Baseball is a team sport, in which a fist-sized ball is thrown by a defensive player called a pitcher, and an offensive player called a batter 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.
Baseball is sometimes called hardball to differentiate it from the closely related sport of softball and other similar games.
Baseball is popular in the Americas and East Asia. In Japan, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, South Korea, Taiwan, and some other countries/areas, it is one of the most popular sports by any measurement. In the United States, baseball has long been regarded as 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 and auto racing. 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.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
