 In 1994, the filmmaker Ken Burns released a documentary called Baseball, which was unsurprisingly about baseball. It is arguably one of the greatest documentaries ever made and is also nearly 20 hours long. I'm told, however, that attention spans are short of these days, so I say we can do it in 20 minutes. I started making videos over 10 years ago with the intent on creating a series that explained to a total beginner how to play baseball, because the rule book is 176 pages long and nobody is going to learn by reading all that. What you really need to start learning baseball, or any topic really, is someone who has figured out like the eight relevant pages and then have them start with those. Over the last few years, what I've learned in my journey trying to understand European football though, which for Americans I mean soccer, but they get mad if you call it that, is even if you understand the rules, it's a whole different thing to understand the sports place in society, especially if it's not popular where you live. So we're going to briefly discuss how baseball works, how it got started, why so many people think it's boring, discuss some of the juicy scandals, and then maybe tell a few stories along the way too. Baseball is played between two teams of nine players. The defensive team throws or pitches the ball to the batter who tries to hit it with a bat. The pitcher can throw the ball fast or slow or make it curve because he wants the batter to miss it. A baseball bat is like a cricket bat but smaller and round so it's actually a challenge to hit the ball. Points in baseball are called runs which are scored when a player works his way around the bases, usually through the help of his teammates also hitting the ball. The defense can stop them from scoring runs by getting outs, either by catching a ball that was hit before it touches the ground, by tagging a runner out which means that they touch the runner while holding the ball in their glove or through like eight other ways that we're not going to get into here. After three outs the teams switch sides so that the other team can have a turn at bat and try to score runs for themselves and after three more outs that's the end of the first inning. After nine innings whichever team has more runs wins. There's typically around eight or nine total runs scored in a game. If the score is tied after nine innings then they keep playing. There is no clock, there are no ties, they will play forever if they have to. The longest game ever went 33 innings and lasted over eight hours. And although the average game lasts for about two and a half to three hours many people will tell you that they all feel like eight. Baseball fields are unique among sporting grounds because they are all different. Not in like a figurative sense the fields are literally all uniquely sized and this comes into play because hitting the ball over the fence is called a home run which results in automatic runs. Some parts of the field are the same. The bases are 90 feet from each other and the pitcher throws the ball to the batter from 60 feet six inches away. That area is called the infield but the outfield can be like whatever distance from home plate you want it to be. And it's not just distance. You want a wall that's 37 feet high, you got it. At one point Houston put a hill and a flagpole in the middle of their field just for the heck of it. Although they did can that idea a few years later. Popular fields include Boston's Fenway Park with the aforementioned high fence and left field that has been dubbed the green monster. Chicago's Wrigley field with its famous brick outfield fence complete with ivy growing on it and Pittsburgh's PNC park which offers such a great view of Pittsburgh skyline that it distracts all who attend games there from just how much of a garbage team the Pirates truly are. Like most sports American kids usually start playing baseball when they're like five. There are leagues for all ages but things really get going in Little League which is for nine to twelve year olds. It culminates each year in a nationally televised tournament called the Little League World Series. It's an open tournament that Wikipedia tells me is entered into each year by a little over one hundred and eighty thousand teams from all over the world. Because Little League is a nonprofit organization they don't charge an entry fee for the games making it one of the last few areas of sport largely untouched by greed. Although a few teams have been caught using illegal players and they also did change the rules a few years back to guarantee that a team from the US would make the championship because we can't have countries beating us at our own game by which I mean intentionally skewing the outcomes to favor ourselves and then claiming that we're the best. Girls will sometimes appear on Little League teams but typically will instead play softball which is like baseball's sister as any man who has taken a line drive shot to the groin will tell you the name of the sport is false advertising softballs are in no way shape or form soft. The field is smaller typically the size of Little League baseball fields which can actually make it tougher to hit pitches which are thrown underhand but still quite quickly. Other than that the rules are very similar to baseball and like baseball softball was an Olympic sport starting in 1996 but the USA dominated so hard that a few years later they essentially declared Americans the winners of the sport once and for all and announced the 2008 would be the final time it appeared in the Olympics at which point Japan beat the US for gold. While softball is popular in high school and college it has never really seen much popularity beyond that like the WNBA or the NWSL have. The origins of baseball are kind of unclear there are elements of cricket in it but more so there are aspects of games called town ball and the better known rounders which involve four bases and running from one to the next in either a counter or anti-clockwise fashion depending on your language preference. In 1905 something called the Mills Commission was formed to discover the true origins of baseball once and for all. They concluded that it had been invented by an American Civil War General named Abner Govilde in 1839 while he was at a town called Cooperstown New York. Cooperstown became the home of the baseball hall of fame where the best players of the game still get a plaque with their picture on it. It's a great story the only issue with it is that the Mills Commission at best sucked at fact checking and at worst just completely made the whole thing up so while it's less exciting historians now say that what baseball may have evolved on a micro level evidence of the sports macro evolution is largely unsupported after all this is America where if you don't like basic facts you can just make new ones up. