Baseball is America’s past time. No two fields are exactly identical. The only identical portion of a baseball field, depending on the league you are in, is the infield. Every Major League Baseball park has the exact same dimensions for the infield, which is a four sided square laid like a diamond with each side being equal to ninety feet. The game of baseball is played between two teams using wood or metal bats, depending on league rules, league regulated sized ball, and baseball gloves. The game is started with the home team taking the field first. The home team will pitch to the visiting team trying to get three outs. Out can be made by a batter swinging and missing on strike three or fielder catching the ball in the air, or off of a bounce and proceed to throw the runner out at the base. After three outs are made the teams swap places and do the same thing over again. When the next team gets three outs, that makes up an inning. Most games are played with nine innings; however there are some younger leagues that just play with six innings. This is the basic structure of a baseball game, but the game of baseball ball is made up of so much more detail. This extra detail is known as statistics. In the 19th century Henry Chadwick started keeping a statistical record of athlete’s achievements. According to Sounders “While covering a game between the Stars and the Excelsiors in South Brooklyn in 1859, Chadwick introduced what many baseball fans, datasticians and historians consider to be his greatest contribution to the game: the boxscore. Adapted from the scorecard used in cricket, the boxscore is a detailed record of the occurrences of the game, including such data as the names of all the players who particip... ... middle of paper ... .... In the book “Lewis chronicled the exploits of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane, who has used statistical analysis to guide the Athletics to five playoff appearances in the last eight years, despite working with one of the smallest payrolls in Major League Baseball (Bendix, 2009)”. Basic statistics are not always enough to review a team, the deeper you look the more you will find out. The old saying “you can’t judge a book by its cover”, is perfect for evaluating ball players. Works Cited Bendix, Peter. (April 15, 2009). Ask The Professor: What is sabermetrics and why do baseball teams care so much about it?. Retrieve from http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/2009/04_2/professor/01/ Souders, Mac. (N.D.). Baseball’s First Publicist Henry Chadwick. Retrieved from http://research.sabr.org/journals/baseballs-first-publicist-henry-chadwick
The reach question “do baseball teams with higher payroll win more?” will for testing purposes be turned into the verbal Hypothesis statement, baseball teams with larger payrolls don’t win anymore than teams with smaller payrolls. This leads to the numerical hypothesis statements regarding the null and alternative hypotheses.
In the August 30, 1905 edition of Detroit’s Free Press, the sportswriters ran a small blurb announcing the arrival of a Detroit Tigers rookie, Ty Cobb. They stated, “Cobb left the South Atlantic League with a batting average of .328. He will not pile up anything like that in this league, and he doesn’t expect to” (Allen 177). Their prediction ironically rung true. Cobb hit better than their projected .328 batting average twenty times in his twenty four seasons (McCallum 217). Tyrus Raymond Cobb’s prolific career leads many fans and historians to believe that he deserves the title of greatest hitter of all time. However, some critics would argue that Ted Williams warrants this distinction. Unfortunately for Williams and his fans, the hitting prowess of Williams falls short of Cobb’s. While Williams arguably displayed a great hitting ability, Cobb remains the better batsman.
Baseball statistics are meant to be a representation of a player’s talent. Since baseball’s inception around the mid-19th century, statistics have been used to interpret the talent level of any given player, however, the statistics that have been traditionally used to define talent are often times misleading. At a fundamental level, baseball, like any game, is about winning. To win games, teams have to score runs; to score runs, players have to get on base any way they can. All the while, the pitcher and the defense are supposed to prevent runs from scoring. As simplistic as this view sounds, the statistics being used to evaluate individual players were extremely flawed. In an attempt to develop more specific, objective forms of statistical analysis, the idea of Sabermetrics was born. Bill James, a man who never played or coached professional baseball, is often credited as a pioneer in the field and for coining the name as homage to the Society of American Baseball Research, or SABR. Eventually, the use of Sabermetrics became widespread in the Major Leagues, the first team being the Oakland Athletics, as depicted in Moneyball. Bill James and other baseball statisticians have developed various methods of evaluating a player performance that allow for a more objective view of the game, broadly defined as Sabermetrics.
"SABR." Society for American Baseball Research. Marc Appleman, 29 Mar. 2012. Web. 25 Apr. 2014.
One of the most iconic names in baseball is the team name “New York Yankees”, and along with it have come some equally as famous players. The Yankees have had so much talent come through their stadium, names including Babe Ruth, Yogi Berra and Mickie Mantle to name a few. Though there are several arguments about who the greatest players of the game are it is no question who the top ten are from the New York team. Based on up to date career statistics these players have a ninety year span of talent between them. These players may not have top score in all parts of the game but they have all set certain records that either have yet to be broken or held for a longer time than most students have been alive.
Alexander builds an admirable amount of sources, writes in a way that takes the reader season by season, and uses visual histories to help enhance his writings. The flaws a reader may see in his writing is forgetting to look at the culture that influenced the players and leaving out Negro baseball. Baseball has been a fixture in American culture for many years and as a historian Alexander encompasses baseball during the Depression in a way that makes it come alive for the
A team of players usually ranges from ten to forty players depending on how many people join the squad. The field consists of nine players on defense, as well as one batter at the plate playing offense. Of those nine players on the field, three play deep in the outfield (right, left, and center) who look to catch a ball hit in the air and get it back to the infield as quickly and efficiently as possible; if the ball drops then their goal is to hurry to the ball and get it back to the infield as quickly and efficiently as possible before the runner (after the ball is hit and the player gets on base because the ball wasn’t caught in the air, his title changes from a batter/hitter into a runner) advances to the next base.
