District Doubleheader (Little League Book 2)

A baseball game is played between two teams, each composed of nine players, that take turns playing offense batting and baserunning and defense pitching and fielding. A pair of turns, one at bat and one in the field, by each team constitutes an inning. A game consists of nine innings seven innings at the high school level and in doubleheaders in college and minor leagues, and six innings at the Little League level. The other team—customarily the home team—bats in the bottom, or second half, of every inning. The goal of the game is to score more points runs than the other team. The players on the team at bat attempt to score runs by circling or completing a tour of the four bases set at the corners of the square-shaped baseball diamond.

A player bats at home plate and must proceed counterclockwise to first base, second base, third base, and back home to score a run. The team in the field attempts to prevent runs from scoring and record outs , which remove opposing players from offensive action until their turn in their team's batting order comes up again.

When three outs are recorded, the teams switch roles for the next half-inning. If the score of the game is tied after nine innings, extra innings are played to resolve the contest. Many amateur games, particularly unorganized ones, involve different numbers of players and innings. The game is played on a field whose primary boundaries, the foul lines, extend forward from home plate at degree angles. The degree area within the foul lines is referred to as fair territory; the degree area outside them is foul territory.

The part of the field enclosed by the bases and several yards beyond them is the infield ; the area farther beyond the infield is the outfield. In the middle of the infield is a raised pitcher's mound, with a rectangular rubber plate the rubber at its center. The outer boundary of the outfield is typically demarcated by a raised fence, which may be of any material and height. The fair territory between home plate and the outfield boundary is baseball's field of play, though significant events can take place in foul territory, as well.

There are three basic tools of baseball: Protective helmets are also standard equipment for all batters. At the beginning of each half-inning, the nine players on the fielding team arrange themselves around the field. One of them, the pitcher , stands on the pitcher's mound.

The pitcher begins the pitching delivery with one foot on the rubber, pushing off it to gain velocity when throwing toward home plate. Another player, the catcher , squats on the far side of home plate, facing the pitcher. The rest of the team faces home plate, typically arranged as four infielders—who set up along or within a few yards outside the imaginary lines basepaths between first, second, and third base—and three outfielders. In the standard arrangement , there is a first baseman positioned several steps to the left of first base, a second baseman to the right of second base, a shortstop to the left of second base, and a third baseman to the right of third base.

The basic outfield positions are left fielder , center fielder , and right fielder. With the exception of the catcher, all fielders are required to be in fair territory when the pitch is delivered. A neutral umpire sets up behind the catcher. Play starts with a batter standing at home plate, holding a bat. A batter who hits the ball into the field of play must drop the bat and begin running toward first base, at which point the player is referred to as a runner or, until the play is over, a batter-runner.

A batter-runner who reaches first base without being put out is said to be safe and is on base. A batter-runner may choose to remain at first base or attempt to advance to second base or even beyond—however far the player believes can be reached safely. A player who reaches base despite proper play by the fielders has recorded a hit. A player who reaches first base safely on a hit is credited with a single.

If a player makes it to second base safely as a direct result of a hit, it is a double ; third base, a triple. If the ball is hit in the air within the foul lines over the entire outfield and outfield fence, if there is one , or otherwise safely circles all the bases, it is a home run: This is the most desirable result for the batter. A player who reaches base due to a fielding mistake is not credited with a hit—instead, the responsible fielder is charged with an error.

Any runners already on base may attempt to advance on batted balls that land, or contact the ground, in fair territory, before or after the ball lands. A runner on first base must attempt to advance if a ball lands in play. If a ball hit into play rolls foul before passing through the infield, it becomes dead and any runners must return to the base they occupied when the play began. If the ball is hit in the air and caught before it lands, the batter has flied out and any runners on base may attempt to advance only if they tag up contact the base they occupied when the play began, as or after the ball is caught.

Runners may also attempt to advance to the next base while the pitcher is in the process of delivering the ball to home plate; a successful effort is a stolen base. A pitch that is not hit into the field of play is called either a strike or a ball. A batter against whom three strikes are recorded strikes out. A batter against whom four balls are recorded is awarded a base on balls or walk, a free advance to first base. A batter may also freely advance to first base if the batter's body or uniform is struck by a pitch outside the strike zone, provided the batter does not swing and attempts to avoid being hit.

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While the team at bat is trying to score runs, the team in the field is attempting to record outs. In addition to the strikeout, common ways a member of the batting team may be put out include the flyout , ground out , force out , and tag out. It is possible to record two outs in the course of the same play. This is called a double play. Three outs in one play, a triple play , is possible, though rare. Players put out or retired must leave the field, returning to their team's dugout or bench. A runner may be stranded on base when a third out is recorded against another player on the team.

