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.
Evolving from older bat-and-ball games, an early form of baseball was being played in England by the mid-eighteenth century. 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.
Baseball in 1632[]
Baseball was brought to 17th century Europe by the arrival of Grantville. Prior to the Ring of Fire, the star pitcher for the high school's baseball team, Billy Trumble, was good enough to have drawn the attention of a few major-league scouts. The game caught on among the down-time German population, and German stars, such as Conrad Ursinus, began to emerge.
It was thought that, at least for a while, baseball would have to return to the "dead ball" era, as Grantville's supply of modern baseballs was limited.
References[]
- Ring of Fire, "American Past Time"
- 1634: The Galileo Affair, chapters 13 and 15