#baseball 101

Teams that are playing! This is from a New York Mets vs Miami Marlins game.

Current score. Marlins have one run, Mets have zero. (Also let's get this out of the way now, yes, they can be called runs or points. Both get used. The one thing they aren't are goals!)

Runner positions on base. There's one guy on first, so there's no one in scoring position.

Current outs. There are no outs! There's only two dots because as soon as they get the third out, the inning is over and the dots disappear entirely. (Some broadcasts use 3 dots, I just don't like it. 2 dots; nice, simple, concise.)

Inning information. This is the bottom of the 7th inning, meaning it's getting near the end of the game, and the home team (Mets) are batting. When the Marlins get that third out, as mentioned above, this will change to read END 7th instead.

Count! That's the word used to quickly refer to the batters balls and strikes. ("What's the count?") This batter has 3 balls and 2 strikes, which is also known as a full count.

Pitcher. Miami's pitcher Sandy Alcantara is pitching.

Pitch clock. Again, pitch clock rules and violations can get a little complex, but essentially, this is how long the pitcher gets to throw their pitch. Here, the full time would be 18 seconds.

Number of pitches. How many pitches this pitcher has thrown. I believe Alcantara was also the Marlins' starting pitcher this game, so he's been pitching for a while here.

At Bat. Mets 1st baseman (for today) Jared Young is batting, and the number 6 represents that he is 6th in the batting order (out of 9).

Batter's record. (Honestly there's probably a real name for this but I'm not sure what it is.) This one shows that Young has been up to bat twice, and was put out both times. (If you're curious, it was a strikeout and a groundout.)

See what I mean? That's so much good info in a tiny graphic!!!

Let's also talk about another graphic that I hope comes to WPBL soon. These types will pop up when a player comes up for an at bat. (Also some of these lines I don't know the official name for! I just know what they mean, sowwy)

Player and Position. This is Francisco Lindor, and he's a shortstop on the Mets.

Record for this game. Here he's recorded 2 at bats (walks don't count as a recorded at bat), and he hit the ball once.

On base record for this game. Even though walks don't get recorded as an at bat, he did make it on base. With his other hit, he made it on base twice.

His plate appearances in the diamond scorekeeping form. First inning, he struck out looking (backwards k). Fourth inning, he was walked. 5th inning, he hit the ball and made it to first base. These stats on the bottom line are all season stats.

Batting average. Batter's stat from dividing the total of base hits by the number of times at bat (with some exceptions). At .229, he's like... literally fine. Nothing special, lol.

Home runs. Number of home runs Lindor hit this season. (Home run - hitting the ball far enough that the player goes around all the bases in one go. Usually this is by hitting the ball out of the park, but if the defensive team fucks up enough, you can also get what's called a "little league home run". I don't think that's like... an official stat keeping term? But you will hear it thrown around.)

Run(s) Batted In. How many runs were able to be scored because Lindor was at bat.

OPS (On Base plus Slugging). Check out my original definitions post for a fuller definition for OPS, but essentially this is a metric of how productive he is for at bats. With .729, Wikipedia grades him as "average".

There's also a lot more things they can pop up on screen, but those get more specific, like about a pitcher's stats, someones salary, how long they've been out injured, etc. etc. The most important thing to know about baseball is that it is ALL ABOUT STATS. Everything is a statistic! Keeping your own scorecard during the game is a common activity!! So this should all get you started if you've never watched before.

Ok, now with all this info, let's do an easy graphic (but not from TV). Take a look at this one (also I swear to god I tried to pull this from the WPBL website but it's just not at all thorough. And I wanted one where the bottom of the 9th wasn't played):

Try your best before reading the next section!

Ok, going left to right, top to bottom.

This was a Marlins vs Mets game at the Mets home stadium. the Marlins have a record of 55 wins and 55 losses, while the Mets stand at 47 wins and 63 losses (You may be looking at this record and thinking, "hey man, it seems like your team loses a lot." Yeah. They do. A lot. They're kind of the bane of my existence. And my mother's existence. And my grandmother's existence. It's a generational wound, you know?)

Marlins are ranked 3rd in their shared division (National League East), while Mets are ranked 5th (aka last). The final score was 4-2, with the Mets taking the win.

