Baseball is a team sport played between two opposing teams of nine players on a field in the shape of a diamond. The object of the game is to score more runs than the other team. The batting team attempts to do this by hitting a ball and running between four bases positioned at the corners of the diamond. The defending team tries to get the batting team out by either catching the ball on the fly, throwing the batter out, or tagging out a base runner.
Like all professional sports, baseball generates most of its revenue from fans that pay to attend the games. This has been supplemented with income from radio, television and cable, as well as licensing and other sources. A major challenge for the league is to keep the number of people attending the games at a high level and to increase those who are watching the games in other ways.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American sportswriters struggled to define baseball’s place in the nation’s cultural life. While other professional sports had their own unique niches, Americans yearned for a sport they could claim as exclusively American. Baseball’s nationalistic sentiments helped make it a favorite, but the game was also facing potent competition from other professional sports (especially gridiron football) and from a general conversion of Americans to private, at-home diversions. Attendance fell, and the minor leagues and hundreds of amateur and semipro teams folded.
In the twentieth century, innovations were introduced to help stabilize the game’s popularity. Most notable was the introduction of interleague play, allowing American and National League teams to play clubs from the other league during the regular season. This heightened fan interest in cities that had crosstown rivals and reopened the debate about which league was better.
The other significant change was the introduction of the World Series, which pits the best teams in each league against one another in a best-of-seven-games series to determine the champion. This added an exciting new element to the season and increased interest in both the World Series and individual player performances.
In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a resurgence of interest in statistics and analytical approaches to the game has grown to be known as “sabermetrics.” This approach is more focused on business aspects of the game than on traditional aspects such as the history and traditions of the game. This movement has been aided by the development of computerized databases and statistical software programs that allow analysts to gather more data than ever before. This has resulted in improved analysis and insights into the game of baseball that have not only influenced the game’s business practices but also have shaped its culture. In this way, sabermetrics has helped revitalize interest in the game of baseball and contributed to its continuing relevance to modern society.