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Baseball Basics

Baseball is a wonderful sport (I’m guessing you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t worked that out already) and whether your introduction was via Five, ESPN America/NASN or through catching a game during a visit to the States, the chances are good that you were hooked pretty quickly.

As with any new sport, you need to learn the basic ideas of the game itself and there are lots of rules you have to become accustomed with, but even after you’ve got to grips with all of this you can be left flummoxed when an announcer or writer breezily tells you that:

“The Braves head off to Shea for a three-game series against the Mets without Tom Glavine, after the veteran lefty was placed on the fifteen day DL. Buddy Carlyle will take the future hall-of-famer’s spot in the rotation, while Jo-Jo Reyes has been called up from Triple A and added to the 25-man roster to take Carlyle’s place in the bullpen”.

Your reaction will probably be along the lines of:

What the hell’s a fifteen day ‘dee ell’?!
What do they mean by “rotation”?!
What’s Triple A?!
25-man roster?!
Bullpen?!
Help!!!

The problem is, the vast majority of places that provide you with baseball news and information assume you already know what all of this means. That’s understandable because their focus is almost always on an American audience and these are the sort of details that someone growing up in the States will learn at a very young age. Not so with us Brits. We have to fight our way through wikis and glossaries on the Internet containing definitions and explanations that often leave us more confused than when we started.

So, the Baseball Basics for Brits series has been launched to help you bridge this knowledge gap. The actual rules of the game and the events on the field can be better explained elsewhere, not least by simply watching games themselves. This series is designed to explain everything that goes on around the game, from the structure of Major League Baseball to player contracts, statistics and much more. Each volume is written with two points in mind: what are the key things a Brit would need to know on this topic and what is the best way to explain them? The number of volumes will build up over time, eventually providing a complete overview of all the basics that a British newcomer needs to know. Current volumes, published as pdfs, can be accessed below.

Volume 01: The Major League Baseball season.