o sports person who seems to understand how baseball works. how does it work. teach me your ways (watching sports)
okay yay!! fair warning im a mets fan and love their broadcasters, so im going to use a bunch of their clips as examples.
so you probably got a lot of the basics today. The object of the game is score runs, which is when a batter tags all three bases in the infield to make it back to home plate. EDIT: this got so long so fast holy fuck
Here's the diamond! everyone in the dirt (except pitcher and catcher) is an infielder, everyone in the green is an outfielder.
Usually there's 9 innings, but the WBPL is doing 7 inning games. An inning is when both teams get their turn to play defense and play offense.
At the top of an inning, the visiting team will bat (play offense), with the home team fielding (playing defense). At the bottom of an inning, the home team will bat, with the visiting team fielding. This lets the home team get "last licks".
The same players who field, bat, and vice versa. The only player who doesn't bat (most of the time, but we can get into that later) is the pitcher, who is usually replaced in the batting order by the designated hitter.
Here's some definitions:
strike - a pitch that either 1) a batter swings at and misses or 2) does not swing at, but was pitched into the "strike zone"
strike zone - square the width of home plate that roughly extends from the batter's knees to chest where they should be able to hit a ball.
ball - pitch outside the strike zone. the batter must not swing for a pitch to be called a ball.
strikeout - an out from three strikes in an at bat.
strikeout swinging (k) - the batter swung.
strikeout looking (ꓘ) - the batter did NOT swing. (NOTE: functionally, these strikeouts are exactly the same in a game, but they are notated differently!)
walk - after receiving four balls, a batter walks to first base.
Foul Ball - balls hit outside the white lines that line the diamond (scroll up to the diamond again and you'll see what i mean). It gets way more complicated very quickly, so I'm going to leave the official MLB definition here. Something important to note is that fouls will count as strikes until the 3rd strike (i.e. you can't strike out on foul balls). If a player fouls a ball with a count of 2-1 (two balls, one strike), that's a strike and the count becomes 2-2 (two balls, two strikes). If they foul again, those subsequent fouls are not strikes.
Foul Tip - usually you'll hear people say this when the batter fouls a ball behind themselves. once again, MLB has a more in depth definition.
HBP - hit by pitch, which also gets you first base. As you can imagine, this means the batter was hit by a pitch.
Breaking up these definitions to paint a picture for you of one of the most painful situations you can watch as a viewer. Bases loaded, then the pitcher walks a player, which forces a run. Happened to the Braves a couple days ago, check it out. Okay, more definitions!
Out - an offensive player is caught in some way by the defensive team. There's a bunch of ways this happens, like strikeouts, which we just covered. Essentially, they're going back to the dugout. Each team gets three outs per inning.
Flyout - out from an outfielder catching a ball before it hits the ground (and here's baby Met Carson Benge with a flyout then absolutely HAMMERING that ball from the outfield to home plate! It's crazy that's so fucking far! And this results in 2 outs for this play.)
Popout - out from an infielder catching a ball before it hits the ground
Forceout - when fielders tag a base with the ball before the runner is able to make it to the base. Here's a very clear forceout.
Groundout - forceout from fielding a groundball, then throwing the ball to a baseman to tag a base before the runner reaches it. The most common one is throwing to the first baseman for them to tag the base with the ball before the batter gets there. This is probably one of the most common plays you see in baseball! (And here's pitcher Luke Weaver making a beautiful play for an out at first)
Lineout - a line drive caught by a fielder.
Line Drive - pitch hit hard in the air with a low arc. Here's a line drive to lineout in the outfield.
RBI - Run(s) batted in. Runs scored from a player's at bat.
Error - when fielders fuck up a play they should've made. It can get really fucking painful, check out this three errors into three runs play by the Royals from a few weeks ago.
Batting Average - batter's stat from dividing the total of base hits by the number of times at bat, not including walks, sacrifices, times hit by a pitch, or times interfered with by the catcher
OPS (On-base plus slugging) - On-base is how often a hitter reaches base, per plate appearance (minus reaching base on an error, dropped third strike, or fielder's choice), while slugging is total bases, ONLY from hits. For slugging, singles count as one, doubles are multiplied by two, triples are multiplied by three, and home runs are multiplied by four. That's divided by a player's total number of at-bats. There's been a shift where OPS is becoming a more popular stat to use than batting avg, so I think it's worth mentioning.
Single - batter hits a pitch and makes it to first base.
Double - batter hits a pitch and makes it second base
Triple - batter hits a pitch and makes it to third base
Home Run - batter hits a pitch (usually) out of the park (meaning past the yellow line that defines the field's boundaries) and makes it around all the bases, back to home plate.
Double Play - when fielders are able to put two players out in one play.
Steal - when a player advances to the next base unexpectedly, not from a ball put in play by a batter. This can be from things like the catcher losing control of the ball from a wild pitch.
Pickoff - When a pitcher, instead of pitching to the batter, turns and quickly throws to an infielder to try to prevent a stolen base.
Pinch hitter - substituting a player in the batting order.
It's a really fun game, but it's definitely slower moving than most other sports. One of the common things to do while watching a game is keeping your own scorecard! I even saw someone post one in the WPBL tag earlier today, which is awesome. Here's the wikihow on keeping a scorecard!
And then in no particular order, here are some things to watch for:
The pitcher and catcher control the game! They're constantly in cahoots with each other and it can be so fun to watch them. Or they hate each other which is way rarer but can be cwazy. In the WPBL, you can watch the catcher telling the pitcher which pitch to throw with hand signals (in MLB they use a system called pitchcomm to do this instead, which has little earpieces for the players). The catcher is running strategy for the team, and sequencing pitches for the pitcher to hopefully optimize strikeouts.
When a ball is pitched all the fielders do a lil jump and it's cute :)
When a team is down by a lot or up by a lot, they're allowed to put a non-pitcher on the mound (you'll see this referred to as a position player). It can be soooo good or sooooooooo bad. The point of this is to not tire out your pitchers on a game you can't win. You'll hear a lot of talk about pitchers in that sense - coaches try not to let pitchers get over 100 pitches in a game, and try to rest them multiple days in between games to keep their arms healthy. In fact, that was the issue for the Atlanta Braves pitcher in an earlier clip - he was having a terrible game but there was no one to relieve him because the Braves had exhausted their bullpen (used to refer to a team's pitchers, also the name for the area of the park where pitchers warm up) in earlier games. They just hung him out to dry until they were down enough runs to put in a position player. That poor guy ended with like 11 runs allowed in something like 2.6 innings. It was truly bad.
so i also said that the commentators weren't talking about bullshit and that its a time honored baseball tradition. i just wanna include a recent example of what im talking about. for away games, a guy on the mets broadcast team tries the hotdogs in every park and then gives a review. he's just on the right side of insane and i look forward to every time they let him talk for extended periods of time. and his mid taper fade.
okay yeah i feel like i just rambled forever! Please tell me if you have specific questions! I want to try to find more video examples but it's been a little hard, because these more routine plays don't really make highlight reels. But I'll try to reblog with more examples when I come across them <3
