Baseball is a group sport without physical contact, where two teams of nine players face each other. It is practiced in a field partially covered with grass because the line that joins the bases island; The name of the land is diamond, due to its irregular pentagon structure.
The bases, on the other hand, make up a square inside the diamond, and the distance between them is 26 to 30 meters; The batting site is in one of the vertices. Alongside football and basketball, baseball is one of the most important sports in the United States.
It is also widely practiced in Central American countries, including Panama, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. In it, a player must hit a ball that is thrown at him by his opponent and then start a race whose purpose is to touch as many bases as possible; if you can turn the diamond, that is, return to the batting side, score a point, called a run. The other players belonging to the batter’s team may also advance. While they run, their rivals try to pick up the ball and pass it to the players located at the bases; If you manage to get it before the batter or another of the runners reaches the base, the race will not be counted.
Since the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, baseball reached a great boom in the United States, despite this, its origins are still a mystery. It is wrong to say that Officer Abner Doubleday invented it. In England, around the middle of the 18th century, there are references to a children’s game called baseball, also in other European countries.
In the same 18th century, baseball appears in newspapers of American students and soldiers. In any case, the first formal baseball team was formed in New York in 1842 by several young men, including firefighter Alexander Cartwright (1820-1892), who is credited with the official creation of the sport. The club was the New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club.
In 1845, team members published twenty rules that would later be the basis for current baseball. On June 19, 1846, in New Jersey, New York Knickerbockers played a game against the New York Club, the first official baseball game, to be more exact, and Cartwright acted as a judge in him.
In 1850 the National Baseball Players Association was created, with 16 teams. Then came the Civil War, and the meetings were suspended. In 1866 the players began to be paid for playing matches, one of the teams that applied it was the Cincinnati Red Stocking, currently the Boston Red Stocking.
In 1871 the League of the National Association of Professional Baseball Players was created, which became the National League in 1876; in her, the use of the calendar of games and the contracts of the sportsmen was applied. In 1881 an American Association was created with other teams and in response to the National League.
The creation of several leagues in different regions led to the consolidation of the big leagues, made up of thirty teams, whose champions play the World Series. Between 1900 and 1919, there were a couple of unfortunate events: the death of a player due to a ball, which caused a change in the balls used, and the Black Sox Scandal, a corruption case that triggered the creation of the charge of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. In them, the participation of black players was banned until the forties. Jackie Robinson was the first to integrate a team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947. The club, with a notable performance by Robinson, was proclaimed champion in that year.
The nine players occupy different positions on the field, and they vary depending on whether they attack or defend themselves. In the case of the attack, players bat in a given order at the start of the game and seek to complete runs.
The positions are: the pitcher or pitcher ; the batter; the first baseman, or first baseman ; the second base, or second baseman ; the third baseman, or third baseman ; the shortstop , or shortstop , which is located between the second and third base; the left fielder, or left fielder ; the central gardener, or central fielder ; and the right gardener, or right fielder. Gardeners must catch the throws in the air or return the ball to the diamond for the players of their team located at the bases. The referees are called umpires. The principal is located behind the batting site and enables or punishes the pitches. In each base, there are secondary referees, and they decide if the player reached the base before the ball arrived at the hands of the rival team.
In case the batter hits the ball, and she falls to the ground, if he manages to advance to first base, the movement is called simple; if you reach second base, double; if it reaches third base, triple; and if it turns full it is called homerun. In case the ball is caught by a rival player before touching the ground, the batter is eliminated. The team that achieves the most races wins the match.
The meetings have a duration of nine episodes, called innings; when a team attacks and defends an episode is constituted. The attack corresponds to the team that bats, generally the visitors fulfill that function in the first place. The turn of batting changes when three of the players of the same club fail to advance to other bases; nine times, he changes from attack to defense. In the rules of baseball, the draw is not contemplated. Therefore, the games usually extend until one of the teams wins.
Simultaneously with the growth of baseball in the United States, Mexico, and Central America, they also cultivated this sport; According to rumors, some Mexican teams crossed the border only to play meetings with American clubs. The level of the Central American game soon matched the North American, even exceeded it. In recent history, for example, baseball was an Olympic sport from 1992 to 2008, and, during that time, Cuba reached the gold medal in three of the five tournaments played and the silver medal in the remaining two occasions.
Among the most important baseball competitions are: the Caribbean Series , played by the clubs of Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, who finish champions in their respective leagues; the Latin American Series , with the winning teams of the leagues in the countries included in the Latin American Association of Professional Baseball (ALBP); the Baseball World Cup , where twenty-two teams compete; and the World Baseball Classic , which is also played at the selections level. In addition, the highest authority of baseball is the World Baseball and Softball Confederation.