A Beginner’s Guide to Baseball

Before they can even contemplate slamming a dunk or throwing a spiral, every child gets the insatiable desire to play bat and ball. Baseball remains America’s sport, the national pastime. Perhaps we just want to hit something, maybe it’s all the hot dogs, or maybe it has something to do with the thick thud and unfettered arc of every home run.

Baseball is democratic. Batter and pitcher can duke it out with just a couple of pieces of equipment and an endless shortage of skill. Height and athleticism are hardly prerequisites. From a puff of chalk to the pristine diamond, from the swish of a strike to the clunk of a homer, and from chili dogs and bacon-wrapped wieners to peanuts and tubs full of ice cream, no other sport conjures so many distinct sights, sounds, and smells.

Still for all that baseball can remain something of an enigma. A sport so closely entwined with the fabric of American society gives itself so freely to the minutiae of historians and statisticians that to the uninitiated, the barriers to entry can seem hard to surmount. What follows then serves as a beginner’s guide to Major League Baseball, its iconic figures and most cherished moments, its rules and scoring, and the new season just about to commence.

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A Brief History of Major League Baseball

The history of baseball in America stretches back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the fledgling sport began to flourish in and around New York. The New York Knickerbockers, founded in the crisp fall of 1845, were the first club to adopt a set of rules broadly in line with the modern game.

In 1857 the Knickerbockers and fifteen other clubs in the New York area formed the National Association of Base Ball Players, the first governing organisation in the history of the sport. Membership of the National Association of Base Ball Players grew rapidly, reaching one hundred clubs by 1865, and quadrupling to four hundred within the span of two years come 1867.

Baseball remained on an amateur basis until 1869, when the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first club to declare themselves fully professional. With others soon following their lead, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was established in 1871. In 1876 it was replaced by the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs.

In these early years of professional ball, there was no shortage of upstarts. The American Association was the most prominent alternative to the National League, running from 1882 until 1891 and managing to establish the sport among America’s river cities and working class populations. The champions of the American Association met the champions of the National League seven times between 1884 and 1890, in games which prefigured the World Series.

As the American Association and Western League declined, the American League took their place and was elevated to a major league, on par with the National League, in 1901. The two leagues have existed at the pinnacle of professional baseball ever since. The first World Series took place in 1903 between the National League pennant holders, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the American League pennant holders, the Boston Americans. A disagreement squashed the 1904 season, but since then the World Series has been a permanent fixture.

The first two decades of twentieth century baseball are referred to as the ‘dead-ball era’ for their spacious ballparks, slow balls, low-scoring games, and scarcity of home runs. That all ended in 1919 when a young Babe Ruth consolidated his growing reputation as a power hitter, scoring an unprecedented twenty-nine home runs over the course of the season. The following year he moved from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees and scored fifty-four home runs, and the sport entered a heyday of high attendances.

Major League Baseball like society at large suffered a downturn in the years following the Great Depression. The farm system which was established in the thirties continues to see Minor League teams and feeder clubs cultivate talent for their Major League counterparts.

Then as baseball emerged from the Second World War, on 15 April 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier. He became the first black player to play in the major leagues in around sixty years, since segregation took hold in the 1880s. Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League, under the auspices of general manager Branch Rickey and head coach Leo Durocher. His achievement echoed a few months later in the American League, when Larry Doby suited up for the Cleveland Indians.

Modern baseball had found its footing. The rapid expansions and relocations of the fifties and sixties changed the face of the sport, as the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, the New York Giants moved to San Francisco, and the Washington Senators made their way over to Minneapolis. When the Houston Astros were added to the National League in 1962, baseball finally covered the length and breadth of the country, stretching from sea to shining sea. Subsequent expansions took in the Deep South and Canada.

Change off the field was not always matched by expansive scoring, as the emphasis turned towards pitching and fielding. By the eighties the use of artificial playing surfaces had reached its peak. The pattern of declining home runs was corrected come the nineties, although fans of the sport would eventually learn that this extra hitting power did not always come naturally. In 2005 the Montreal Expos became the first side in more than three decades to switch homes, as the Washington Nationals brought baseball back to the American capital.

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Heroes and Villains

Babe Ruth Calls His Shot: In the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth pointed towards the centre field bleachers and proceeded to smash a home run precisely in the direction of his indicated spot. Was Ruth promising a home run or merely gesturing towards the opposition? According to Ruth himself there was never any doubt. In newsreel footage he said that he had looked out over centre field and thought to himself, ‘I’m gonna hit the next pitched ball right past the flagpole!’

The ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’: In the fall of 1951, the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers met at the Polo Grounds to decide the fate of the National League pennant. With the two teams tied at a game apiece, Bobby Thomson of the Giants took up the bat with his side 2-4 down in the crucial ninth inning.

There were two runners on base, and Thomson connected with Ralph Branca’s second pitch, sending the ball down the left field line into the lower deck as the stands erupted. The three-run homer gave the Giants a 5-4 victory and made them the National League champions, completing a remarkable comeback at the end of a season which had seen them consistently trail in the standings.

