Baseball: Expert Guides and Resources

Coaching baseball is hard but rewarding work that requires a variety of skills. You have to be organized enough to bring what your players need to practices and games, knowledgeable enough to make practice both effective and fun, versatile enough to be able to coach first and third base, and inspirational enough to give memorable pre-game and post-game talks as well as build your players’ confidence.

Think of this Cheat Sheet as your shortcut guide to baseball, America’s pastime, and a concise set of notes to consult about the basic rules and positions. You can quickly refer to it when you or a friend needs a quick explanation of why a certain play just happened, its circumstances, and consequences. In other words: the Situation.

Outs are one of the fundamental elements of the game — they’re baseball’s currency, its equivalent of time. You only get 27 of them in a game, so the team on offense strives to avoid them while the defending team craves them. Refer to this list at a glance to find the most common ways a hitter can make an out in baseball.

Baseball is played everywhere a diamond can be forged from a semblance of a field — from mud huts, to driveways, to sugar cane grasslands, to billion-dollar state-of-the-art stadiums. And you can watch it and its myriad variations played by inventive children, high school hopefuls, and elite professionals. The ultimate dream for many aspiring players is Major League Baseball (MLB).

The following figure shows the different positions (and their abbreviations) of the positions on a baseball team. It’s baseball’s chessboard. Knowing the positions and the way they relate to each other can help you understand the role of each as you watch play unfold. You also can see why some positions are more important than others and certain players are more suited for a certain position.

Getting on base is a batter’s primary task, and the first step to scoring runs, which is the way to win — and lose — games. This is a list of the ways hitters can get on base, by either swinging or not swinging. Refer to the following whenever you can’t figure out why and how players are occupying bases that were empty a moment before You hit a fair ball that isn’t caught by a fielder before it touches the ground.

After a baseball player reaches base, a million things can happen to him — and the worst of them is getting put out. The following is a short list of the most common ways base runners suffer that fate. You should refer to it if you want to make sure why an out was made, or anticipate how one could be made — or avoided.

Most people associated with baseball, especially scouts, coaches, managers, and general managers, emphasize such elements as a player’s stance, hitting mechanics, bat speed, and natural power. But even if a player possesses all these skills, his career success will hinge more on several even more important — and less-discussed — attributes.