"Certainly the Stupidest" - An Introduction to Baseball for Non-Americans, Nerds & Novices (Part 1)

This was just so much fun, and even though every sports news office, desk and segment in the country ran the clip last night, because its that good, I'm gonna try and do something here too, because its that good.

It occurs to me that some the most...minute rules in baseball come into play against a backdrop of some of the simplest, most basic rules of the sport in a way that, as it is so very entertaining to watch, makes the whole thing perfect for teaching kids the game.

Let's take this, literally, from a perspective of teaching aliens, or Tanzanians, to play the game. This is not meant to equate Tanzanians with non-human creatures excepting in their relative innocence to the rules of the American ball-and-stick sport, but I do not want to obfuscate the fragmented and concatenous fashion in which the American Hegemony is built, because that's not especially welcome in the places where the differences are obvious.

Tanzanians play cricket and netball and they look at you like you're an imbecile if you refer to their ten foot basket on a pole as a basketball hoop. The government also accept an uncomfortable amount of 'charity' and developmental 'aid' from China, yet they are a growing democracy with a great deal of developmental ties to the U.S. and Europe as well. In this, they are like most nation states on the planet, especially ones who are not dominant regional powers either; they are accedent to the U.S. hegemony, but independent minded, and not closed to other pretenders to 'Super' power. I might as easily have chosen Mali, or Azerbaijan or Thailand. Well...Southeast Asia has complications of cultural history that make it less exemplary in its politics, but still... (Ecuador, Jordan, Canada probably fairly qualifies, though this example, baseball, would be vaguely familiar in Ecuador or Canada...)

So long as those connections are maintained in a fair and mutually profitable way, there should be no reason for them not to accede to American wishes and do things like modify their government (progressively, and by internal, emulative forces) to be more public and less secretive, more bureaucratic and less...informal is a less loaded word than 'corrupt,' though that is what 'corrupt' is meant to mean: one who corrupts the bureaucratic record. One of those 'mutual profits' that such a nation could gain is cultural, in this case, sporting.

Japan and South Korea demonstrate how baseball, itself can be the gain. The economic difference between a contemporary Japan or South Korea that plays cricket without great passion and the real one is drastic, even without counting the international exchange stimulated directly with the hegemon. The contract of one Mr. Shohei Ohtani, alone, is of historically economic proportion. For another reference, consider the economic 'weight' of soccer in America in the 1990's versus the weight of MLS in the coming decade, after the clear watershed success of their post-pandemic tournament.

So let's teach baseball as if to Tanzanian schoolchildren, who at least tend to have the same number and shape to their extremities, which we cannot guarantee for extraterrestrial aliens.

A game of baseball that is not extended because of a tie score will run in eighteen parts, nine for each side, and one round of each team taking a part is called an 'inning,' so that there are nine (scheduled) innings with a top and bottom half. In the television age, it is useful to note that a small break in action intercedes each part, and the thirteenth break, the one at the middle of the seventh inning, is traditionally extended for an audience intermission, often including a stadium-wide singalong. A 'part,' as I have previously called it, is informally referred to as 'ups,' 'an at-bats' or a 'half-inning.'

These 'halves' however, are not timed and are certainly not required to be of equal chronological duration. One at-bats consists of however many team plate appearances is required for the defensive team to achieve three 'outs' against the batting, offensive team. The most impressive achievement in the game, therefore, has always been the recording of twenty-seven successive defensive outs, which is the total number required in a regular-length game, without allowing any player to safely reach a 'base.'

Ball-and-stick sports are unique in that the defensive team holds and controls the object of play. The only impact the offensive team is allowed to make upon the ball itself it the impact of the swung stick, only once, upon the ball. Clearly, this rule exists for safety and dates from a time when standards of safety were significantly lower than they are today. If a defensive player may play the ball once it is struck, but the batter may attempt to strike it a second time, it does not require instant replay review to prove that the probability of someone being struck in the body or head with a bat is far too high for a publicly operating business, which a baseball team is, they collect the best talent they can find and sell opportunities to see that talent when it is on display.

It is (perhaps surprisingly) difficult to hit a thrown ball, and the difficulty rises as the obligation grows with skill-levelling to require hitting faster-thrown balls, harder, higher, farther and with greater control over the direction in the horizontal plane. Over a period approaching nearly two centuries of data, it seems that the best 'batters' (or 'hitters' or 'batsmen') are able to hit a ball both 'well' and to one of the locations that must be left only partially defended by the rules of the sport, which allow only seven players to defend the large, irregular playing surface of a baseball field.

