Archive for the 'Baseball' Category
There’s nothing better than watching your kids enjoy an impromptu game of baseball in the backyard on a warm summer night. Not only will they be getting a lot of physical exercise, but it’s also a great way to for the various family members to bond and spend some quality time together. If this sounds like your family, consider buying all the baseball equipment they’ll need to enjoy a full game.
For that reason, make sure you purchase the basics such as baseballs and bats. But don’t forget to get all the equipment that can truly make it a real baseball game. As such, don’t forget accessories like baseball bases and baseball gloves. And for the highest level of safety, don’t forget the helmets, chest guards, and catcher’s masks.
When it comes to baseball, kids often want to take on the positions with the most responsibility, and pitcher is one of them. Everyone starts off as a wild pitcher; there’s no prodigy that can throw straight fastballs without ever holding a ball. But with a bit of effort, parents can develop their little ball player into a league capable pitcher. You might start by purchasing a pitching screen for your child, or even better, play catch with them and throw it back. Just be aware that wearing catcher’s gear the first time isn’t a bad idea!
It takes a long time to develop a talent for pitching and calm down wild throwing tendencies, and it’s easy to get frustrated. But if parents encourage their children to continue, their potential is limitless.
History of baseball in the United States
Semiprofessional baseball started in the United States in the 1860s; 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. By the following decade, American newspapers were referring to baseball as the “National Pastime” or “National Game.” The first attempt at forming a “major league” was the National Association, which lasted from 1871 to 1875. The “major league” status of the NA is in dispute among present-day baseball historians, and Major League Baseball does not include the NA among the major leagues. The National League, which still exists, was founded in 1876 in response to the NA’s shortcomings. Several other major leagues formed and failed, but the American League, which evolved from the minor Western League (1893) and was established in 1901 as a major league, succeeded. The two leagues were initially rivals that actively fought for the best players, often disregarding one another’s contracts and engaging in bitter legal disputes. A modicum of peace was established in 1903, and the World Series was inaugurated that fall, albeit without formal major league sanction or governance. The next year, the National League champion New York Giants did not participate, as their manager, John McGraw, refused to recognize the major league status of the American League and its champion, the Boston Americans who beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series. The following year, Giants’ management relented, and actually led the formal establishment of rules that standardized the format of the World Series and made participation compulsory.
The New York Giants baseball team, circa 1910.
Compared with the present day, games in the early part of the 20th century were lower scoring and pitchers were more successful. The “inside game”, whose nature was to “scratch for runs”, was played more violently and aggressively than it is today. Ty Cobb said of his era especially, “Baseball is something like a war!” This period, which has since become known as the “dead-ball era”, ended in the 1920s with several rule changes that gave advantages to hitters and the rise of the legendary baseball player -, who showed the world what power hitting could produce, altering the nature of the game. Two of the changes introduced were the construction of additional seating to accommodate the rising popularity of the game, which often had the effect of bringing the outfield fences closer to the infield in the largest parks; and the introduction of strict rules governing the size, shape and construction of the ball which, coupled with superior materials becoming available following World War I, caused the ball to travel farther when hit. The aggregate result of these two changes was to enable batters to hit many more home runs.
In 1884, African American Moses Walker (and, briefly, his brother Welday) had played for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the major league American Association. An injury ended Walker’s major league career, and by the early 1890s, a “gentlemen’s agreement” in the form of the baseball color line effectively barred African-American players from the majors and their affiliated minor leagues, resulting in the formation of several Negro Leagues. There was never any formal segregation rule in baseball, which presented an opportunity for integration for someone bold enough to attempt it. The first crack in the unwritten agreement occurred in 1946, when Jackie Robinson was signed by the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers and began playing for their minor league team in Montreal. Finally, in 1947, the major leagues’ color barrier was broken when Robinson debuted with the Dodgers. Larry Doby debuted in the American League the same year. Although the transformation was not instantaneous, baseball has since become fully integrated.
Major League baseball finally made it to the West Coast of the United States in 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively. The first American League team on the West Coast was the Los Angeles Angels, who were founded as an expansion team in 1961.
Pitchers dominated the game in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the early 1970s the designated hitter (DH) rule was proposed. The American League adopted this rule in 1973, though pitchers still bat for themselves in the National League to this day. The DH rule now constitutes the primary difference between the two leagues.
