When I used to go to McCoy stadium in the 1990s, their were signs all over the stadium commemorating the game. They even had the score printed on cups.
The scoreboard running all the way around the circumference of the cup was awesome. My dad worked in RI for a few years as a kid and we went to a bunch of games at McCoy. I didn't realize until I was older how many long-time big leaguers appeared in that game!
There is a great book about this called “Bottom of the 33rd” that really goes into the stories of every person involved in that game to the point where it seems like a nexus event for more than half of baseball
Isner-Mahut in 2010 Wimbledon took 11 hours over 3 days and ended
6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68. It can't be repeated since they introduced tie breaks in the fifth set as a direct result of the travesty.
Basically up to World War II all cricket tests were timeless. So basically the game would go until one team dismissed the other twice while scoring more runs.
The match mentioned here refers to the Timeless Test played between England and South Africa in the latter in 1939. It seems a combination rainfall and rolling the pitch (i.e. playing surface) rejuvenated the pitch, making it relatively easy to bat on. Combined with some patient batting, this enabled the teams to run up some large scores. Typically the pitch starts to deteriorate after several days play, making it more difficult to bat on.
The stadium where this game was played was recently torn down, as the team ownership and city could not come to an agreement regarding tax incentives, and the team moved away.
It was dumber than that. Governor Raimondo worked out a loan with the Fenway group that bought the franchise that would keep the team in Pawtucket. The speaker of the House wouldn’t let the bill come to a vote, so the deal died. (I don’t remember his name; I do remember he was from West Warwick.)
I can load it fine, and it loads quickly.. I'd be very surprised if HN could hug the mlb website to death, considering it probably sees significantly more traffic than we'd end up causing them, especially with an ALCS game going on right now
A test cricket match can last for up to five days and is the longest format of the game, with each team having two innings. Each day consists of about 90 overs and typically lasts for 6-7 hours, including lunch and tea breaks.
Indeed. And even among those who do drink, many don't seem to understand very well how widely variable tolerance can be between people. Even someone who only drinks occassionally can still have a much higher tolerance than someone else. Where two drinks might make somebody tipsy or even drunk, to another person they might barely even feel it.
That's quite a bit of alcohol to be drinking, but that alone does not make it a "problem". Ill-advised? Sure. But whether it's a "problem" depends on other factors - for example there's a big difference between drinking a can of <5% ABV beer and >9% ABV beer per inning. Drinking too much alcohol one time does not a problem make.
Anyone who can drink a beer per inning is not doing it as a one time thing. If you drink infrequently, you won't be capable of doing this and remaining in a capacity becoming of public places with children around
To be fair, OP didn't say anything about being at the game. Could be at home.
9x 4% 12.5oz beers in 3 hours is quite a lot, but it's definitely something that could be accomplished without the person necessarily having a problem. I know plenty of people who are not alcoholics but have stories of one-off nights like that with friends.
Definitely don't do this in a public, child-friendly venu though. That would be grossly irresponsible.
A lot of HNers are quite puritanical about alcohol and think it cannot ever be enjoyed responsibly, and that anyone who has ever overdone it a bit has a serious problem.
As you and others have said, this is maybe a bit much to have over 3 hours, but doesn't necessarily mean anything on its own. This is roughly six 500ml beers (plus one half), at a rate of one beer every 30 minutes. The bigger issue would be fetching the beer and going to the toilet - you'd be up and down constantly.
> the term has been described in academic research to mean consuming five or more standard drinks (male), or four or more drinks (female),[12] over a two-hour period.
> Drinking too much alcohol one time does not a problem make
When I was in college, a lot of people would define alcoholism in their heads so that they didn't call themselves alcoholics, when in fact they were exhibiting textbook alcoholism. (Not that I have a perfect past myself.)
Needless to say, "a beer an inning" isn't the kind of behavior that I will publicly glorify; nor will I try to handwave it away as "not a problem."
A single session of binge drinking does not an alcoholic make. An "alcoholic" is defined by their regular abuse of alcohol, not a single instance of binge drinking.
Binge drinking can obviously be a symptom of alcoholism, but IMO it's not appropriate to declare people you don't know are alcoholics based on a comment about an theoretical instance of binge drinking.
Even if you play one-beer-per-inning only 1 in 20 games (5% of the time) and only when watching your team, that’s more than once a month for the six month regular season.
