Jus Pitch them. Review on Baseball

Baseball is a team sport, a bat-and-ball game, in which a hard, fist-sized ball is thrown by a defensive player called a pitcher from a pitchers mound 60 1/2 feet away, to an offensive player called a batter, who stands at a plate called home and attempts to hit it with a tapered, cylindrical, smooth stick called a bat. The ball itself is also called a baseball. Scoring is accomplished by the batter running and touching a series of four markers on the ground called bases without being tagged by a man with a ball or being forced out for some other reason.

Baseball is sometimes called hardball to differentiate it from the closely related sport of softball and other similar games.A view of the playing field at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri. Picture of Fenway Park. Part of the ''Green Monster'' can be seen lurking on the right side of this pictureBaseball is popular in the Americas and East Asia. In Japan, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, South Korea, and Taiwan, it is one of the most popular sports by any measurement. In the United States, baseball has long been regarded as more than just a ''major sport'' - it is the unofficial national pastime; the total attendance for Major League games is roughly equal to that of all other American professional team sports combined. Among American television viewers, however, baseball has been surpassed in popularity (in terms of television ratings) by American football. Although three of the four most popular sports in North America are ball games (baseball, basketball and American football), baseball's popularity grew so great that the word ''ballgame'' in the United States almost always refers to a game of baseball, and ''ballpark'' to a baseball field.

Professional baseball leagues began to form in countries outside of America in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Netherlands (formed in 1922), Japan (1936), and Australia (1934). Today, Venezuela (1945), the whole of Europe (1953), Italy (1948), Korea (1982), Taiwan (1990), and mainland China (2003) all have professional leagues as well. Competition between national teams, such as in the World Baseball Classic and the Olympic baseball tournament, has been administered by the International Baseball Federation since its formation in 1938. As of 2004, this organization has 112 member countries.

The 117th meeting of the International Olympic Committee, held in Singapore in July 2005, voted not to hold baseball and softball tournaments at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, but they will remain an Olympic sport during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, and will be put to vote again for each succeeding Summer Olympics. The elimination of baseball and softball from the 2012 Olympic program enabled the IOC to consider adding two other sports to the program instead, but no other sport received a majority of votes favoring its inclusion