The Marlins scored once in the fourth and seventh innings. Mets scored two in the sixth inning and two in the eighth. The X indicates that the bottom of the ninth was not played, since the home team was already leading.

The Marlins ended the game with 2 runs, 7 hits, and 1 error. The Mets ended the game with 4 runs, 6 hits, and 1 error.

Mets pitcher Raley was recorded as the winning pitcher, making his record for this season 5 wins and 5 losses. He has a 2.01 average of earned runs in those appearances. Marlins pitcher Peterson was recorded as the losing pitcher, making his record 1 win and 2 losses. He has an average of 3.20 earned runs. Mets pitcher Williams is credited with a save, for pitching the last inning. This is his 16th save of the season.

(Earned Run - any run that was fully enabled by the offensive team's production in the face of competent play from the defensive team.)

Here's the diamond! everyone in the dirt (except pitcher and catcher) is an infielder, everyone in the green is an outfielder.

Usually there's 9 innings, but the WBPL is doing 7 inning games. An inning is when both teams get their turn to play defense and play offense.

At the top of an inning, the visiting team will bat (play offense), with the home team fielding (playing defense). At the bottom of an inning, the home team will bat, with the visiting team fielding. This lets the home team get "last licks".

The same players who field, bat, and vice versa. The only player who doesn't bat (most of the time, but we can get into that later) is the pitcher, who is usually replaced in the batting order by the designated hitter.

Here's some definitions:

strike - a pitch that either 1) a batter swings at and misses or 2) does not swing at, but was pitched into the "strike zone"

strike zone - square the width of home plate that roughly extends from the batter's knees to chest where they should be able to hit a ball.

ball - pitch outside the strike zone. the batter must not swing for a pitch to be called a ball.

strikeout - an out from three strikes in an at bat.

strikeout swinging (k) - the batter swung.

strikeout looking (ꓘ) - the batter did NOT swing. (NOTE: functionally, these strikeouts are exactly the same in a game, but they are notated differently!)

walk - after receiving four balls, a batter walks to first base.

Foul Ball - balls hit outside the white lines that line the diamond (scroll up to the diamond again and you'll see what i mean). It gets way more complicated very quickly, so I'm going to leave the official MLB definition here. Something important to note is that fouls will count as strikes until the 3rd strike (i.e. you can't strike out on foul balls). If a player fouls a ball with a count of 2-1 (two balls, one strike), that's a strike and the count becomes 2-2 (two balls, two strikes). If they foul again, those subsequent fouls are not strikes.

Foul Tip - usually you'll hear people say this when the batter fouls a ball behind themselves. once again, MLB has a more in depth definition.

HBP - hit by pitch, which also gets you first base. As you can imagine, this means the batter was hit by a pitch.

Breaking up these definitions to paint a picture for you of one of the most painful situations you can watch as a viewer. Bases loaded, then the pitcher walks a player, which forces a run. Happened to the Braves a couple days ago, check it out. Okay, more definitions!

Out - an offensive player is caught in some way by the defensive team. There's a bunch of ways this happens, like strikeouts, which we just covered. Essentially, they're going back to the dugout. Each team gets three outs per inning.

Flyout - out from an outfielder catching a ball before it hits the ground (and here's baby Met Carson Benge with a flyout then absolutely HAMMERING that ball from the outfield to home plate! It's crazy that's so fucking far! And this results in 2 outs for this play.)

Popout - out from an infielder catching a ball before it hits the ground

Forceout - when fielders tag a base with the ball before the runner is able to make it to the base. Here's a very clear forceout.

Groundout - forceout from fielding a groundball, then throwing the ball to a baseman to tag a base before the runner reaches it. The most common one is throwing to the first baseman for them to tag the base with the ball before the batter gets there. This is probably one of the most common plays you see in baseball! (And here's pitcher Luke Weaver making a beautiful play for an out at first)

Lineout - a line drive caught by a fielder.

Line Drive - pitch hit hard in the air with a low arc. Here's a line drive to lineout in the outfield.

RBI - Run(s) batted in. Runs scored from a player's at bat.

Error - when fielders fuck up a play they should've made. It can get really fucking painful, check out this three errors into three runs play by the Royals from a few weeks ago.