Stranded runners do not benefit the team in its next turn at bat as every half-inning begins with the bases empty. An individual player's turn batting or plate appearance is complete when the player reaches base, hits a home run, makes an out, or hits a ball that results in the team's third out, even if it is recorded against a teammate. On rare occasions, a batter may be at the plate when, without the batter's hitting the ball, a third out is recorded against a teammate—for instance, a runner getting caught stealing tagged out attempting to steal a base. A batter with this sort of incomplete plate appearance starts off the team's next turn batting; any balls or strikes recorded against the batter the previous inning are erased.

A runner may circle the bases only once per plate appearance and thus can score at most a single run per batting turn. Once a player has completed a plate appearance, that player may not bat again until the eight other members of the player's team have all taken their turn at bat. The batting order is set before the game begins, and may not be altered except for substitutions. Once a player has been removed for a substitute, that player may not reenter the game.

Children's games often have more liberal substitution rules. If the designated hitter DH rule is in effect, each team has a tenth player whose sole responsibility is to bat and run. The DH takes the place of another player—almost invariably the pitcher—in the batting order, but does not field.

Thus, even with the DH, each team still has a batting order of nine players and a fielding arrangement of nine players. The number of players on a baseball roster, or squad , varies by league and by the level of organized play. A typical roster features the following players: The manager , or head coach, oversees the team's major strategic decisions, such as establishing the starting rotation, setting the lineup, or batting order, before each game, and making substitutions during games—in particular, bringing in relief pitchers. Managers are typically assisted by two or more coaches ; they may have specialized responsibilities, such as working with players on hitting, fielding, pitching, or strength and conditioning.

At most levels of organized play, two coaches are stationed on the field when the team is at bat: Any baseball game involves one or more umpires, who make rulings on the outcome of each play. At a minimum, one umpire will stand behind the catcher, to have a good view of the strike zone, and call balls and strikes. Additional umpires may be stationed near the other bases, thus making it easier to judge plays such as attempted force outs and tag outs. In MLB, four umpires are used for each game, one near each base.

In the playoffs, six umpires are used: Many of the pre-game and in-game strategic decisions in baseball revolve around a fundamental fact: During the late innings of a game, as relief pitchers and pinch hitters are brought in, the opposing managers will often go back and forth trying to create favorable matchups with their substitutions: With a team that has the lead in the late innings, a manager may remove a starting position player—especially one whose turn at bat is not likely to come up again—for a more skillful fielder. The tactical decision that precedes almost every play in a baseball game involves pitch selection.

With a runner on base and taking a lead , the pitcher may attempt a pickoff , a quick throw to a fielder covering the base to keep the runner's lead in check or, optimally, effect a tag out. Violation of any one of these rules could result in the umpire calling a balk against the pitcher, which permits any runners on base to advance one base with impunity. With a runner on third base, the infielders may play in , moving closer to home plate to improve the odds of throwing out the runner on a ground ball , though a sharply hit grounder is more likely to carry through a drawn-in infield.

Several basic offensive tactics come into play with a runner on first base, including the fundamental choice of whether to attempt a steal of second base. The hit and run is sometimes employed with a skillful contact hitter: A batter, particularly one who is a fast runner, may also attempt to bunt for a hit. A sacrifice bunt employed with a runner on third base, aimed at bringing that runner home, is known as a squeeze play. The evolution of baseball from older bat-and-ball games is difficult to trace with precision. Consensus once held that today's baseball is a North American development from the older game rounders , popular among children in Great Britain and Ireland.

A Search for the Roots of the Game , by American baseball historian David Block, suggests that the game originated in England; recently uncovered historical evidence supports this position. Block argues that rounders and early baseball were actually regional variants of each other, and that the game's most direct antecedents are the English games of stoolball and "tut-ball". By the early s, there were reports of a variety of uncodified bat-and-ball games recognizable as early forms of baseball being played around North America.

In the mids, a baseball craze hit the New York metropolitan area , [52] and by , local journals were referring to baseball as the "national pastime" or "national game". In , it barred participation by African Americans. The National Agreement of formalized relations both between the two major leagues and between them and the National Association of Professional Base Ball Leagues, representing most of the country's minor professional leagues.

That year also saw the founding of the Negro National League ; the first significant Negro league, it would operate until For part of the s, it was joined by the Eastern Colored League. Compared with the present, professional baseball in the early 20th century was lower-scoring, and pitchers were more dominant. Strict new regulations governed the ball's size, shape and composition, along with a new rule officially banning the spitball and other pitches that depended on the ball being treated or roughed-up with foreign substances, resulted in a ball that traveled farther when hit.

