Baseball

Baseball is a team sport, a bat-and-ball game, in which a hard, fist-sized ball is thrown by a defensive player called a pitcher, and an offensive player called a batter attempts to hit it with a tapered, cylindrical, smooth stick called a bat. The ball itself is also called a baseball. Scoring is accomplished by the batter running and touching a series of four markers on the ground called bases.

Introduction

Baseball culture includes the game, the field, the players, the ballparks, and the fans. It remains a sport created in and for simpler times, yet is a complex sport that is greater than any one individual, team, or era.

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Baseball has a perennial attraction, summarized below in Baseball's unique style, unlike any other sport. But, "unique" fails to capture baseball's more endearing quality—orderly and deliberate. Maybe Yogi Berra (a Hall of Fame baseball player) said it best: "Baseball is 90% mental—the other half is physical."

Related Topics:
Baseball's unique style - Yogi Berra - Hall of Fame

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The section on Gameplay (below) provides the rules of game, but the lure of baseball is in its subtleties: situational defense, pitch location, pitch sequence, statistics, ball parks, history, and player personalities. For the avid, keenly enthusiastic fan, the game, even at its slowest, is never boring because of these nuances. Therefore, to appreciate baseball does require some knowledge of the rules, but it also requires a deep observation of those endearing and enduring qualities that gives baseball its unique style. Again quoting Yogi Berra, "You can observe a lot just by watching."

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Baseball is among the oldest and most popular team sports in the United States. Although the origins and evolution of the various bat-and-ball games are murky, the game we know as baseball is primarily an American invention. As such, going back to at least the 1870s, American newspapers were calling the sport "The National Pastime" or "The National Game". No small part of its appeal is that it is mostly played during the warm, relatively leisurely months of the year, thus it is also called "The Summer Game" and its players often referred to as "The Boys of Summer".

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