For many of us who grew up watching cartoons or Hollywood movies, baseball is a game we would be somewhat familiar with. One of the most popularly played sports in the United States of America, this is a sport which is loved with as much fervour as cricket is loved in India.
For those of us who are uninitiated in this sport, baseball is a bat and ball game that is played between two teams consisting of nine players in each team, with each team taking turns batting and fielding. A player on the fielding team (who is referred to as the pitcher) throws a ball which a player on the batting team must hit with a bat. In baseball, the objective of the game is for the batting team to hit the ball into the field, at which time its players must run in a counter-clockwise direction around the four bases in order to score runs. The objective of the fielding team is to prevent players of the batting team from becoming runners, and, in due course, to prevent the runners’ movement around the bases. A run is scored when a runner moves around the bases in sequence and touches ‘home base’, which is the place where the player started as a batter. Just like in cricket, the team that scores the most runs by the time the game concludes is the winner.
