Talk:Baseball

Potential images for future placement

The Library of Congress has a ton of photos of early 1900's baseball, with no known restrictions here. --Todd Coles 19:57, 2 February 2008 (CST)

We do not sign our names in article space.

Robert, please don't revert my edit. We do not sign our names in main article space - that is saved for signing comments on talk pages. I'll be reverting it back. Thanks. --Todd Coles 22:22, 12 February 2008 (CST)

I'm sorry Todd if I stepped on your toes. I do however think the baseball page needs serious revision and I would love to work with you on this. The reason for my edit earlier was I thought you were claiming the page as your own (since you made no additional contribution adding or retracting from my comments, which if its a misunderstanding or attributed to my newbie staus, I apologize). So can we coordinate our efforts here? I would like to make the baseball page "official". I've done quite a bit of reading, research, and writing that I think I can make a significant contribution.

Robert

Robert, you are making great contributions to this article, which is great. But I think you also need to better familiarize yourself with how a wiki works. I've reviewed the edit history and I don't see anything Todd has done that could even be remotely construed as "claiming the page" for his own. You did, by signing your name at the top, which is never done. And by the way, please sign your posts here, on the Talk page, by hitting the tilde key four times. Shawn Goldwater 00:03, 13 February 2008 (CST)

Robert, please do continue to work on this article. The contributions you made are great. Plus, if I tried to claim the page as my own I think people would run me out of town. :) I am guessing what probably happened, is you accidentally hit the signature button, and didn't realize it signed your name at the top of the article - that's the only thing I was trying to clean up. I apologize if I came off harsh, you aren't stepping on anyones toes. And, like Shawn said, if you hit ~~~~ at the end of your posts on a talk page, it will sign our name and timestamp it. There is also a button you can hit above the edit window that will do the same. Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions, and welcome to CZ. --Todd Coles 07:21, 13 February 2008 (CST)

hi Todd- thanks for your encouragement and understanding about my mistakes. I assure you that I intend to contribute more to the article but would like to know where my contribution would be best served. In other words, what do we need to do to get this "official"? Obviously this is a broad catagory but some things are more important than others. Any thoughts? Robert C. Starkins 02:27, 19 February 2008 (CST)

In my opinion, the two most critical sections of this should deal with 1) the history of the game, giving attention not only to the American game, but on the world stage as well and 2) the rules and gameplay. I, of course, can't give any definitive answer on what it will take to get it approved, since I'm not an editor.

I have been thinking about what to do with the terminology section. I think it will be helpful to someone who is completely unfamiliar with baseball in their understanding of the article, but I'm not sure it fits in right where it is. Maybe move it to a catalog subpage, I'm thinking. --Todd Coles 11:48, 19 February 2008 (CST)

Stats, the use of

Stat guru Bill James once wrote (disgustedly) that people frequently asked him what was the most "interesting" statistic he had ever encountered. That, he said, is like asking a carpenter what his most interesting tool was. Stats are merely tools to be used to study and analyze various aspects of performance and to develop new insights thereby. (Bill and I are both members of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research.) Hayford Peirce 20:36, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

I hoped you might show up, Hayford, bem vindo. Watching some on the television last night, I was trying to make sense of it. This article isn't as bad as I feared it might be...but what is a home run exactly? 'This results in the current batter and all runners on base being allowed to score a run with no interference from the other team.' They just stand out of the way, and say, please go ahead? No, I think it is an automatic prize, like a four or 6 in cricket... Ro Thorpe 20:46, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, it is akin to, I believe, a 6 in cricket. When a baseball player hits the ball entirely out of the playing area, generally into the grandstands furthest away from him, or over the fence that surrounds the playing field (once again, in the areas furthest from where he is standing), he then runs to his right (or swaggers these days) to first base, steps on it, makes a left turn, goes to second base, steps on it, makes another left turn, goes to third base and steps on it, makes a final left turn and runs down to the place where he originally stood while trying to strike the ball. When he steps on "home plate", he thereby creates a "run", or score of 1. If a teammate had been on any of the three bases when he struck his home run, the teammate would have scored ahead of him and together they would have accounted for 2 runs. Two men on base would have meant 3 runs, and men on all three bases would mean 4 runs, a rather unusual happening. A hundred years ago, when the ball being used was dirty, misshapened, and never replaced, and the playing strategies were different, a typical game might end up with a score of 3-2 or 2-1. With Babe Ruth in 1920 and the advent of the frequent home run, scores rapidly mounted and a very good-hitting team in today's world will probably score around 850 runs in the course of a 162-game season, an average of about 5.2 runs per game. A second-rate team will probably average about 4, or even less, runs per game. Ralph Kiner, a celebrated home-run hitter in the late 1940s, who was frequently criticized for being able to do very little *except* hit home runs, remarked, "Home run hitters drive Cadillacs, singles hitters drive Chevrolets." In a day when the minimum salary was $6,000 and a *good* salary was $20,000, Ralph was pulling down around $80,000 per year. He also married a beautiful tennis player named Nancy Chaffee (I think) and lived happily ever after. He is still alive and known, like Yogi Berra for his malapropisms. Hayford Peirce 21:05, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

It really is like the rounders we played in primary school, except that I think there were more bases... But a home run is what? "...hits the ball entirely out of the playing area, generally into the grandstands furthest away from him, or over the fence that surrounds the playing field (once again, in the areas furthest from where he is standing), he then runs to his right (or swaggers these days) to first base, steps on it..." - so there is nothing automatic about it? You don't have to shake yer body (or swagger it) when you hit a 4 or a 6 - you just stand there & receive the applause; or, if you've been running, and the ball reaches the boundary, you just stop, and your movement counts for nothing extra (except that the batsmen may have changed ends...). Do you have to run for a home run? Ro Thorpe 21:26, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

You have to run in the sense that, yes, you do have to physically round the three other bases and return to home plate. And you have to *touch* each base with your foot -- occasionally someone will hit a home run and then find it nullified and his turn at batting over because he missed one of the bases. And if he runs too fast and passes one of his teammates already on base, then he is also out and his score negated. In the *old* days, when men were men and wimmin were sluts, players who hit home runs actually *ran* around the bases. Now they generally swagger and saunter. In the old days, had they done that, the next time they came to bat, a very hard, very fast baseball would have been directed at their head by the pitcher. Also, an *extremely* rare home run occurs when the batter hits the ball to, usually, the very deepest part of the playing field, but still within the boundaries, and then *really* runs around the bases, arriving back at home player before the fielders can gather up the ball he has struck and thrown it to home plate ahead of his arrival. In the old days, with *enormous* parks, and dead balls that were almost impossible to hit over the fences, this so-called "inside the park home run" was quite a bit more common than today. In 1910, say, the leading home run hitter of the year might have hit 9 altogether, of which 4 or 5 would be the inside the park variety. Ruth revolutionized the game in 1920 by hitting the unheard amount of 59 in a single year, more than all but *one* of the other 15 ball teams had for the entire team. He was pretty fast for a big man and might have had a couple of inside the park ones that year, but today it is only the extreme speedsters who do this, and probably not more than once or twice a year. Hayford Peirce 21:40, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Baseball

Potential images for future placement

We do not sign our names in article space.

Stats, the use of

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