Louis Cardinals general manager Branch Rickey invested in several minor league clubs and developed the first modern farm system. The first elections to the National Baseball Hall of Fame took place in In , Little League Baseball was founded in Pennsylvania. A large number of minor league teams disbanded when World War II led to a player shortage.

Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley led the formation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League to help keep the game in the public eye. Jackie Robinson was signed by the National League's Brooklyn Dodgers and began playing for their minor league team in Montreal.

In , the union's power—and players' salaries—began to increase greatly when the reserve clause was effectively struck down , leading to the free agency system. Regular-season interleague play was introduced in and the second-highest attendance mark for a full season was set. While their identities were maintained for scheduling purposes and the designated hitter distinction , the regulations and other functions—such as player discipline and umpire supervision—they had administered separately were consolidated under the rubric of MLB.

In , Barry Bonds established the current record of 73 home runs in a single season. There had long been suspicions that the dramatic increase in power hitting was fueled in large part by the abuse of illegal steroids as well as by the dilution of pitching talent due to expansion , but the issue only began attracting significant media attention in and there was no penalty for the use of performance-enhancing drugs before Widely known as America's pastime, baseball is well established in several other countries as well.

As early as , a professional league, the International Association , featured teams from both Canada and the US. The Dominican Republic held its first islandwide championship tournament in Many European countries have professional leagues as well; the most successful, other than the Dutch league , is the Italian league , founded in After being admitted to the Olympics as a medal sport beginning with the Games , baseball was dropped from the Summer Olympic Games at the International Olympic Committee meeting. It remained part of the Games. The inaugural Classic , held in March , was the first tournament involving national teams to feature a significant number of MLB participants.

Baseball has certain attributes that set it apart from the other popular team sports in the countries where it has a following. All of these sports use a clock; [] in all of them, play is less individual and more collective; [] and in none of them is the variation between playing fields nearly as substantial or important. In clock-limited sports, games often end with a team that holds the lead killing the clock rather than competing aggressively against the opposing team. In contrast, baseball has no clock; a team cannot win without getting the last batter out and rallies are not constrained by time.

At almost any turn in any baseball game, the most advantageous strategy is some form of aggressive strategy. While nine innings has been the standard since the beginning of professional baseball, the duration of the average major league game has increased steadily through the years.

At the turn of the 20th century, games typically took an hour and a half to play. In the s, they averaged just less than two hours, which eventually ballooned to 2: In , Nippon Professional Baseball took steps aimed at shortening games by 12 minutes from the preceding decade's average of 3: In , the average nine-inning playoff game in Major League baseball was 3 hours and 35 minutes. This was up 10 minutes from and 21 minutes from Although baseball is a team sport, individual players are often placed under scrutiny and pressure.

In , a baseball instructional manual pointed out that every single pitch, of which there are often more than two hundred in a game, involves an individual, one-on-one contest: While coaching staffs can signal pitcher or batter to pursue certain tactics, the execution of the play itself is a series of solitary acts. If the batter hits a line drive, the outfielder is solely responsible for deciding to try to catch it or play it on the bounce and for succeeding or failing. The statistical precision of baseball is both facilitated by this isolation and reinforces it.

As described by Mandelbaum,. It is impossible to isolate and objectively assess the contribution each [football] team member makes to the outcome of the play In baseball, by contrast, every player is more or less on his own Baseball is therefore a realm of complete transparency and total responsibility. A baseball player lives in a glass house, and in a stark moral universe Everything that every player does is accounted for and everything accounted for is either good or bad, right or wrong.

Cricket is more similar to baseball than many other team sports in this regard: There is no statistical equivalent in cricket for the fielding error and thus less emphasis on personal responsibility in this area of play. Unlike those of most sports, baseball playing fields can vary significantly in size and shape. The most famously idiosyncratic outfield boundary is the left-field wall at Boston's Fenway Park , in use since Similarly, there are no regulations at all concerning the dimensions of foul territory. Thus a foul fly ball may be entirely out of play in a park with little space between the foul lines and the stands, but a foulout in a park with more expansive foul ground.

These variations can make the difference between a double and a triple or inside-the-park home run. While the adjacent image shows a traditional field surfacing arrangement and the one used by virtually all MLB teams with naturally surfaced fields , teams are free to decide what areas will be grassed or bare. Surface variations can have a significant effect on how ground balls behave and are fielded as well as on baserunning. Similarly, the presence of a roof seven major league teams play in stadiums with permanent or retractable roofs can greatly affect how fly balls are played.