“Serious sport is war minus the shooting” (Orwell, 1945). In this respect the Oakland A’s guerilla warfare like tactics helped achieve their ascendance through the MLB. Bill James’s Sabermetrics was used to accomplish this. It works on the basis of studying player performance data to guide player recruitment, valuation and field tactics. Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland A’s, saw his monetarily weak team in need of regeneration and so adopted the system as a ‘David strategy’ for the A’s (Gray, 2006 cited in Gerrard, 2007). It is argued that atomistic striking and fielding sports are more conducive to this systematic approach, owing to the easily defined contributions of individual players (Gerrard and Howard, 2007). This essay will explore to what extent this form of metric can be applied to invasion sports, in particular football: a free flowing invasion sport and American football: a fragmented invasion sport . It will assess whether technology and concepts have reached the level so data analytics can be used to the same effect to that of atomistic striking games. Finally it will look into the cultural barriers and whether the industry wants to use this form analytics.
When asked to describe a baseball the first word generally voiced is white, and before April 15, 1947 that is exactly what the game of baseball was, white. “There is no law against Negroes playing with white teams, or whites with colored clubs, but neither has invited the other for the obvious reason they prefer to draw their talent from their own ranks” (‘42’). These were the feelings of people living in 1947, that blacks and whites were not meant to play baseball together. Then, why decades earlier, had there been an African American in the league? In 1887, an African American Pitcher, George Stovey, was expected to pitch a game with Chicago, however, the first baseman, Cap Anson, would not play as long as Stovey was on the field. Other influential players in the league quickly joined Anson in expressing their disgust, and Stovey suddenly found himself no longer in the game. “In the six decades that followed the only other attempt to sign a black player was made by Baltimore's Joan McGraw. He tried to pass of Charlie Grant as an American Indian in spring training of 1901” (Frommer 65). It had been years since anyone had even attempted to play an African American, but on April 15, 1947, the whole world of baseball changed. The fight for the integration of Major League Baseball had been going on for decades and it took not only some very influential players, but the press, and some determined owners to make the change permanent.
Deeply embedded in the folklore of American sports is the story of baseball's supposed invention by a young West Point cadet, Abner Doubleday, in the summer of 1839 at the village of Cooperstown, New York. Because of the numerous types of baseball, or rather games similar to it, the origin of the game has been disputed for decades by sports historians all over the world. In 1839, in Cooperstown, New York, Doubleday supposedly started the great game of baseball. Doubleday, also a famous Union general in the Civil War, was said to be the inventor of baseball by Abner Graves, an elderly miner from New York. In response to the question of where baseball first originated, major league owners summoned a committee in 1907. Abner Graves stepped before the committee and gave his testimony. In Graves' account of "the first game," the Otsego Academy and Cooperstown's Green's Select School played against one another in 1839. Committeeman Albert G. Spalding, the founder of Spalding's Sporting Goods, favored Graves' declaration and convinced the other committeemen that Graves' account was true. As a result, in 1939, the committee and the State of New York named Cooperstown and Abner Doubleday as the birthplace and inventor of baseball, respectively. Today, many baseball historians still doubt the testimony of Abner Graves. Historians say the story came from the creative memory of one very old man and was spread by a superpatriotic sporting goods manufacturer, determined to prove that baseball was a wholly American invention. According to Doubleday's diary, he was not playing baseball in Cooperstown, but attending school at West Point on that day in 1839. Also, historians have found that nowhere in Doubleday's diar...
Simon, Scott. 2002. Jackie Robinson and the integration of Baseball. Turning points. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley & Sons.
When you think about the game of baseball, you think about the most remembered baseball player Jackie Robinson because he stole more bases than I stole hearts. The game of baseball was created sometime in the 1800’s and has been played ever since. Baseball is a major sport and it is apart of a lot of the cultures in the world. The United States of America and Cuba are two of the top 2 countries that have a lot of players go to the MLB. The game of baseball was first played on sandlot and now is being played in huge stadiums that have large capacities. Baseball is a sport that can be watched for fun and doesn’t necessarily have to be played.
It is a game of the half loaf. In baseball, as in democracy, no one gets everything they want. Essentially all 30 teams go to Spring Training knowing they are going to win 60 games and lose 60 games. They play the long season to sort out the other 42 games. And every team also knows if it wins only 10 out of every 20 games, it is obviously mediocre. But if it wins 11 out of every 20 games, it will win almost 90 games and have a good chance of playing in the post-season. Which is why in baseball, as in the life of a competitive free society, little differences, ultimately, make an enormous difference. Baseball also is, as America is, both about individualism and cooperation. The heart of the game is the one-on-one battle between the batter and the pitcher. But baseball also requires teamwork, on offense, to move runners another 90 feet and on defense, to make 27
Today, baseball is known as a game composed of two teams of nine players each who play in an enclosed field. Both teams rotate between the position of offense and defense, where one team is batting and one is on the field. When playing defense, there are positions in both the infield and outfield in order to prevent runs from the offense. In the offensive realm, the batter’s goal is to outsmart the pitcher and move the players around the bases to score a maximum amount of runs. The primary objective of the game is to score more runs than the opposing team by the end of the nine innings. However, the early forms of this sport were played much different.
Baseball fans, in addition to behaving insanely, are also fascinated by baseball trivia. Every day they turn to the sports page and study last night's statistics. They simply must see who extended his hitting streak and how many strikeouts the winning pitcher recorded. Their bookshelves are crammed full of record books, team yearbooks, and baseball almanacs. They delight in remembering such significant facts as who was the last left-handed third baseman to hit an inning-ending double play in the fifth game of the playoffs.