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were various professional leagues which ultimately saw two rise above the rest the National Association of Professional Baseball Players or NAPBBP for short which as you can see contains the letters NAP because you have to take a nap halfway through saying it and the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs the National and the American Leagues as they are called today combined to form something called Major League Baseball in 1903 however for almost a hundred years the teams in each league never crossed over and played against each other except for in the championship when the winners of each league played each other. Baseball like most other US sports has playoffs which consists of the best of five or seven game series whoever wins the most games wins that series and moves on. The championship series which is still played to this day between the AL and the NL winners is called the World Series because again the US is very ego centric. In order to get to the playoffs however MLB teams must play a 162 game regular season basically playing a game every single day and on rare occasion to make up a game that gets rained out they'll play two in one day which is also called a double header. To reduce travel teams will generally play three days in a row in each city that they travel to. In 1997 the two leagues figured that they would start playing each other during the regular season because why not and so interleague play was born and is still around today as both the NL and the AL now have 15 teams each. The only practical difference between the two leagues is that the AL uses something called a designated hitter or DH which is a guy that hits for his team's pitcher while the NL makes their pitchers hit for themselves even though they generally suck at it. Whether or not all teams or no teams should have a DH is a controversy that really upsets some people which sounds like a joke but I assure you is not and if you would like to test this then I welcome you to walk into any sports bar in a city that is home to a national league team and loudly declare your support for the universal DH. For our European friends as with most US sports there is no relegation in MLB so teams that suck are in the league and making bank forever would no real reason to change their ways although if it gets too bad the team's owner can just move the team to a different city a concept that will probably give some Europeans heart palpitations but hey at least you've got good health care if you need it. Each of the 30 major league franchises have agreements with other lower level league teams called minor league teams and when a player is drafted which usually happens after they complete college or high school they are signed to the pro teams organization and they have to work their way up from rookie league then to single a double a triple a before ultimately being called up to the major league team players in the minors make a tiny fraction of what major leagueers do and it can be quite a heartwarming story to hear about players finally reaching the majors after years of playing in the minors and unlike football where players are often purchased from other teams baseball players are typically traded for other players although there was once a minor leagueer in the 1980s who was traded to another team for a hundred bucks in a bag of baseballs the most common objection of why people don't like baseball is that it is too slow this is obviously a relative term i've seen commenters on my various videos accuse soccer of being too slow sport opting instead to watch american football but i've also heard from people in south america who wonder how in the world americans can put up with american football a sport which has about 10 seconds of playing time before it stops for a 40 second break and includes an hour of commercials during every game when other than half time soccer almost never really stops for 90 minutes now it has been said that baseball is eight minutes of action jam packed into two hours and actually a study in 2013 from the wall street journal said that a game of baseball has about 18 minutes of action for a three hour game for comparison though american football games have just about 11 minutes of action over the same three hour span there is no doubt that the amount of time that players take between pitches has increased over the years back in the 1940s baseball games lasted about two hours rather than the three they do now and it's not just the commercials that have added time the board of mass spec though i suspect comes from another place for fans of the sport a great deal of baseball is about anticipation there are lots of little things that happen in between plays like where the fielders position themselves for each new hitter which is why i don't really enjoy watching baseball on tv because you miss so much of that aspect many plays do occur within just a few seconds which means that you better know where you're going to throw the ball before it comes to you when i was in high school the guys in the lacrosse team like to make fun of baseball because they said you never really do much the ball gets hit to you you throw it somewhere else maybe you'll run a little bit and i would remind them of fred snodgrass an outfielder who dropped a fly ball for the new york giants in 1912 costing them the world's series snodgrass after he retired from baseball moved to california he became a banker he had two daughters and raised a family he was elected the mayor of his town and everyone loved him and after all of that do you know what the new york times wrote when he died fred snodgrass 86 deadball player muffed 1912 fly so yes it's easy to catch a fly ball but you'd better darn well catch it and for some reason now that i think about it those lacrosse guys never really hung out with me anymore there's a great quote whose author i was unable to track down it says those who fail to enjoy baseball don't do so because they don't grasp its rules but because they fail to imagine it the problem if you're just learning about the sport like any topic really is that you haven't seen all the crazy things that can happen in a game yet so you simply lack the frame of reference as to what can happen next and there's a lot of down time during a game to imagine what could come next or what teams should do the great thing about it is that once you learn enough that you think you know what's coming next something new will inevitably happen no matter how much you watch baseball you will never see it all in almost every game something will happen that you will not see again for years because baseball has so much stopping and starting it occurs in these kind of chunks whether it's one pitch or one batter or one play at a time this pace of play lends itself to being able to easily record everything that happens in a game and there's a shorthand system