The area out-of-bounds on a football or soccer field does not affect play the way foul territory in baseball does, so variations in that regard are largely insignificant. These physical variations create a distinctive set of playing conditions at each ballpark. Other local factors, such as altitude and climate, can also significantly affect play. A given stadium may acquire a reputation as a pitcher's park or a hitter's park, if one or the other discipline notably benefits from its unique mix of elements.

The most exceptional park in this regard is Coors Field , home of the Colorado Rockies. A team that plays in a park with a relatively short right field, such as the New York Yankees , will tend to stock its roster with left-handed pull hitters , who can best exploit it.

On the individual level, a player who spends most of his career with a team that plays in a hitter's park will gain an advantage in batting statistics over time—even more so if his talents are especially suited to the park. Organized baseball lends itself to statistics to a greater degree than many other sports. Each play is discrete and has a relatively small number of possible outcomes. In the late 19th century, a former cricket player, English-born Henry Chadwick of Brooklyn , was responsible for the "development of the box score , tabular standings, the annual baseball guide, the batting average , and most of the common statistics and tables used to describe baseball.

The Official Baseball Rules administered by MLB require the official scorer to categorize each baseball play unambiguously. The rules provide detailed criteria to promote consistency. The score report is the official basis for both the box score of the game and the relevant statistical records. Certain traditional statistics are familiar to most baseball fans.

The basic batting statistics include: The basic baserunning statistics include: The basic pitching statistics include: The basic fielding statistics include: Among the many other statistics that are kept are those collectively known as situational statistics. For example, statistics can indicate which specific pitchers a certain batter performs best against. If a given situation statistically favors a certain batter, the manager of the fielding team may be more likely to change pitchers or have the pitcher intentionally walk the batter in order to face one who is less likely to succeed.

Sabermetrics refers to the field of baseball statistical study and the development of new statistics and analytical tools. The term is also used to refer directly to new statistics themselves. The growing popularity of sabermetrics since the early s has brought more attention to two batting statistics that sabermetricians argue are much better gauges of a batter's skill than batting average: Writing in , philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen described baseball as America's national religion.

Scholar Peter Bjarkman describes "how deeply the sport is ingrained in the history and culture of a nation such as Cuba, [and] how thoroughly it was radically reshaped and nativized in Japan. The major league game in the United States was originally targeted toward a middle-class, white-collar audience: With the rise in popularity of other team sports with much higher average ticket prices—football, basketball, and hockey—professional baseball had become among the most blue-collar-oriented of leading American spectator sports. Overall, baseball has a large following in the United States; a poll found that nearly half of Americans are fans.

Total NPB attendance for the year was approximately 20 million. While in the preceding two decades, MLB attendance grew by 50 percent and revenue nearly tripled, the comparable NPB figures were stagnant. There are concerns that MLB's growing interest in acquiring star Japanese players will hurt the game in their home country. Similarly, according to one official pronouncement, the sport's governing authority "has never taken into account attendance As of [update] , Little League Baseball oversees leagues with close to 2.

A varsity baseball team is an established part of physical education departments at most high schools and colleges in the United States. Today, high school baseball in particular is immensely popular there. The tournaments are known, respectively, as Spring Koshien and Summer Koshien after the 55,capacity stadium where they are played. Talented children as young as seven are sent to special district schools for more intensive training—the first step on a ladder whose acme is the national baseball team.

That is, until a new pitcher hits the scene. Matt Christopher is the best selling name behind more than sports-themed books for young readers.

by Matt Christopher

Flowing text, Original pages. Web, Tablet, Phone, eReader. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders. It's an all star showdown Carter Jones leads the charge with a devastating pitch that leaves batters blinking in confusion. Forest Park looks unstoppable--until a long-held grudge threatens to break apart the team and end its postseason journey.

Catcher Liam McGrath, Carter's cousin, knows all about grudges. But if he's going to succeed on his California All-Star team, he has to put them aside and work together with a rival-turned-teammate. The debut book in the Jeter Publishing imprint, The Contract is a middle grade baseball novel inspired by the youth of legendary sports icon and role model Derek Jeter. He even imagines himself in the World Series. So when Derek is chosen for the Little League Tigers, he hopes to play shortstop. But on the day of the assignments, Derek Starts at second base. Still, he tries his best while he wishes and dreams of that shortstop spot.

And to help him stay focused on school, his parents make him a contract: Derek makes sure he always plays his best game—on and off the baseball field!

He is a true legend in professional sports and a role model for young people both on the field and through his Turn 2 Foundation. For more about Jeter Publishing visit JeterPublishing.

Mike Lupica delivers a New York Times bestselling middle grade series! Ben McBain is every football team's dream player. He's a jack-of-all-trades guy that can handle almost any position.