Table of Contents
Introduction: How to Use This Book
Overview: The Baseball Field Guide is designed and written to be a quick and easy-to-use reference guide to the complete rules of Major League Baseball. It organizes and explains the vague, misleading, confusing, inconsistent, and obscure rules of Americas favorite pastime.
Since the inception of professional baseball in the late 1800s the rules have evolved haphazardly revised, appended, and patched together by various committees over the decades. While the official rules are worded to cover every angle and circumstance, they are not easy to read. The Baseball Field Guide takes a different approach. We rewrote the rules to explain them in plain English, enhancing them with lots of examples and illustrations. The result is an easy-to-use reference guide that will help everyone, from beginner to expert, understand every play in the game.
This book is intended to be used as a reference guide.
The information in this book is written and organized to be easily read and retrieved. The rules are intuitively arranged according to topic and subject.
Each chapter covers a major topic and begins with a list of the contents to be found in that chapter. Important rules are cross-referenced throughout the book. Since many of the more fundamental rules apply to several topics, the same rule may be explained in more than one chapter. In cases where rules are repeated, our explanation discusses the rules from a point of view relevant to that chapter.
The rules of baseball are gender-neutral, so any time we refer to he, him, or his which we do a lot in the book please consider it to also mean she, her, or hers.
This book was not intended to be read from cover to cover at least not in one sitting. Instead it is designed to allow you to get quick and clear answers to one or two issues at a time. Its a handy book to have around while watching a game to answer a question, settle an argument, or perhaps win a bet about the true nature of the infield fly rule.
In the long run, we hope this book helps you enjoy the beautiful game of baseball.
Special thanks:
This book was created with the help of many nice people and organizations, including:
Laura Gross, Peter Zubiaurre, Greg Littleton, Lou Fratello, Kimberly Fratello, James Bintliff, Claudia Christen, Smart Design, and John Oakes.
Thanks especially to Rick Roder, who was invaluable coaching us through every detail of the more complex rules of baseball as interpreted by Major League Umpires. Special thanks also go to Ivy McLemore, who has served as an official scorer at Houston Astros games for four decades. Ivy assisted us with the finer points of scoring.
www.baseballfieldguide.com
Basic Rules of Baseball
This chapter provides preliminary insight into the rules of the game. The first two pages show the basic rules at a glance. Subsequent pages go a bit further but not much, since this chapter is meant to be a quick guide.
Chapters later in this book discuss the rules of baseball in detail. This chapter is intended to get new fans started.
Baseball At a Glance
Overview: This section provides a quick description of baseball, and shows the basic components of the game, including the field, the players and the equipment. Later in the chapter you can learn more about how the game is played.
Baseball, a quick description
Baseball is played by two teams of nine players each. The objective of the game is to score more runs than the opposing team. A baseball field is arranged with four bases. In counterclockwise order, they are first base, second base, third base, and home plate. A run is scored when a runner touches all bases, reaching home plate.
A baseball game lasts nine innings (additional innings will be played if the score is tied). In each inning both teams will have a chance to bat.
To start the inning, nine fielders will take their positions. The pitcher will pitch the ball to a batter from the opposing team, who will try to hit it. The batter will get a strike if he swings and misses, or fails to swing at a perfectly good pitch. If he gets three strikes, he is out. He will also be out if he hits the ball but his hit is caught by a fielder before it touches the ground. If his hit touches the ground first, however, the batter begins his run around the bases. If other runners are on base they may run as well.
The fielders will attempt to put out the batter or runners as they advance. A runner touching a base, however, is safe on that base and cannot be put out. A team is allowed three outs before the next team will come to bat.
The winning team will be the team with the most runs scored at the end of the game.
The field and players:
The infield
Basic equipment
Baseball: Basic Rules
Overview: The goal of the team at bat is to reach the next base hence the name baseball. If a runner safely reaches first, second, third, and home plate he will score a run for his team.
How to score: The first thing a batter wants to do is to get on a base safely. There are many ways to get on base, but the most typical way is to hit the ball so that none of the fielders can catch it. If the batter does that, he can try to run to a base before a fielder tags him with the ball. If he can continue to advance to all the bases until he makes it back to home plate (where he started), he will score a run for his team.
Pitching
The pitchers job is to pitch the ball to the batter, in an attempt to put him out. The pitcher may throw the ball into the strike zone, or may try to throw the ball just outside of the strike zone in hopes the batter will swing but miss. Each pitch thrown by the pitcher will result in either:
a strike
a ball
a hit
an awarded base
Three strikes: the batter is out.
Four balls: the batter is walked.
If the batter swings and misses it will count as a strike. A ball hit into foul territory will also be considered a strike unless it is caught before it touches the ground for an out, or it occurs on the third strike. On the third strike, a hit into foul territory that is not caught for an out is ignored.
If the pitcher throws four balls (pitches outside of the strike zone) at which the batter does not swing, the batter will be walked, meaning he will advance to first base.
If the batter hits the ball, what happens next depends on where the ball goes and what happens to the ball when it gets there.