This is PNC Baseball Park. The Pittsburgh Pirates, an altogether terrible team this season and for decades of past seasons in succession, play their games here as the 'home' team. It is, fortunately for them, and by pretty broad consensus, the most beautiful baseball stadium in the nation. Having seen it myself, only from the outside, but in person, I must agree with this evaluation for pure, uncontextualized aesthetics.

You will note the white lines, laid in powdered chalk along the edges of some of the cutout dirt spaces in the midst of the grassy park area of the field. All of these lines are out-of-bounds, except for the two that extend upward in the picture, to meet the base of the yellow poles that rise at either end of the outer wall. Those two lines mark the boundary, but are, themselves, in-bounds. Players and the game may move outside the boundaries without consequence, but if the ball lands in the grass or dirt outside the boundary (except the rare times when it curves back inside the boundary before traveling 90 horizontal feet) it is ruled inert and play is reset.

There are some words I've avoided here, because I find them dated. Most people, however, will refer to the fouled ball (the ball hit into 'foul territory') as 'dead,' and the play, likewise, will be called 'dead.' I honestly find this more crude than offensive, and inert is so much more precise while reset also tells me more about what is happening than 'the play is dead.'

So the immediate object of the ball-and-stick game is, obviously, to strike the ball with the stick, sending it, ideally, a long, long way. The addition of defensive players is also, in some sense, pro forma, with cricket fielders tasked to catch the ball before it lands in similar fashion to baseballers. The array across a 90-degree circular segment is, of course, rather different from the 360-degree ellipse used in cricket, primarily in the strategic demands it places on both sides.

In cricket the field is sufficiently open to allow base totals upward of one hundred on each side and days of play; in baseball, the field is constrained enough so that not every struck ball is in play, meaning more balls hit with purpose to defenders covering a smaller strategic space. The result is not as many fewer bases achieved as one might expect (bases are the scoring figure in cricket, where they are merely a building block to a score in baseball), but a reduction of perhaps half to two-thirds nonetheless. Certainly a total of 100 bases safely-reached on the part of both teams in a baseball game is extraordinary, though it has to have happened in any game with twenty-five total runs.

Because not every struck ball is in play, the baseball pitcher is incentivized differently from the cricket pitcher, whose affirmative aim, not interdicted by the batter, is directly rewarded. Because the object is to make sport primarily upon well-struck balls, rather than all batted balls, the pitcher is responsible to provide a due opportunity to the batter to do precisely that, to strike the ball well. The game has changed over time however, and the incentive on pitchers has come to be that they be not only good enough to put the ball in the area where a batter has the best opportunity to strike it fairly (the 'strike zone') on a consistent basis, but that they be so overwhelmingly good that they can put it within that area and still make it difficult to strike consistently (in baseball the active-verb 'hit' and hitting are commonly used for the impact of ball-and-stick).

In fact, though this is another subject, awaiting a moment that seems likely to come sooner than later, incentives and environmental changes have led to pitchers, recently, after 175 years of a consistent competitive balance where three fair hits in ten or twelve plate appearances was the standard for good to extraordinary hitting, have become so good that 'batting averages' are dropping, 'strikeouts' (a sporting-failure to successfully strike the ball fairly) are rising, and the number of games where a pitcher achieves at least the second tier of defensive excellence (namely, twenty-seven 'outs' achieved without any conventionally-successful batted balls, referred to as a no-hitter and considered more closely under the whole control of the pitcher than the so-called 'perfect game') may set a season-long record before we reach the All-Star Game, which is held during a mid-season break, in baseball.

Four bases are set on flat ground, ninety feet apart from one another in baseball. They are oriented at right angles to one another in a perfect geometric square but the mound is not geometrically centered within this square, it is set 60 feet and 6 inches away (this is not quite 18 and a half meters, 18.44m). One of the beautiful and elegant things about baseball is that it controls what can be controlled as simply as possible, and lets chaos fall evenly into statistically relevant results, so that what newer baseball statisticians refer to as 'analytics' may be more accurate ways of measuring baseball results (though some might not be as accurate as they're reputed, and others may actually measure something different from what they are supposed to), but by no means are earlier measurements of baseball success inaccurate. A twenty-game-winner is a spectacular pitcher, that much is not disputable, even if a twelve-game-winner might have won twenty on a different team.