Ok, and if you did it in 20/20 games it would be a huge problem (probably life-threatening) and if you did it in 0/20 games, it wouldn't be a problem at all.
A one time nine beers game would not normally be constructed as “one beer per inning.”
Because one-beer-per-inning is a drinking game that involves an intent to drink nine beers…and because beer sales typically cut off at the seventh inning, one -beer-per-inning requires buying multiple beers at a time, so it is unlikely to happen accidentally.
But to be clear, if you’re young nine beers probably won’t kill you (particularly if you train) and can youthful folly. But at 47 or 55 or 60 it is another story…not one that is usually a happy story.
It's a lot, but not egregiously so especially when you consider it's spread over 3 hours. That's 3 beers an hour for 3 hours...if you're big (like over 200lb) you're going to be drunk but certainly upright. If you're smaller, well, results may vary.
No matter how many videos or articles I've read, I still can't wrap my head around the rules of baseball.
Is there any guide for us non-americans to help us gain enough grasp on the rules to, at least, understand the dynamics of the game?
Learning the basic of (american) football was much easier. I'm not writing any treaties any time soon, but at least I can follow the games and enjoy the "craftsmanship" of the players.
The game itself is fairly simple; it’s just that it’s existed in codified form for like 140 years and they have had to make rule adjustments in every era to account for the next game-breaking strategy, so the corpus of rules is huge.
Each team gets up to nine turns on offense. If the home team (which would be on offense in the second half of the ninth inning) is ahead when their final turn on offense would occur, the game ends.
Each batter gets pitched to until they hit the ball in-bounds, they get three strikes, or they get four “balls”. A strike occurs when a hittable ball (over home plate, between the batter’s knees and shoulders, as a rough approximation) goes past the batter with no attempt to hit, or when any ball is swung at by the batter without a successful hit in-bounds (so, foul balls are counted as strikes, except that you can’t strike out on a foul - however, if you do hit a foul ball and a defender catches it before it hits the ground, you are out). Almost all other pitches [0] are “balls”, and after four balls the player automatically advances to first base.
Getting all the way back around to home plate scores a point.
After the defending team gets three outs against the batting team, they switch roles.
There are a lot more details and nuance, but that’s baseball in a nutshell.
Hit ball within 90 degrees of home plate position and try to make it to as many bases as possible before being tagged out (by a player holding the ball) or forced out by a player holding the ball tagging a base that you are forced to travel to (due to a runner behind you having to advance or it being first base if you're the batter).
When ball is in air and caught without touching the ground by opposing team, the batter is automatically out and any already onbase runners must return to the tag the base they were on before the hit.
If batter swings and misses its a strike. If a batter doesnt swing but its a fair pitch (over the plate and above knees and at or below chest) its a strike. If the batter hits the ball outside of 90 degree range, its a foul ball and counts as a strike (but cant count for third strike or "strikeout" condition).
If pitcher throws ball outside of fair zone, and batter doesnt swing at it, its a "ball".
If batter gets 3 strikes he's out. If pitcher throws 4 "balls", its a "walk" and batter advances to 1st base for free and any runners on base in front of batter get to advance 1 base as well.
Game is 9 innings, each team gets one turn at offense and one turn at defense per inning. Each team's turn lasts until there are 3 outs.
If teams are still tied at end of 9th inning, they simply continue playing more innings until they are no longer tied. There are no game clocks in baseball.
There is a pitch clock in MLB since 2023. If the pitcher does not pitch within 15 seconds (or 20 if someone is on base) then a ball is automatically awarded. There is a penalty against batters also for delay of game.
Before, the umpire could call this without an official timer but rarely did.
Bases must be tagged in order by runners. And they can safely wait at a base without getting tagged out as long as there is not a runner behind them that must advance. Anytime they are offbase they are at risk.
> Is there any guide for us non-americans to help us gain enough grasp on the rules to, at least, understand the dynamics of the game?
If you've already read "no matter how many" and don't get it? Then no, you probably can't be helped.
It's not very different conceptually from cricket. One player throws the ball hard, another tries to hit it far away with a bat. If you hit it far enough, you get to run; if you run far enough before the other team throw the ball back, you might score some points. If you keep failing to hit the ball, you will (probabilistically) soon be out. If the other team catches the ball, you're out. If enough players are out, the teams swap sides and the other team gets to try hitting the ball.
