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Baseball

Baseball is an immensely popular American game,

known as the "national pastime," played between two

teams of nine players each. The basic implements used in

the game are a leather-covered ball, wooden bats for

hitting the ball, and gloves for catching it. Baseball is played

on a large scale in Latin America, Japan, and other places

besides the United States, but it is in the United States that

it thrives most both as a participant's and spectator's sport.

It is played at its highest level in the United States and two

Canadian cities, where 26 teams make up the American

and National Leagues (each with two divisions, East and

West). Combined, these leagues are called major-league

(professional) baseball. Most players who reach the major

leagues have worked their way up through Little League,

scholastic, college, and minor-league (professional) ball.

The vast majority of major-league players are

American-reared, although since the 1960s the sport has

seen an influx of Latin American players. Following a

regular season of 162 games, the division winners vie for

each league's pennant; the American and National League

champions then compete in the World Series. Both rounds

of competition employ best-of-seven series of games.

Baseball's popularity is in part a result of the fact that

almost every American boy plays the game at one time or

another, and the lore of the game is intertwined with

American life. Baseball has supplied the American culture

with a wide range of legendary heroes, as well as books,

magazines, movies, and songs. The game has contributed

hundreds of words and phrases to the American language.

The History of Baseball The popular myth that Abner

DOUBLEDAY invented baseball in Cooperstown, N.Y.,

in 1839, is without foundation. Actually, baseball evolved

from cricket and rounders, with town ball and the New

York game, popular in the eastern United States by the

1820s, as intermediaries. On June 19, 1846, a New York

team...