for this called keeping score and obviously there's like one guy at the ballpark whose job it is to be the official scorekeeper for like the stats but really anyone can do it with just a sheet of paper so over the years baseball fans have become obsessed with certain statistics and records like if someone is a 300 hitter that means that as a batter you are getting a hit in 30 percent of your bats which may not sound so great but a 300 hitter who keep in mind is failing seven out of every 10 at bats is actually very good and for a pitcher if your ERA is under three that means on average you give up less than three runs for every nine innings you pitch which is equal to one game so that's also good there are also longer records from over a season or a career so if you ask a baseball fan the significance of the number 56 they will say that that's how many games in a row a guy named Joe DiMaggio had a hit during the 1941 season which is a record that nobody has topped since there's 2632 which is how many games in a row a guy named Kyle Ripken Jr played in a row meaning he did not miss a game for over 15 years when Ripken broke the previous record of 2130 games in 1995 the entire crowd in Baltimore gave him a standing ovation that lasted for 22 minutes any baseball fan who can watch the video of that moment without tears in their eyes is probably also a serial killer or at least a Yankees fan there's also 755 which is the number of home runs that a guy named Hank Aaron hit in his career now another guy named Barry Bonds who played from the 1980s to the aughts hit 762 home runs which as mathematicians will tell you is more than 755 however it is widely alleged that bonds like lots of other players in the late 80s and 90s took performance enhancing drugs one of the things that baseball fans hold in high regard is that baseball has largely been unchanged over the last 130 years or so which is why these numbers are so cherished now obviously every sport has changed in the last century i mean it used to be a summer job for many players which is far from the situation where we are now when guys literally make a few dollars a minute just for staying alive the steroid scandal of the 90s is arguably the biggest in baseball's history and the reaction to it is more or less to yes we count the records but then we immediately hang our heads and sigh and explain why they are complete another other scandals in baseball's history include the black sock scandal during which some members of the chicago white socks intentionally lost the 1919 world series for gambling money and most recently the houston astros sign stealing scandal of 2017 and 18 during which they used banging on a trash can to signal to their batter what the next pitch would be the astros won the world series in 2017 and almost made it again in 2018 so when all of this information came out in 2019 people were pretty mad as i say this it is 2021 and fans continue to boo the team wherever they go now the response of the players involved has been just telling everybody that it's been a few years just let it go which makes them boo even more and why i've decided to include it here despite like 800 other things i could have mentioned moving on from scandals to curses there was one time that the boston red socks remember the ones at the big wall sold one of their best young players a guy named babe ruth to their biggest rival the new york yankees the details are a bit murky but legend has it that the red socks owner rather than trying to keep the team together that had just won the world series in 1918 needed money to fund a play that he was trying to produce and while in reality the price was around a hundred thousand dollars which at the time was the largest sum of money ever played for a player people always tell the tale as if the price was like a box of popsicles and a donkey ruth went on to become the greatest baseball player ever because he could both hit really well and pitch really well which is extremely rare even today and despite the red socks to that point having been one of the best teams they failed to win another championship until 2004 and many refer to their failure to win all those years as the curse of the bambino we've talked about a few but if you know just two baseball players from history they should probably be babe ruth and jackie rominson rominson played for the brooklyn dodgers in the 1940s and 50s which is significant because he was the first black guy to play in the major leagues after a decades-long streak where all the owners of baseball teams while never formally making it a rule just had a conspiracy not to sign any black players as you can imagine reception to this move in a 1940s america was mixed and robinson received verbal abuse and threats for years including from many other players but he was of course only successful in breaking the color barrier because he was able to keep his cool and not fight back kind of like if gondy could run really fast prior to a game in the 1950s rominson had received a death threat and the dodgers were a bit on edge before the game when suddenly one of their outfielders a guy named gene hermanski said i've got it we should all wear number 42 and that way they'll never know which one rominson is and now each year on april 15th the anniversary of his first game every major league baseball player wears number 42. robinson's story is important not only because it altered the history of baseball but the history of america as well and there's a lot more about that in can burns baseball series which i'm not sure i can praise high enough i promise he's not a sponsor it's just really good it won't teach you the rules but if you like american history it is a must watch which i don't say likely for a 20 hour series if you want to learn more about how to actually play the sport maybe watch a game and also i have a playlist called learn baseball that starts from the very basics and goes fairly in depth about it but i'm always adding to it and if you have a any suggestions for a new video leave it in the comments after you have a basic grasp of the rules my go-to way of learning any new sport is playing video games of which there is one series called mlb the show although it's only on consoles so yeah if you live in the us i'm sure you can find a few games on tv most nights during the summer or there's lots of high school and college games happening all the time depending on where you live if you don't live in the u.s i'm not sure how accessible games are but there are lots of highlights on the internet and if you're more of a movie person my two favorite baseball movies are field of dreams and moneyball neither of which are really about baseball but they're kind of about baseball although i can't watch the final scene of either one without crying maybe someday you'll cry because of baseball too i just hope it's due to excitement rather than boredom