The game played to a nationwide audience, but the most famous moment in the history of the sport was encapsulated through the commentary of Russ Hodges. Calling the game for WMCA-AM, a local radio station in New York, when Thomson hit his home run Hodges cried out ‘The Giants win the pennant!’

‘The Catch’: In a remarkable display of awareness and concentration, Willie Mays made an over-the-shoulder catch and threw the ball back to the infield in the eighth inning of Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. The play prevented the Cleveland Indians from taking an early lead, putting the New York Giants on course for a clean sweep of the series.

Buckner’s Error: With the Boston Red Sox leading the New York Mets 3-2 towards the tail end of the 1986 World Series, outfielder and first baseman Bill Buckner let a rolling ball run through his legs. His error handed Game 6 to the Mets at the end of a back-and-forth tussle which had stretched into extra innings.

A comeback victory in Game 7 gave the Mets the World Series, and left Rod Sox fans ruing Buckner. He became the latest face of a long-rumoured curse which had left the Red Sox without a World Series title since 1918. Buckner was eventually rehabilitated. In 2008, he threw out the first pitch as the Red Sox opened their home season, in 2011 he was part of the ESPN film ‘Catching Hell’, and he was even able to make light of the incident as a foil for Larry David in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Ogden Nash and the Baseball Immortals: In 1949 the humorist and poet Ogden Nash wrote the poem ‘Line-Up for Yesterday: An ABC of Baseball Immortals’, which was published in SPORT Magazine. The poem served as a compendium of cherished figures from baseball’s past. For instance for the letter ‘G’, Nash wrote:

G is for Gehrig
The Pride of the Stadium;
His record, pure gold,
His courage, pure radium.

Lou Gehrig was known as ‘The Iron Horse’ for his physical prowess and strength as a left-handed slugger. Playing all of his career with the New York Yankees, for fourteen years between 1925 and 1939 Gehrig never missed a single game, setting a venerable record of 2,130 consecutive matches. Gehrig was an All-Star for seven consecutive seasons between 1933 and 1939, and won six World Series with the Yankees. He was finally forced to retire when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as motor neurone disease and commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease in North America.

Gehrig died in 1941, two years after retiring from the sport. Remembered as the greatest first baseman of all-time, he became the first Major League Baseball player to have his number retired by a team. The Lou Gehrig Memorial Award is given annually in recognition of his integrity and character.

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Structuring the Sport

Today thirty teams compete across Major League Baseball: fifteen in the National League and fifteen in the American League, with five teams in each of the East, Central, and West divisions. The regular season consists of 162 games, divided evenly between home and away. As the season takes place over a span of 187 days, teams receive roughly one day off in every ten, with the exception of three days in early July when the season breaks for the annual All-Star Game.

Teams play the other four clubs in their division 19 times each, for a total of 76 games. Six or seven games – a series at home and a series away – are played against the remaining clubs in their league, adding another 66 games in total. The remaining 20 games are interleague fixtures, which since 2013 have taken place throughout the course of the season.

When the regular season concludes as summer becomes fall, usually in late September or early October, the baseball postseason begins. From 2022 a new collective bargaining agreement will see six teams from each league qualify for the postseason playoffs: the three divisional winners plus the three ‘wild-cards’ with the next-best records. Each team is seeded from one through six. The postseason playoffs will then progress through four stages:

1. In the wild-card round, Seed 3 will host Seed 6 and Seed 4 will host Seed 5 as the one-off wild-card game is replaced by two three-game series.
2. With no reseeding ahead of the divisional round, Seed 1 will host Seed 4 or 5 and Seed 2 will host Seed 3 or 6 in two five-game series.
3. The two victorious teams from the divisional round of games will meet for a seven-game series, with the championship series serving to determine the National League and American League pennant winners.
4. The National League pennant holders and American League pennant holders will meet for the World Series, a seven-game series which results in an overall champion.

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The State of Play

Teams consist of nine players and take turns on offence and defence, batting and running then pitching and fielding. Typically all nine players feature at bat and take up positions in the field. However since 1973 the American League has authorised the use of a designated hitter, allowing one player to bat for their team in place of the pitcher. The designated hitter therefore plays as part of the offence, while the pitcher remains as part of the defence. In 2020 the National League temporarily implemented the designated hitter rule as rosters were stretched owing to the impact of coronavirus.

Each game lasts for nine innings, and each inning has a top and a bottom. The away side bats at the top of each inning, and the home side bats at the bottom. Batters seek to score runs by striking the ball thrown by the opposition pitcher, then progressing through the four bases of the baseball infield: first, second, and third base before reaching home plate. A home run occurs when a better rounds all four bases in one play, typically as the result of hitting the ball over the outfield.

A turn at bat ends when a team suffers three outs. These outs can occur in a variety of situations: when a runner is forced out or tagged with the ball between bases, when a batter’s ball is caught in flight, or when a batter strikes out by succumbing to three successful pitches. A strike is issued for a foul ball when the batter has already received fewer than two strikes, but a batter cannot strikeout on a foul.

