contents

       Preface

       Baseball History

       Stadiums

Fact or Fiction?

       Rules and Lingo

       Names

       Baseball Media and Popular Culture

       Plays, Strategies, and Statistics

      Great Moments

       Blunders, Jokes, and Not-So-Great Moments

       Firsts and Record-Breakers

       The Greats and Near-Greats

       Traditions and Superstitions

       The Best of the Best: Baseball’s Thirty Most Memorable Moments

      Champions and Award Winners

       Question and Feature List

preface

      One of the most remarkable things about baseball is that it is followed passionately by people who are polar opposites. It’s a sport that is loved by poets and statisticians. W.P. Kinsella takes us into fantasy worlds in his novels and short stories, making ghosts, time travel, and prophecy seem not just plausible, but factual. On the other side of the brain, Bill James can examine every minutiae of the game with numeric analysis that convinces legions that anything that happens in the game can have a formula applied to it.

      Baseball is also loved by both rich and developing nations. The United States and Japan play and watch baseball with a passion. That passion is equalled or surpassed by nations such as the Dominican Republic.

      What is it that draws people to this sport? Perhaps it’s that the game can be so simple, while at the same time so complex. Or maybe it’s the fact that it differs so much from the other major team sports, nearly all of which are played on rectangular playing surfaces and involve moving an object from one end to the other in order to score in a net or other designated area. Baseball is played on a field that fans out from home plate. The defence controls the ball, and the ball never does the scoring — the players themselves do the scoring, and they do so by running a route that brings them back to where they started. And as Kinsella points out, it’s a game about infinity: in theory, a game can continue forever as long as no team holds the lead at the end of an extra inning, or a third out is never recorded in the last inning; and when played on a field without an outfield wall, the foul lines are never ending.

      Whatever the appeal, baseball fans are attracted to every nuance of their chosen sport, and that’s why we have such an insatiable appetite for stories and facts about the game. From rattling off statistics to telling anecdotes about players and games we’ve seen or heard about, every fan delights in the ongoing history of baseball.

      This book is a small part of that ongoing history. One book can’t hope to capture all the questions and answers that baseball can inspire, but it is my hope that it captures some of the spirit that the game arouses.