Pitching position

In baseball, there are two legal pitching positions: the windup, and the set. Colloquially, the set is often referred to as "the stretch", although this term actually only refers to one part of the pitching motion when pitching from the set.

Each type of pitching position has its strengths and weaknesses. Compared to the set, the windup has a relatively slower execution, so therefore is better suited for situations in which there are no baserunners, or when the lead runner is on third base, since it is difficult to steal home plate. Conversely, a pitch from the set, having a relatively faster execution, is preferred when there are baserunners. Faster execution is important to prevent stolen bases. A pitcher may also use other techniques to prevent stealing; these are ways of holding the runner on and include the pickoff, the pitchout and the slide step.

However, some pitchers, particularly relief pitchers, are more comfortable pitching from the set position, and thus use it regardless of the situation.

Jessica Alba

Jessica Marie Alba (born April 28, 1981) is an American actress, model and businesswoman. She has won various awards for her acting, including the Choice Actress Teen Choice Award and Saturn Award for Best Actress on Television, and a Golden Globe nomination for her lead role in the television series Dark Angel.

Alba began her television and movie appearances at age 13 in Camp Nowhere and The Secret World of Alex Mack (1994). She rose to prominence as the lead actress in the James Cameron television series Dark Angel (2000–2002) when she was 19 years old. Alba later appeared in Honey (2003), Sin City (2005), Fantastic Four (2005), Into the Blue (2005), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and Good Luck Chuck (2007).

In January 2012, Alba co-founded The Honest Company, a consumer goods company that sells non-toxic household products, and owns 15 to 20 percent of the company.

Early life

Alba was born in Pomona, California, to Catherine (née Jensen) and Mark David Alba. Her mother has Danish, Welsh, German, English, and French Canadian ancestry, while her paternal grandparents, who were born in California, were both the children of Mexican immigrants. She has a younger brother, Joshua. Her third cousin, once removed, is writer Gustavo Arellano. Her father's Air Force career took the family to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Del Rio, Texas, before settling back in Claremont, California, when she was nine years old. Alba has described her family as being a "very conservative family – a traditional, Catholic, Latin American family" and herself as very liberal; she says she had identified herself as a "feminist" as early as age five.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Gail Winfrey, born January 29, 1954, is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is now North America's first and only multi-billionaire Black. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.