Baseball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of nine players each who take turns batting and fielding.

The batting team attempts to score runs by hitting a ball that is thrown by the pitcher with a bat swung by the batter, then running counter-clockwise around a series of four bases: first, second, third, and home plate. A run is scored when a player advances around the bases and returns to home plate.

Players on the batting team take turns hitting against the pitcher of the fielding team, which tries to prevent runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways. A player on the batting team who reaches a base safely can later attempt to advance to subsequent bases during teammates' turns batting, such as on a hit or by other means. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team records three outs. One turn batting for both teams, beginning with the visiting team, constitutes an inning. A game comprises nine innings, and the team with the greater number of runs at the end of the game wins. Baseball is the only major team sport in America with no game clock, although almost all games end in the ninth inning.

World Baseball Classic

The World Baseball Classic (WBC) is an international baseball tournament sanctioned from 2006 to 2013 by the International Baseball Federation (IBAF) and after 2013 by the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC). It was proposed to the IBAF by Major League Baseball (MLB), the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), and other professional baseball leagues and their players associations around the world. It is the main baseball tournament sanctioned by the WBSC, which grants to the winner the title of "World Champion". It previously coexisted with Olympic Baseball (until 2008) and the Baseball World Cup (until 2011) as IBAF–sanctioned tournaments, but baseball has not been on the Olympic program since 2008, after it was voted out by the International Olympic Committee in 2005. The final men's Baseball World Cup was held in 2011, and was discontinued to streamline the international calendar. The 2013 Classic, the third edition of the event, was won by the Dominican Republic in an all-Caribbean World Baseball Classic Final.

Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball league. A total of 30 teams now play in two divisions, the American League (AL) and National League (NL), with 15 teams in each. The AL and NL operated as separate legal entities from 1901 and 1876 respectively, until 2000, when they were merged into a single organization known as Major League Baseball. After cooperating but remaining legally separate entities since 1903, in 2000 the leagues merged into a single organization led by the Commissioner of Baseball. The organization also oversees minor league baseball leagues, which comprise about 240 teams affiliated with the major-league clubs. With the World Baseball Softball Confederation, MLB manages the international World Baseball Classic tournament.

Baseball's first professional team was founded in Cincinnati in 1869. The first few decades of professional baseball were characterized by rivalries between leagues and by players who often jumped from one team or league to another. The period before 1920 in baseball was known as the dead-ball era; players rarely hit home runs during this time. Baseball survived a conspiracy to fix the 1919 World Series, which came to be known as the Black Sox Scandal. The sport rose in popularity in the 1920s, and survived potential downturns during the Great Depression and World War II. Shortly after the war, baseball's color barrier was broken by Jackie Robinson.

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