| |
Betting
System
Sports betting is the general
activity of predicting sports results by making a wager on the
outcome of a sporting event. Perhaps more so than other forms of
gambling, the legality and general acceptance of sport betting
varies from nation to nation.
Girls
Basketball Uniforms
|
|
Baseball
Baseball is a
bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The
goal of baseball is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat
and touching a series of four markers called bases arranged at the
corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the
batting team) take turns hitting while the other team (the fielding
team) tries to stop them from scoring runs by getting hitters out in any
of several ways. A player on the batting team can stop at any of the
bases and hope to score on a teammate's hit. The teams switch between
batting and fielding whenever the fielding team gets three outs. One
turn at bat for each team constitutes an inning; nine innings make up a
professional game. The team with the most runs at the end of the game
wins.
Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is popular in
North America, Central America, parts of South America and the
Caribbean, and parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia. The modern version
of the game developed in North America, beginning in the eighteenth
century. The consensus of historians is that it evolved from earlier
bat-and-ball games, such as cricket and rounders, brought to the
continent by British and Irish immigrants. By the late nineteenth
century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the
United States. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball in contrast
to the very similar game of softball.
In North America, professional Major League Baseball teams are divided
into the National League (NL) and American League (AL). Each league has
three divisions: East, West, and Central. Every year, the champion of
Major League Baseball is determined by playoffs culminating in the World
Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular
season division winners, plus one wild card team. The wild card is the
team with the best record among the non–division winners in the league.
In the National League, the pitcher is required to bat, per the
traditional rules. In the American League, there is a tenth player, a
designated hitter, who bats for the pitcher. Each major league team has
a "farm system" of minor league teams at various levels. These teams
allow younger players to develop as they gain on-field experience
against opponents with similar levels of skill.
The story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 was once widely
promoted and widely believed. There was and is no evidence for this
claim, except for the testimony of one man decades after the fact, and
there is a great deal of persuasive counter-evidence. Doubleday left
many letters and papers, but they contain no description of baseball or
even a suggestion that he considered himself a prominent person in the
history of the game. His New York Times obituary makes no mention of
baseball, nor does a 1911 encyclopedia article about Doubleday. (For
more, see Abner Doubleday)
The distinct evolution of baseball from among the various bat-and-ball
games is difficult to trace with precision. Oina, a very similar
bat-and-ball traditional game played in Romania was mentioned for the
first time during the rule of King Vlaicu Voda, in 1364. 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. Several references to "baseball" and "bat-and-ball"
have been found in British and American documents of the early
eighteenth century.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. 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. 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. |
|