The rest is details. You can find them in any of the videos or articles you've already failed to comprehend without this primer.
I’ll never understand commenters who ask strangers to explain how some of the top sports in the world work from other random commenters rather than looking up a basic rules video or something like that.
American football is probably pretty straightforward at a very basic level. (And very complex as you dig deeper--coverages, penalties though even the refs seemingly don't understand them a lot of the time, man in motion rules. A lot it's simplified because at any serious level, players do their thing and don't violate most a the less straightforward points that much. I think rugby is pretty similar.
As someone who reffed it at a very casual level, ice hockey seems simpler overall.
Baseball--I don't know but then I grew up with it. You pitch the ball, you hit the ball, you get the ball into play (or not), you run around the bases. Again, lots of subtle points. To actually answer your question, I assume so. But I don't have one myself.
I think you have to differentiate between professional (or collegiate) level football v. less formal games.
Having grown up playing lots of American Football all through school (for fun, not competitively), I think the rules are a lot more of a spectrum. For someone to play for fun or even watch the pros, most of the rules don't really affect the overall understanding. There will be some plays that get reversed or penalized on some weird technicality, but it's relatively rare. Things like "offsides", "false start", "delay of game", "intentional grounding", and personal fouls seem like the most common infractions, and those aren't really all that complex once you understand the basic mechanics of plays like the system of downs and line of scrimmage. "Illegal Formation" and various others get ridiculously technical and complex, but unless you watch a lot of football (and even then) it's not something that will have much impact and the refs/commentators nearly always explain what the infraction was.
Now that said, I don't mean to undersell the difficulty in learning the simple structure. Trying to teach my kids the rules when they've never played an informal game and were watching NCAA games with me was a helpful exercise at appreciating the weirdness. It's not the most intuitive for sure. If I hadn't grown up with it and had that informal experience as a baseline, I'd also struggle to make sense of the game just watching it without much explanation.
I'm a born American and I don't know the detailed rules to football. Baseball is conceptually easy though. Football seems super messed up with a clock that never seems to end and a game that is 90% commercial breaks.
> Football seems super messed up with a clock that never seems to end
I'm guessing you haven't watched much football then. I'm not saying that as an insult or anything, just a guess. There are plenty of weird things about the game, but the clock isn't one of them IMHO. The clock always runs while the ball is in play. It stops until the start of the next play when a player goes out of bounds or throws an incomplete pass, but continues running after a normal down. Each quarter is 15 minutes of play time, and it's quite strictly applied, and it is always displayed prominently, so it definitely ends. The length of a game is a lot more predictable/understandable than a game like baseball where time is disconnected from game length.
The weird part about football's clock is how the last two minutes sometimes take at long as the first 13 minutes of the quarter, so if you're only half paying attention to the game while hanging out with people it seems like the clock is going down at a steady pace and then it just stops going down.
Buy* an old baseball sim game for a few dollars and play a few games from start to finish. Finish a season or two and you will understand more rules than most Americans!
The rules aren't important. What's important is, it's linear. Every time I throw this ball, a hundred different things can happen in a game. He might swing and miss, he might hit it. The point is, you never know. You try to anticipate, set a strategy for all the possibilities as best you can, but in the end it comes down to throwing one pitch after another and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.
As they say "In baseball, anything can happen, but often doesn't". Oh boy, is that true.
Also, baseball is the most random of the major sports in the US. Consider the playoffs, statistically, any team getting into the playoffs has an equal chance of winning the World Series. It's just that dynamic.
The other interesting consideration about baseball is that when the ball is out of control, is when the scoring happens. This is in contrast to most every other sport where control of the ball is necessary to score.
If the ball is there bouncing around in the outfield, and runners are on base, guess what's happening.
It's also why single players do not dominate that game. The random nature, and all they can do is get the ball in play. After that, good luck predicting it.
I love the game. I love the anticipation of the pitch, how the infield basically freezes and gets ready. My heart skips whenever the ball is hit well. Single? Double? Home run? GRAND SLAM!? Oh, nope, foul.