What is beautiful and elegant about 726 inches, off the center of a larger square? Well, ninety feet is, within a very small margin of error, exactly the perfect distance apart for bases. That may have originally happened by feel, then by rounding to the exact round distance, but whatever the case, if the length of an inch were magically set 5% smaller it would be absolutely impossible to throw out a top-speed runner attempting to steal a base, and most athletic people would be able to reach second base safely most of the time, if they attempted to steal under the current rules with shorter base-intervals. Those intervals, by the way, are referred to as 'basepaths,' whether or not what is referenced is either directly in line between; on the most-traveled (curved) line; or any other point on the dirt between the bases.

As it is, self-inflated 'analytics' users have mathed themselves into the statistical elimination of the stolen base (only to find their teams were losing in the playoffs to teams that still steal...just like teams that still pay for RBI), if the base were any farther away, they might have a better argument. So why not just put the pitching mound in the middle, wouldn't that be more elegant?

Well, kinda.

Pitching is hard. This year, for only the second time in nearly two centuries of play, proposals were publicly debated for making pitching harder. Its hard enough getting the ball consistently across the plate from 60 feet away, adding a couple of feet doesn't sound like much, but it changes everything, not just for teams and strategists, thinking about how many pitches will be seen better by the batter and therefore hit better, harder and farther, but for the individual pitcher, whose curveball catches enough air resistance to really, visibly change course at exactly 50 feet from his fingertips (or whatever the number) every time, with a give or take of less than three inches depending on air pressure and his own effort.

And in the end, 60 feet was the distance found to be about right for the most hurlers to exert the best control over the behavior of the ball just shy of its intended destination. Six inches was added accidentally one time, in a tournament or something, I saw it in a tv segment earlier this season, but I don't remember exactly. Still, somehow, that became the number instead of sixty, probably honestly because that six-inch difference was the difference between 'perfect' and 'perfecter' and while numerical, statistical, mathematical elegance is a value in baseball, as with bases-reached, value ain't the same thing as scoreboard, and in the end, the perfect proportions of sporting play matters more to baseball as an institution than dropping the mound on the crosshairs and saying 'okay primates, adapt,' like we're farming long-necked giraffes.

In order to keep the game moving somewhat faster than a cricket match, and to incentivize the pitcher, the batter is given a limited opportunity to select pitches to swing at. This is done by conditionally limiting the number of pitches (balls thrown with intent) he will see, with an opportunity for a positive offensive outcome and a positive defensive outcome if he does not successfully strike a ball.

The batter may 'take' or not swing at up to three balls that do not pass through the three dimensional strike zone, a column shaped like the anchor base (called home base or home plate), which is a five-sided polygon with a front squared to the pitcher and a ninety degree point at the 'back.' This imaginary column floats in the air at a place even with 'the hollows below the knees,' which is where the doctor hits you with that reflex hammer, and it supposedly rises to the lettering of the jersey, but in practice the top of the zone is called a few inches lower, below the sternum.

They may also take, or not swing at up to two pitches that do pass through the strike zone without immediate consequence, though the number of missed balls (called simply 'balls') and pitches that 'strike' the zone will be tracked and, if a public scoreboard is displayed, will be marked on the scoreboard. If the batter elects to swing at any pitch, they are assessed another strike, whether the ball 'struck' the zone or they were simply mistaken about its 'hitability.' If they actually hit the ball, there are, of course, a variety of results that can still come to pass, even if there are no other players already waiting safely on a base (a 'runner' or 'base-runner').

First, the ball may land in foul territory. The rules of foul balls have specifics, but simply, if the ball stops in foul territory short of an even line from second base to either of the outer bases (first or third, at the right and left of the picture above, respectively), it is foul. If it lands foul and travels, by spin, bounce or curve, but not by impact with any animate object (including thrown or dropped equipment), back into fair territory, either on the ground or even while airborne, and it does so before it reaches one of those lines even with the bases, it is ruled a 'fair' ball and play must continue to a regular outcome.

If the ball comes back into fair play, but only after it has bounced once, and occupied any space in foul territory beyond the base, then it is a foul ball and is rendered inconsequential, even if the second bounce is fair. It must be fair again before passing the farther end of the base from home plate.

