Baseball is played between two teams of nine players each on a baseball field, under the authority of one or more officials, called umpires. There are usually four umpires in major league games; up to six (and as few as one) may officiate depending on the league and the importance of the game. There are four bases. Numbered counter-clockwise, first, second and third bases are cushions (sometimes informally referred to as bags) shaped as 15 in (38 cm) squares which are raised a short distance above the ground; together with home plate, the fourth “base,” they form a square with sides of 90 ft (27.4 m) called the diamond. Home base (plate) is a pentagonal rubber slab known as simply home. The playing field is divided into three main sections:
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Baseball is largely known as America’s pastime, but has a fan base in several other countries as well. The history of baseball in Canada has remained closely linked with that of the sport in the United States. As early as 1877, a professional league, the International Association, featured teams from both countries. While baseball is widely played in Canada, and many minor league teams have been based in the country, the American major leagues did not include a Canadian club until 1969, when the Montreal Expos joined the National League as an expansion team. In 1977, the expansion Toronto Blue Jays joined the American League. The Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993, the first and still the only club from outside the United States to do so. In 2004, Major League Baseball relocated the Expos to Washington, D.C., where the team is now known as the Nationals.
The first formal baseball league outside of the United States and Canada was founded in 1878 in Cuba, which maintains a rich baseball tradition and whose national team has been one of the world’s strongest since international play began in the late 1930s. Professional baseball leagues began to form in other countries between the world wars, including the Netherlands (formed in 1922), Australia (1934), Japan (1936), and Puerto Rico (1938). After World War II, professional leagues were founded in Italy (1948) and in many Latin American nations, most prominently Venezuela (1945), Mexico (1945), and the Dominican Republic (1951). In Asia, Korea (1982), Taiwan (1990), and China (2003) all have professional leagues.
Many European countries have pro leagues as well, the most successful beside the Dutch being the Italian league founded in 1948. Compared to those in Asia and Latin America, the various European leagues and the one in Australia historically have had no more than niche appeal. Recently, the sport has begun to grow in popularity in those nations, most notably in Australia, which won a surprise silver medal in the 2004 Olympic Games. In 2007, the Israel Baseball League, featuring six teams, was launched. Competition between national teams, such as in the Baseball World Cup and the Olympic baseball tournament, has been administered by the International Baseball Federation since its formation in 1938. As of 2004, the organization has 112 member countries.
Since the early 1970s, the annual Caribbean Series has matched the league-winning clubs from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. The Confédération Européene de Baseball (European Baseball Confederation), founded in 1953, organizes a number of competitions between clubs from different countries as well as national squads. The inaugural World Baseball Classic, held in March 2006, had a much higher profile than previous tournaments featuring national teams, owing to the participation for the first time of a significant number of players from Major League Baseball.
The 117th meeting of the International Olympic Committee, held in Singapore in July 2005, voted not to hold baseball and softball tournaments at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, but they will remain Olympic sports during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games and will be put to vote again for each succeeding Summer Olympics. The elimination of baseball and softball from the 2012 Olympic program enabled the IOC to consider adding two different sports to the program, but no other sport received a majority of votes favoring its inclusion. While baseball’s lack of substantial appeal in much of the world was a factor; more important is the unwillingness of Major League Baseball to have a break during the Games so that its players can participate, something that the National Hockey League now does during the Winter Olympic Games. Because of the seasonal nature of baseball and the high priority its fans place on the integrity of major-league statistics from one season to the next, it would be more difficult to accommodate such a break in Major League Baseball.
The distinct evolution of baseball from among the various bat-and-ball games is difficult to trace with precision. While there has been general agreement that modern baseball is a North American development from the older game rounders, the 2006 book Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, by David Block, argues against that notion.[1] Several references to “baseball” and “bat-and-ball” have been found in British and American documents of the early eighteenth century.[2] The earliest known description is in a 1744 British publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by John Newbery. It contains a wood-cut illustration of boys playing “base-ball,” showing a baseball set-up roughly similar to the modern game, and a rhymed description of the sport. The earliest known unambiguous American discussion of “baseball” was published in a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts, town bylaw that prohibited the playing of the game within 80 yards (70 m) of the town’s new meeting house.[3] The English novelist Jane Austen made a reference to children playing “base-ball” on a village green in her book Northanger Abbey, which was written between 1798 and 1803 (though not published until 1818).
The first full documentation of a baseball game in North America is Dr. Adam Ford’s contemporary description of a game that took place in 1838 on June 4 (Militia Muster Day) in Beachville, Ontario, Canada; this report was related in an 1886 edition of Sporting Life magazine in a letter by former St. Marys, Ontario, resident Dr. Matthew Harris. In 1845, Alexander Cartwright of New York City led the codification of an early list of rules (the so-called Knickerbocker Rules), from which today’s have evolved. He had also initiated the replacement of the soft ball used in rounders with a smaller hard ball.[4] While there are reports of Cartwright’s club, the New York Knickerbockers, playing games in 1845, the game now recognized as the first in U.S. history to be officially recorded took place on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey, with the “New York Nine” defeating the Knickerbockers, 23–1, in four innings.