Baseball (Amateur)

The “national pastime” in the United States, evoked alongside such icons of Americana as hot dogs and apple pie (and the only major league sport conducted in July, concurrent with Independence Day), baseball has a long history and strong association with America, in addition to its popularity elsewhere. The odd man out of the major American sports, it lacks a goal and a definite endpoint—a game of potentially infinite length (there are no ties) played in finite innings in which the teams take turns playing offense and defense.

The origins of baseball are unclear. There are half a dozen competing origin stories, at least one of which—the 1839 invention of baseball by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York—is known to be false, though it continues to be repeated because of the association of the name with the sport and the location of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. In the end, this much is clear: There have been many bat and ball games, dating back to ancient eras, and they were especially popular in England, where cricket is the best-known example. The [Page 65]sport of baseball shares aspects with English bat-and-ball games, as well as with tag games. Though possibly invented in England, baseball first became popular in New England in the 18th century—a 1791 Pittsfield (Massachusetts) bylaw forbids playing the game within 80 yards of the town meeting house, presumably for the sake of the windows.

The sport spread as the country did, across the continent and soon beyond, taking advantage of the many available empty fields. One of the hallmarks of the sport is the unique character of each park, whether at the major league level or in amateur play. Though the infield conforms to specific dimensions, there is significant leeway in the configuration of the outfield and the park as a whole, making some parks better for hitters, worse for left-handed pitchers, etcetera. Even the amount of foul territory, which in some sense affects every at-bat, varies. Most parks, for the sake of convenience, are oriented to keep the sun out of pitchers' eyes—though professional baseball is often played at night for the sake of ticket sales and television ratings, the sport is traditionally a day game.

To a greater degree than the America's other major team sports—football, basketball, hockey, soccer—baseball is both a team sport and an individual sport. A far greater number of individual statistics are tallied, some of them position-specific and many of them not, than in other sports. Team-driven plays do not exist to the same degree, in the same sense, as in other team sports. Though there may be runners on base, and fielders ready to catch fly balls or chase down grounders, the discrete unit of baseball play is a confrontation between two players: the pitcher and the hitter.

This is also what has changed the most since the earliest days of the game, when a hitter had an unlimited number of strikes and could call for a specific pitch; the pitcher then was an enabler of the game more than the hitter's obstacle. But now, with the pitcher doing his best to keep the batter from making a hit without throwing a ball (a pitch outside the designated zone), the fundamental act of baseball—hitting a 90-mile-per-hour ball with a stick—is widely considered the most difficult act performed as part of the ordinary activity of a sport. The fact that hitting the ball two times out of five is an almost unattainable feat, achieved only by a small handful of professional players, attests to this.

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