Gio Urshela, of the Sacramento Athletics, makes contact with a pitch from Nick Cannon, of the Chicago White Sox.

Fair Ball

The pitch comes in, the batter swings— and they hit the ball! What’s more, they hit the ball fair. This means the ball is in play, and now the defense is going to try and turn the play into an out. The batter, meanwhile, is obligated to run to first base. At this point, the batter becomes a runner, and is subject to the rules of being a runner. Indeed, you will sometimes see the batter, as a runner, referred to as the "batter/runner," so if you run into that phrasing in the subsequent pages, well, now you know what it means.

What happens next depends on a lot of things: how hard the ball was hit, where the ball was hit, where the defenders were playing, etc. Generally, though, the biggest factor in determining what happens next is what sort of contact the batter made. But! There are lots of ways to distinguish between types of contact— indeed, by specifying that the ball is fair, we have already made one of those distinctions.