Baseball, by the Rules
Introduction
Welcome! So, you’ve decided to learn about baseball? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Baseball has been around in one form or another for a while— the earliest known reference to the sport dates back to 1744! Indeed, baseball has been around long enough that what started out as a fairly simple idea— one person throws a ball at another person, that second person whacks it with a stick, a lot of running around ensues— has become somewhat complicated. Take, for example, the following sequence from baseball's modern rules:
Makes perfect sense, right? Of course, if you’re someone coming at this without much baseball knowledge, all of that might seem a little confusing. Don’t worry, we’re going to explain all of this— and so much more!
How to Use this Website
Many of baseball's rules operate in a similar manner to the example above, where there is a basic rule, then a series of caveats— sort of a "if X, then Y, unless A, B, or C" situation. When you step back and think about it, the rules and caveats start to unfold not unlike a decision tree: a pitch comes in, does the batter swing? If so, does the batter hit the ball? If so, where does the ball go? And so forth.
Here, we will attempt to use that decision tree to explain how baseball works, along with teaching a little bit about in-game strategy, as well as the history behind various rules. How? By allowing you to choose, or select, your own path through a game of baseball. Along the way, we will provide relevant illustrations of plays, including videos, most of which are drawn from Major League Baseball's video archives, which are tremendously comprehensive. There will occasionally be links to other plays or sources of information, and you will also occasionally spot footnotes; when you do, go ahead and click those footnotes for more information about the topic at hand1. Eventually, you will hit the "Navigation" section of each page, which lets you continue on your chooseable path.
Now, if you are completely new to baseball, there are a few ideas and concepts you are probably going to want to know before you dive in. Thus, we have a series of explainers for you, broken out into a couple of different groups: Game Setup explainers (things that you'd want to know before a game starts, like how the field is setup, what the positions are, etc.), and Game Event explainers (things that happen during a game, like what the strike zone means, how fair/foul balls are decided, etc.). This latter section especially contains details about parts of the game that will come up over and over again when you are going through an actual game, so intead of repeating them over and over later on, you can check them out in one place. As such, you can always return to them if needed by checking the sidebar on the left-hand side of the screen.
Speaking of that sidebar, if you're ready to just dive into the game of baseball as it is played, you can always start your journey by clicking the "Baseball by the Rules" link.
Now, when we refer to "baseball," what we are really referring to is “Major League Baseball,” so it’s worth asking…
What is Major League Baseball?
Major League Baseball (or MLB) refers to the organizational structure surrounding the highest level of professional baseball currently played. There are many, many other baseball leagues around the world, and generally speaking, the vast majority of the rules, especially when it comes to the basics of the game, are the same across those leagues.
MLB is divided into two leagues, the National League, and the American League, each with 15 teams. These two leagues have long histories— the NL was founded in 1876, and the AL was founded in 1901— and for most of those histories, the two leagues were completely separate and independent from one another, but they have since merged together, like two black holes combining to form an even more massive structure.
Each MLB team plays a 162-game schedule, that starts in late March/early April, and ends in late September/early October. The top 6 teams in each league then compete in a playoff bracket, playing multiple series of games. The two league champions then face off in an ultimate MLB championship, the World Series2.
So, that in a nutshell is the major leagues. You may, if you pay attention throughout this site, also catch the occasional reference to something called the “minor leagues.” The minor leagues (MiLB) also have long histories, but since the 1920s, these leagues have served as player development factories for the major leagues. Players will debut as professionals in the minors, move through different tiers of leagues, and finally get “called up” to the major league squad. The exact relationship and format of these leagues has varied a lot over the years, but in the current structure, each minor league team is affiliated with an MLB team, which means that the players for each minor league team are directly controlled by (and also paid by) the parent club. Those players develop through the minor league structure, which starts with something called “rookie ball,” then goes up through A-ball, Advanced A-ball, Double-A ball, Triple-A ball, and from there, the major leagues. There’s a whole lot more to this whole thing, but that’s all you really need to know for now if you’re just starting out.
The minors, organizationally-speaking, have also been pulled into the black hole that is MLB. This gives MLB the ability to use MiLB as a test bed for certain rule changes. As such, depending on what level of minor league you are watching, you might see some slightly different rules, though again, the rulebooks across MLB/MiLB are roughly 99.9% the same.
All right, if that's Major League Baseball, then how about a more basic question: What is baseball, anyway?