Despite the popularity of baseball, and the attendant high salaries relative to those of average Americans, the players have become dissatisfied from time to time, as they believed the owners had too much control and retained an unfair share of the money. Various job actions have occurred throughout the game’s history. Players on specific teams occasionally attempted strikes, but usually came back when their jobs were sufficiently threatened. The throwing of the 1919 World series , the “Black Sox scandal”, was in some sense a “strike” or at least a rebellion by the ballplayers against a perceived stingy owner. But the strict rules of baseball contracts tended to keep the players “in line” in general.
This began to change in 1966 when former United Steelworkers chief economist (and assistant to the president) Marvin Miller became the Baseball Players Union executive director. The union became much stronger than it had been previously, especially when the reserve clause was effectively nullified in the mid-1970s. Conflicts between owners and the players’ union led to major work stoppages in 1972, 1981, and 1994. The 1994 baseball strike led to the cancellation of the World Series, and was not settled until the spring of 1995. During this period, as well, many of the functions — such as player discipline and umpire supervision — and regulations that had been administered separately by the two major leagues’ administrations were united under the rubric of Major League Baseball.
The number of home runs increased dramatically after the strike. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both surpassed Roger Maris’s long-standing single season home run record in 1998. In 2001, Barry Bonds established the current record of 73 home runs in a single season. In 2007, Bonds became MLB’s all-time home run leader, surpassing Hank Aaron’s total of 755. Even though all three sluggers (McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds) have been accused in the steroid-abuse scandal of the mid-2000s, their feats did do a lot at the time to bolster the game’s renewed popularity.
Currently, baseball makes up around 20 percent of the franchise sports industry. The team with the highest average game attendance is the New York Yankees, with 51,848 spectators. The New York Yankees are closely followed by the Los Angeles Dodgers (46,400) and the New York Mets (42,327). The 30 Major League Baseball teams earned $5.11 billion in revenue in 2006.
Written in part with Wikipedia:
Opening ceremony
Main article: 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony
The opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing will be held in the Beijing National Stadium, and begin at 8:00pm CST (12:00 UTC) on 8 August 2008. It has been announced that Canada’s Celine Dion and Taiwan’s Jay Chou would perform during the opening ceremony.
On July 21, NBC announced the Opening Ceremony would include performances by a cast of 15,000 and declared it would be the most spectacular Olympics Opening Ceremony ever produced.
Sports
This pictogram depicts Athletics.
Medals of the 2008 Summer Olympics: silver (left), gold (center), bronze (right)
The program for the Beijing 2008 Games is quite similar to that of the Athens Games held in 2004. The 2008 Olympics will see the return of 28 sports, and will hold 302 events (165 men’s events, 127 women’s events, and 10 mixed events), one event more in total than in Athens.
Overall 9 new events will be held, which include 2 from the new cycling discipline of BMX. Women will compete in the 3000 m steeplechase for the first time. In addition, marathon swimming events for men and women, over the distance of 10 kilometres, will be added to the swimming discipline. Team events (men and women) in table tennis will replace the doubles events. In fencing, women’s team foil and women’s team sabre will replace men’s team foil and women’s team epee.
The Beijing Organizing Committee have released pictograms of the 35 Olympic disciplines. This set of sport icons is named the beauty of seal characters, due to each pictogram’s likeness to Chinese seal script.
The following are the sports to be contested at these Games. The number of events to be contested in each sport is indicated in parentheses.
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Rules and Gameplay
A single game is played by two teams, who, during the course of a game, alternate playing offense and defense. Each alternation is called an “inning”, and there are usually 9 innings in a game. A “season” is played over the course of many months by a group of teams, called a league. Each team in the league plays all the other teams in the league a fixed number of times, though it is not always in round robin format. At the end of the season, the team with the most wins is the winner of the regular season.
The goal of a game is to score more points, which are called “runs” in the language of baseball, than the other team. Each team, usually composed of 9 players, attempts to score runs while on offense, by completing a tour of the bases, which form a square-shaped figure called a “diamond.” A tour starts at home plate and proceeds counter-clockwise. See the image below.
There are four basic tools of baseball: the bat, the ball, the mitt, and the field:
- The bat is an offensive tool, either made of wood or aluminum depending on the game being played. It is a long, hard stick, about 2 inches (5 centimeters) in diameter, except at the handle, which is about 1-inch (2.5 centimeters) diameter.
- The ball in baseball is about the size of a fist and white (though other colors can be used) with red lacing. Softball uses a white or yellow ball (usually) about the size of two fists with white lacing.