When a foul is declared, all runner movement, all sporting 'advance' (or 'loss,' if, for instance, a runner might have been tagged 'out' should the play have remained 'fair') is undone and conditions are reset to the positions in play when the fouled pitch was thrown. A strike is also assessed. A pitch was thrown, a swing was made and the result was not a well-struck ball. However, it is not seen as fairly fair to rule the batter out entirely, should the fouled pitch be poised to be ruled the third and therefore the final strike. A 'two-strike foul,' therefore, is not assessed a strike and, technically, therefore, any single plate appearance might continue indefinitely.

So, a 'plate appearance' is made up of at least one and no more than six recorded pitches, for two-strike fouls are simply voided. A 'batting average,' however, the longstanding standard for batting excellence, measured in three decimal places (.300, for instance, is the standard for consistent 'great' hitting), does not use plate appearances, as such, for the divisor. This is because the negative pitching outcome, historically, was not considered worthy of inclusion toward the batter's offensive credit. More recently, on-base percentage has been used to measure offensive results of all plate appearances, but classic batting average is calculated as a simple ratio of 'at-bats,' and at bats are defined as plate appearances resulting in either an 'out' or a hit, a fair struck ball resulting in the batter reaching a base safely. ('base hit,' or 'knock')

A third strike results in an out, as does being 'tagged' (touched) with the ball, a hand, or a leather glove or 'mitt' with the ball under full control inside, or being figuratively tagged at the next objective base in a 'force' out. The concept of this is simple and allows defensive teams to effect multiple outs on a single 'play' (an interval between pitches after a ball has been fairly struck or otherwise put into active play when action takes place). Because the batter who strikes the ball fairly is obliged to reach first safely in order to advance the game offensively for his team, any runner standing safely on first base already is obliged to run to second and, if there is a runner safely on first base, any runner safely on second base at the outset of the play must attempt to reach third, and so for the runner on third attempting to score, but only if both bases before his are also occupied.

Each base, therefore, to which a base runner is forced to run, is subject to a 'force out play,' a term usually shortened by eliminating 'out' or 'play' or both. In a force play, the defensive player needn't wait for the runner to arrive, needn't worry about the runner's dodging his attempt to 'tag,' nor about chasing the runner. They simply catch and possess the ball while also touching the forceable base with any body part (or garment thereupon).

This is how you may come see the spectacularly athletic pivoting play at the middle base on the field, second base, where a defensive player must catch the ball, preferably in stride, and in perfect timing so that their foot is upon the base, but their weight is already rising to allow them to transfer the ball quickly from catching glove to throwing hand, shift their weight and throw the ball on to first base, often by leaping into the air to achieve an angle over the running player. A force play happens at second so the defending player does not have to wait for the arrival of the running player, only find an angle to throw past him, and then another force play (hopefully) happens at first base before the batter arrives there.

So batting average is a simple ratio of the two most common generalized outcomes, hits versus outs. There is, however, the final category of outcomes, the walk. This is when, instead of the plate appearance being expended because the batter has not successfully struck a fair throw, the appearance is expended because the pitcher has failed to provide fair throws with sufficient frequency. This frequency is measured with the ratio of three pitches caught by the 'catcher' after passing through the strike zone, or being offered at for hit by a batter's 'swing' (this three-strikes out is termed a 'strikeout'), against four pitches not passing fairly through the zone. Any number of fouled balls, of course, may also occur, whether counted as the first or second strike, or uncounted, as unworthy of being a third strike.

A 'walk,' presumably shortened from 'free walk,' occurs when four pitches do not pass anywhere into the 'strike zone' before reaching the catcher, before three fairly thrown balls reach said catcher. This can feel a bit unfortunate for the pitcher, if, for instance, the batter succeeds at least enough to foul numerous two-strike pitches away, pitches that might be considered fairly thrown if they had not also almost become well-struck, and then, when finally he does truly miss the strike zone, it counts against his walk total. But the batter has a greater obligation to swing at two-strike pitches, for a couple of reasons, so this balances the disadvantage naturally.

Three outs bring any half-inning to a close, though the exact timing and place on the field where this last out occurs was obviously once one of the most delicate rules that ever had to be negotiated in the rulebooks. It is an important part of the clip I plan to break down tomorrow, though the graphics I'm hoping to make for it might push the posting date on it off a little farther. Nevertheless, stay tuned for a breakdown of the, there is no other word for it, historically bad defensive play by the Pittsburgh Pirates, trying to make the final out of the third Cubs half-inning all the wrong ways against Javier Baez, and I hope I'm the first one ever saying it, the future hall-of-famer.

Seriously, I'm really excited for this...