The summaries always seem to be either “it’s two guys throwing a ball to each other with another guy trying to bat it away with a stick” or “a line drive is out, except when someone pulls a Boston reverse. In that case the guy is still out, but his team (which previously was out) is now in, but only if the ball was originally spinning counter-clockwise. If the ball is spinning clockwise, the team that is out gets an out, and an innings which they can use at any time if they are playing at home, and only during a time out called by the home pitcher if playing away”. There is no in between.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Days_in_Hell
The match mentioned here refers to the Timeless Test played between England and South Africa in the latter in 1939. It seems a combination rainfall and rolling the pitch (i.e. playing surface) rejuvenated the pitch, making it relatively easy to bat on. Combined with some patient batting, this enabled the teams to run up some large scores. Typically the pitch starts to deteriorate after several days play, making it more difficult to bat on.
The Iron Man played 2,632 consecutive games breaking Lou Gehrig's "unbreakable" streak of 2,130
https://web.archive.org/web/20251020203233/https://www.mlb.c...
9x 4% 12.5oz beers in 3 hours is quite a lot, but it's definitely something that could be accomplished without the person necessarily having a problem. I know plenty of people who are not alcoholics but have stories of one-off nights like that with friends.
Definitely don't do this in a public, child-friendly venu though. That would be grossly irresponsible.
As you and others have said, this is maybe a bit much to have over 3 hours, but doesn't necessarily mean anything on its own. This is roughly six 500ml beers (plus one half), at a rate of one beer every 30 minutes. The bigger issue would be fetching the beer and going to the toilet - you'd be up and down constantly.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge_drinking#Definitions
> the term has been described in academic research to mean consuming five or more standard drinks (male), or four or more drinks (female),[12] over a two-hour period.
> Drinking too much alcohol one time does not a problem make
When I was in college, a lot of people would define alcoholism in their heads so that they didn't call themselves alcoholics, when in fact they were exhibiting textbook alcoholism. (Not that I have a perfect past myself.)
Needless to say, "a beer an inning" isn't the kind of behavior that I will publicly glorify; nor will I try to handwave it away as "not a problem."
Binge drinking can obviously be a symptom of alcoholism, but IMO it's not appropriate to declare people you don't know are alcoholics based on a comment about an theoretical instance of binge drinking.
Even if you play one-beer-per-inning only 1 in 20 games (5% of the time) and only when watching your team, that’s more than once a month for the six month regular season.
Alcohol causes problems besides alcoholism.
Because one-beer-per-inning is a drinking game that involves an intent to drink nine beers…and because beer sales typically cut off at the seventh inning, one -beer-per-inning requires buying multiple beers at a time, so it is unlikely to happen accidentally.
But to be clear, if you’re young nine beers probably won’t kill you (particularly if you train) and can youthful folly. But at 47 or 55 or 60 it is another story…not one that is usually a happy story.
- a drunk
Is there any guide for us non-americans to help us gain enough grasp on the rules to, at least, understand the dynamics of the game?
Learning the basic of (american) football was much easier. I'm not writing any treaties any time soon, but at least I can follow the games and enjoy the "craftsmanship" of the players.
That baseball also happens to be a sport is incidental.
The dynamics come from its being a pastime. At its core it has traditionally been unhurried and the game can fall into the background for spectators.
As a sport baseball is explicitly statistical with a sample size of 162 games at the top level.
Each team gets up to nine turns on offense. If the home team (which would be on offense in the second half of the ninth inning) is ahead when their final turn on offense would occur, the game ends.
Each batter gets pitched to until they hit the ball in-bounds, they get three strikes, or they get four “balls”. A strike occurs when a hittable ball (over home plate, between the batter’s knees and shoulders, as a rough approximation) goes past the batter with no attempt to hit, or when any ball is swung at by the batter without a successful hit in-bounds (so, foul balls are counted as strikes, except that you can’t strike out on a foul - however, if you do hit a foul ball and a defender catches it before it hits the ground, you are out). Almost all other pitches [0] are “balls”, and after four balls the player automatically advances to first base.
Getting all the way back around to home plate scores a point.
After the defending team gets three outs against the batting team, they switch roles.
There are a lot more details and nuance, but that’s baseball in a nutshell.
[0] A very famous example of a pitch that was neither a ball nor a strike against the batter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih_ovjbwQGk
When ball is in air and caught without touching the ground by opposing team, the batter is automatically out and any already onbase runners must return to the tag the base they were on before the hit.