- The glove or mitt is a defensive tool, made of leather, worn on the player’s hand to aid in catching the ball. It takes various shapes to meet the unique needs of the defensive position of the player.
- The game is played on a field, whose dimensions vary depending on the age of the players. However, every field has a diamond, with bases at its corners, which the offensive players circumnavigate, as mentioned above. The part of the field closest to the bases is called the infield, and the part most distant from the bases is called the outfield.
Baseball is played in a series of (usually 9) “innings”, each of which is divided into two halves (called “top” and “bottom” in that order: hence the phrase bottom of the ninth). In each half-inning, the offensive team attempts to score runs until three of its players are put “out” (removed from play by actions of the defensive team; discussed below). After the third out, the teams switch roles for the other half of the inning. The “home” team plays defense first, and so plays defense in the top of every inning and offense in the bottom of every inning.
At the beginning of each half-inning, the nine defensive players arrange themselves on the field. One defensive player is called the “pitcher” and stands at the center of the diamond on a designated spot, called the mound or the rubber - a reference to the rectangular rubber plate at the center of the mound. Another defensive player is called the “catcher” and stands on the other side of home plate from the pitcher. Typically four more players are arranged along the lines between first, second, and third bases, and the other three are in the outfield.
Runs are scored as follows: starting at home plate, each offensive player attempts to earn the right to run (counterclockwise) to the next base (corner) of the diamond, then to touch the base at that corner, continuing on to each following base in order, and finally returning to home, whereupon a run (point) is scored. Often an offensive player will achieve a base but be forced to stop there; on future plays (usually in concert with other runners), the player may continue to advance, or else be put out.
A play begins with an offensive player called a “batter” standing at home plate, holding a bat. The batter then waits for the pitcher to throw a “pitch” (the ball) toward home plate, and attempts to hit the ball with the bat. If the batter hits the ball into play, the batter must then drop the bat and begin running toward first base. (There are other ways to earn the right to run the bases, such as “walks” or being hit by a pitched ball.) The catcher catches pitches that the batter does not hit (either by choice or simple failure to make contact) and returns them to the pitcher.
If the batter fails to hit a well-pitched ball (one within the strike zone) or if he hits it so that it goes outside of the field of play it is called a “strike”. (However, if the ball is hit over the outfield and exits the field there, it is instead (one type of) a “home run”: the batter and all other offensive players on bases may complete a tour of the bases and score a run. This is the most desirable result for the batter.)
When a batter begins running, he or she is then referred to as a “runner”. Runners attempt to reach a base, where they are “safe” and may remain there. The defensive players attempt to prevent this by putting the runners out using the ball; runners put out must leave the field (returning to the “bench” or “dugout”, the location where all the other inactive players and managers observe the game).
There are many ways that the team on defense can get an offensive player out. For the sake of simplicity, only the five most common ways are listed here:
1).The “strikeout”: occurs when the batter acquires three strikes before hitting the ball (within the field); the batter never becomes a runner. (Hence the phrase “Three strikes and you are out”.)
2) The “ground out”: when the batter hits the ball but a defensive player retrieves it after it has touched the ground and throws it to another defensive player standing on first base before the runner arrives there.
3) The “forceout”: occurs when a runner is required to run to advance bases ahead of a teammate’s hit but fails to reach it before a defensive player reaches the base with the ball. The “ground out” is actually a special case of “force out.”
4) The “flyout”: if a defensive player catches a hit ball before it touches the ground, the batter (now a runner) is out (regardless of his location).
5) The “tag out”: while between bases, a runner is out if a defensive player touches him with a held ball.
Written in part with Wikipedia:
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal of baseball is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four markers called bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team) take turns hitting while the other team (the fielding team) 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 hope to score on a teammate’s hit. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team gets 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.
Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is popular in North America, Central America, parts of South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia. The modern version of the game developed in North America, beginning in the eighteenth century. The consensus of historians is that it evolved from earlier bat-and-ball games, such as cricket and rounders, brought to the continent by British and Irish immigrants. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball in contrast to the very similar game of softball.
In North America, professional Major League Baseball 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 culminating in the World Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular season division winners, plus one wild card team. The wild card is the team with the best record among the non–division winners in the league. In the National League, the pitcher is required to bat, per the traditional rules. In the American League, there is a tenth player, a designated hitter, who bats for the pitcher. Each major league team has a “farm system” of minor league teams at various levels. These teams allow younger players to develop as they gain on-field experience against opponents with similar levels of skill.
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