree than many other sports. Each play is

discrete and has a relatively small number of possible

outcomes. In the 1920s, American newspapers began

devoting more and more attention to baseball statistics,

initiating what journalist and historian Alan Schwarz

describes as a "tectonic shift in sports, as intrigue that

once focused mostly on teams began to go to individual

players and their statistics lines."

Certain traditional statistics are familiar to most

baseball fans. The basic batting statistics include:

* At bats: plate appearances, excluding walks and hit

by pitches—where the batter's ability is not fully

tested—and sacrifices and sacrifice flies—where the batter

intentionally makes an out in order to advance one or more

baserunners
* Hits: times reached base because of a batted, fair

ball without fielding error or fielder's choice
* Runs: times circling the bases and reaching home

safely
* Runs batted in (RBIs): number of runners who scored

due to a batter's action (including the batter, in the

case of a home run), except when batter grounded into

double play or reached on an error
* Home runs: hits on which the batter successfully

touched all four bases, without the contribution of a

fielding error
* Batting average: hits divided by at bats—the

traditional measure of batting ability

The basic baserunning statistics include:

* Stolen bases: times advancing to the next base

entirely due to the runner's own efforts, generally while

the pitcher is preparing to deliver or delivering the ball
* Caught stealing: times tagged out while attempting

to steal a base

Cy Young—the holder of many major league career marks,

including wins and innings pitched, as well as losses—in

1908. MLB's annual awards for the best pitcher in each

league are named for Young.

The basic pitching statistics include:

* Wins: games where pitcher was pitching while his

team took a lead that it never relinquished, going on to

win
* Losses: games where pitcher was pitching while the

opposing team took a lead that it never relinquished,

going on to win
* Saves: games where the pitcher enters a game led by

the pitcher's team, finishes the game without surrendering

the lead, is not the winning pitcher, and either (a) the

lead was three runs or less when the pitcher entered the

game; (b) the potential tying run was on base, at bat, or

on deck; or (c) the pitcher pitched three or more innings
* Innings pitched: outs recorded while pitching

divided by three
* Strikeouts: times pitching three strikes to a batter
* Winning percentage: wins divided by decisions (wins

plus losses)
* Earned run average (ERA): runs allowed, excluding

those resulting from fielding errors, per nine innings

pitched

The basic fielding statistics include:

* Putouts: times the fielder catches a fly ball, tags

or forces out a runner, or otherwise directly effects an

out
* Assists: times a putout by another fielder was

recorded following the fielder touching the ball
* Errors: times the fielder fails to make a play that

should have been made with common effort, and the batting

team benefits as a result
* Total chances: putouts plus assists plus errors
* Fielding average: successful chances (putouts plus

assists) divided by total chances.

Baseball in popular culture:


Baseball has had a broad

impact on popular culture, both in the United States and

elsewhere. Dozens of English-language idioms have been

derived from baseball; in particular, the game is the

source of a number of widely used sexual euphemisms. The

first networked radio broadcasts in North America were of

the 1922 World Series: famed sportswriter Grantland Rice

announced play-by-play from New York City's Polo Grounds

on WJZ–Newark, New Jersey, which was connected by wire to

WGY–Schenectady, New York, and WBZ–Springfield,

Massachusetts.The baseball cap has become a ubiquitous

fashion item not only in the United States and Japan, but

also in countries where the sport itself is not

particularly popular, such as the United Kingdom.
The American Tobacco Company's line of baseball cards

featured shortstop Honus Wagner of the Pittsburgh Pirates

from 1909 to 1911. In 2007, the card shown here sold for

$2.8 million.

Baseball has inspired many works of art and entertainment.

One of the first major examples, Ernest Thayer's poem

"Casey at the Bat", appeared in 1888. A wry description of

the failure of a star player in what would now be called a

"clutch situation", the poem became the source of

vaudeville and other staged performances, audio

recordings, film adaptations, and an opera, as well as a

host of sequels and parodies in various media. There have

been many baseball movies, including the Academy

Award–winning The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and the

Oscar nominees The Natural (1984) and Field of Dreams

(1989). The American Film Institute's selection of the ten

best sports movies includes The Pride of the Yankees at

number 3 and Bull Durham (1988) at number 5.[160] Baseball

has provided thematic material for hits on both stage—the

Adler–Ross musical Damn Yankees—and record—George J.

Gaskin's "Slide, Kelly, Slide", Simon and Garfunkel's

"Mrs. Robinson", and John Fogerty's Centerfield.The

baseball-founded comedic sketch "Who's on First",

introduced by Abbot and Costello in 1938, quickly became

famous. Six decades later, Time named it the best comedy

routine of the twentieth century.

Baseball has also inspired the creation of new cultural

forms. Baseball cards were introduced in the late

nineteenth century as trade cards; a typical example would

feature an image of a baseball player on one side and

advertising for a business on the other. In the early

1900s they were produced widely as promotional items by

tobacco and confectionary companies. The 1930s saw the

popularization of the modern style of baseball card, with

a player photograph accompanied on the rear by statistics

and biographical data. Baseball cards—many of which are

now prized collectibles—are the source of the much broader

trading card industry, involving similar products for

different sports and non-sports-related fields.Modern

fantasy sports began in 1980 with the invention of

Rotisserie League Baseball by New York writer Daniel

Okrent and several friends. Participants in a Rotisserie

league draft notional teams from the list of active Major

League Baseball players and play out an entire imaginary

season with game outcomes based on the players' latest

real-world statistics. Rotisserie-style play quickly

became a phenomenon. Now known more generically as fantasy

baseball, it has inspired similar games based on an array

of different sports.The field boomed with increasing

Internet access and new fantasy sports–related websites;

by 2008, 29.9 million people in the United States and

Canada were playing fantasy sports, spending $800 million

on the hobby.The burgeoning popularity of fantasy baseball

is also credited with the increasing attention paid to

sabermetrics—first among fans, only later among baseball

professionals.