Whichever team has the most runs after nine innings wins the game. If the home team is ahead after the top of the ninth inning, the bottom of the ninth inning is not played because the victor has already been decided. In case of a tie, games stretch into extra innings.

In the graphic above the New York Yankees are leading the Toronto Blue Jays at home by a score of 2-0 (in baseball as in other American sports, the home team tends to be listed second). The embedded diamond indicates whether the offensive team have any runners on base. In this case the Yankees have one runner on second base, with the relevant segment highlighted in yellow.

The first section of the line below the score notes the current inning, with the arrowhead differentiating between top and bottom. The next section indicates the count. This refers to how many balls the pitcher has thrown versus strikes. If a pitcher throws the ball outside of the batter’s strike zone, the pitch is counted as a ball, and if the pitcher throws four balls the batter can walk to first base without having to make a hit. If a pitcher throws the ball three times within the strike zone and the batter fails to register a hit, the batter strikes out. In the graphic above the count is one-and-one, or one ball and one strike.

The next section shows how many outs the batting team have suffered. Three outs and their turn at bat is over. The final section shows the total number of pitches thrown by the current pitcher. A starting pitcher will usually be substituted for a relief pitcher or a closing specialist as the game progresses.

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The 2022 Major League Baseball Season

The start of the 2022 Major League Baseball season has been delayed by a player lockout, which team owners voted unanimously to enact upon the expiration in December of the last collective bargaining agreement. Ahead of the expiration of that agreement, the Major League Baseball Players Association had issued a series of proposals around tanking, whereby teams purposely make themselves uncompetitive in order to secure greater draft capital, and compensation for younger players who are tied to their drafted team by virtue of six-year rookie contracts.

Finally after 99 days a new five-year collective bargaining agreement was reached between the league and the Major League Baseball Players Association, bringing to a close the ninth work stoppage in Major League Baseball history. As part of the new agreement, the National League has aligned itself with the American League by authorising the full-time use of a designated hitter, with the so-called Ohtani rule allowing a pitcher to remain in the game as a designated hitter following their stint on the mound.

Prior to the lockout, the Texas Rangers and New York Mets hoped to return to winning ways as the Rangers signed shortstop Corey Seager to a franchise-record ten-year deal worth $325 million, while the Mets splashed out $130 million for three years of Max Scherzer, making the pitcher the most expensive player on an annual basis in the history of the sport. The Detroit Tigers captured another star shortstop in Javier Báez for six years at $140 million, and the pitchers Robbie Ray and Marcus Stroman proved big-money moves for the Seattle Mariners and Chicago Cubs.

The reopening of free agency brought another flurry of activity, with Carlos Rodón getting the ball rolling as the pitcher moved to the San Francisco Giants after seven years with the Chicago White Sox. Perhaps the most surprising move of the offseason saw Freddie Freeman, a talismanic figure at first base over twelve seasons with the Atlanta Braves, move to the Los Angeles Dodgers when contract talks broke down just months after Freeman helped the Braves defeat the Houston Astros in six games to win the 2021 World Series.

The Braves responded to the loss of Freeman by acquiring the first baseman Matt Olson from the Oakland Athletics. Meanwhile Kris Bryant snagged the second-largest contract of this free agency class as the third baseman and outfielder moved to the Colorado Rockies for $182 million spread over seven years, the Golden Glove winner Carlos Correa moved to the Minnesota Twins after seven years in Houston, and the slugger Jorge Soler wound up with the Miami Marlins on another short-term contract.

The upshot of all this activity should see the Mets challenge the Braves at the top of the National League East, with the starters Jacob deGrom, Scherzer, and Chris Bassitt for the Mets and the addition of the relief pitchers Collin McHugh and Kenley Jansen for the Braves adding up to two of the deepest bullpens in professional baseball. The Tampa Bay Rays and the Toronto Blue Jays may have the edge over the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox in the highly competitive American League East, while the Tigers and Twins will have to contend with the Chicago White Sox who remain the favourites in the American League Central.

In the American League West the Houston Astros will be hoping to reach the World Series for a fourth time in six years, banking on the return of Justin Verlander following Tommy John surgery. The addition of Freeman makes the Los Angeles Dodgers a firm bet for the National League West, with Fernando Tatís Jr. set to miss three months for the San Diego Padres, and the San Francisco Giants in the absence of Bryant, Kevin Gausman, and the retired catcher Buster Posey facing an uphill battle to repeat last year’s 107 victories. Finally a strong fielding rotation makes the Milwaukee Brewers the team to beat in the National League Central.

Delayed by one week, opening day for the 2022 Major League Baseball season is set for 7 April. The 2022 All-Star Game will be hosted by the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, while from the cornfields of Iowa the Field of Dreams spectacle will return for a second year, this time pitting the Cincinnati Reds against the Chicago Cubs. The new season also brings a change of name for Cleveland, who have dropped the controversial moniker Indians and will henceforth be known as the Guardians after the eight large Art Deco statues over the Hope Memorial Bridge.