If batter swings and misses its a strike. If a batter doesnt swing but its a fair pitch (over the plate and above knees and at or below chest) its a strike. If the batter hits the ball outside of 90 degree range, its a foul ball and counts as a strike (but cant count for third strike or "strikeout" condition).
If pitcher throws ball outside of fair zone, and batter doesnt swing at it, its a "ball".
If batter gets 3 strikes he's out. If pitcher throws 4 "balls", its a "walk" and batter advances to 1st base for free and any runners on base in front of batter get to advance 1 base as well.
Game is 9 innings, each team gets one turn at offense and one turn at defense per inning. Each team's turn lasts until there are 3 outs.
If teams are still tied at end of 9th inning, they simply continue playing more innings until they are no longer tied. There are no game clocks in baseball.
Before, the umpire could call this without an official timer but rarely did.
Bases must be tagged in order by runners. And they can safely wait at a base without getting tagged out as long as there is not a runner behind them that must advance. Anytime they are offbase they are at risk.
If you've already read "no matter how many" and don't get it? Then no, you probably can't be helped.
It's not very different conceptually from cricket. One player throws the ball hard, another tries to hit it far away with a bat. If you hit it far enough, you get to run; if you run far enough before the other team throw the ball back, you might score some points. If you keep failing to hit the ball, you will (probabilistically) soon be out. If the other team catches the ball, you're out. If enough players are out, the teams swap sides and the other team gets to try hitting the ball.
The rest is details. You can find them in any of the videos or articles you've already failed to comprehend without this primer.
In the era of LLMs it’s even more confusing.
As someone who reffed it at a very casual level, ice hockey seems simpler overall.
Baseball--I don't know but then I grew up with it. You pitch the ball, you hit the ball, you get the ball into play (or not), you run around the bases. Again, lots of subtle points. To actually answer your question, I assume so. But I don't have one myself.
Having grown up playing lots of American Football all through school (for fun, not competitively), I think the rules are a lot more of a spectrum. For someone to play for fun or even watch the pros, most of the rules don't really affect the overall understanding. There will be some plays that get reversed or penalized on some weird technicality, but it's relatively rare. Things like "offsides", "false start", "delay of game", "intentional grounding", and personal fouls seem like the most common infractions, and those aren't really all that complex once you understand the basic mechanics of plays like the system of downs and line of scrimmage. "Illegal Formation" and various others get ridiculously technical and complex, but unless you watch a lot of football (and even then) it's not something that will have much impact and the refs/commentators nearly always explain what the infraction was.
Now that said, I don't mean to undersell the difficulty in learning the simple structure. Trying to teach my kids the rules when they've never played an informal game and were watching NCAA games with me was a helpful exercise at appreciating the weirdness. It's not the most intuitive for sure. If I hadn't grown up with it and had that informal experience as a baseline, I'd also struggle to make sense of the game just watching it without much explanation.
I'm guessing you haven't watched much football then. I'm not saying that as an insult or anything, just a guess. There are plenty of weird things about the game, but the clock isn't one of them IMHO. The clock always runs while the ball is in play. It stops until the start of the next play when a player goes out of bounds or throws an incomplete pass, but continues running after a normal down. Each quarter is 15 minutes of play time, and it's quite strictly applied, and it is always displayed prominently, so it definitely ends. The length of a game is a lot more predictable/understandable than a game like baseball where time is disconnected from game length.
*https://archive.org/details/r.b.i-baseball-21
As they say "In baseball, anything can happen, but often doesn't". Oh boy, is that true.
Also, baseball is the most random of the major sports in the US. Consider the playoffs, statistically, any team getting into the playoffs has an equal chance of winning the World Series. It's just that dynamic.
The other interesting consideration about baseball is that when the ball is out of control, is when the scoring happens. This is in contrast to most every other sport where control of the ball is necessary to score.
If the ball is there bouncing around in the outfield, and runners are on base, guess what's happening.
It's also why single players do not dominate that game. The random nature, and all they can do is get the ball in play. After that, good luck predicting it.
I love the game. I love the anticipation of the pitch, how the infield basically freezes and gets ready. My heart skips whenever the ball is hit well. Single? Double? Home run? GRAND SLAM!? Oh, nope, foul.
Next pitch!
Play ball!
I'll never be convinced moving the NL to the DH was the right move for people who actually liked the sport.
Must be even worse for the players…