Batting Average - batter's stat from dividing the total of base hits by the number of times at bat, not including walks, sacrifices, times hit by a pitch, or times interfered with by the catcher

OPS (On-base plus slugging) - On-base is how often a hitter reaches base, per plate appearance (minus reaching base on an error, dropped third strike, or fielder's choice), while slugging is total bases, ONLY from hits. For slugging, singles count as one, doubles are multiplied by two, triples are multiplied by three, and home runs are multiplied by four. That's divided by a player's total number of at-bats. There's been a shift where OPS is becoming a more popular stat to use than batting avg, so I think it's worth mentioning.

Single - batter hits a pitch and makes it to first base.

Double - batter hits a pitch and makes it second base

Triple - batter hits a pitch and makes it to third base

Home Run - batter hits a pitch (usually) out of the park (meaning past the yellow line that defines the field's boundaries) and makes it around all the bases, back to home plate.

Double Play - when fielders are able to put two players out in one play.

Steal - when a player advances to the next base unexpectedly, not from a ball put in play by a batter. This can be from things like the catcher losing control of the ball from a wild pitch.

Pickoff - When a pitcher, instead of pitching to the batter, turns and quickly throws to an infielder to try to prevent a stolen base.

Pinch hitter - substituting a player in the batting order.

It's a really fun game, but it's definitely slower moving than most other sports. One of the common things to do while watching a game is keeping your own scorecard! I even saw someone post one in the WPBL tag earlier today, which is awesome. Here's the wikihow on keeping a scorecard!

And then in no particular order, here are some things to watch for:

The pitcher and catcher control the game! They're constantly in cahoots with each other and it can be so fun to watch them. Or they hate each other which is way rarer but can be cwazy. In the WPBL, you can watch the catcher telling the pitcher which pitch to throw with hand signals (in MLB they use a system called pitchcomm to do this instead, which has little earpieces for the players). The catcher is running strategy for the team, and sequencing pitches for the pitcher to hopefully optimize strikeouts.

When a ball is pitched all the fielders do a lil jump and it's cute :)

When a team is down by a lot or up by a lot, they're allowed to put a non-pitcher on the mound (you'll see this referred to as a position player). It can be soooo good or sooooooooo bad. The point of this is to not tire out your pitchers on a game you can't win. You'll hear a lot of talk about pitchers in that sense - coaches try not to let pitchers get over 100 pitches in a game, and try to rest them multiple days in between games to keep their arms healthy. In fact, that was the issue for the Atlanta Braves pitcher in an earlier clip - he was having a terrible game but there was no one to relieve him because the Braves had exhausted their bullpen (used to refer to a team's pitchers, also the name for the area of the park where pitchers warm up) in earlier games. They just hung him out to dry until they were down enough runs to put in a position player. That poor guy ended with like 11 runs allowed in something like 2.6 innings. It was truly bad.

so i also said that the commentators weren't talking about bullshit and that its a time honored baseball tradition. i just wanna include a recent example of what im talking about. for away games, a guy on the mets broadcast team tries the hotdogs in every park and then gives a review. he's just on the right side of insane and i look forward to every time they let him talk for extended periods of time. and his mid taper fade.

I think that the WPBL is also running with four umps, but I have to admit I'm not entirely sure. They might be using only three umps, and in that case I've seen (in MiLB Triple A games) one ump moving to stand behind the pitcher to essentially cover both first and second base.

Now let's talk about their signals!

The most common signals you'll see from umps are strike, safe, and out. There's also ball, but that's not technically a signal - when a pitch is deemed a ball, umps just move out of their squat to reset before the next pitch.

Strikes have the ump turning to their right, most of the time I've seen them pointing. UmpireBible.com also says they can use a fist. It looks like this:

Umps are supposed to signal strike three a little differently - just kind of put more pizzazz into it. It's my understanding that it can vary a bit from ump to ump, but it usually looks like this:

"strike three, yerrrrrr OUT!"

These next two, you'll see at bases. First one is out, which will have the ump bringing up their closed fist:

There's also safe, where the ump will bring out both arms from the center of their chest:

The last thing we'll (probably) commonly see from them is calling for time. If the batter isn't set when the pitcher is ready, or in other similar scenarios, they can ask the umpire for time, which resets the pitch clock. The pitch clock will get its own post, don't worry!