Richard Lally

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Ever since some sportswriter from the 1880s christened Chicago White Stockings superstar Mike “King” Kelly with his royal moniker, nicknames have been entrenched in the baseball lexicon. Following are ten memorable nicknames from the big leagues. Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson Yes, this nickname is a tad wordy, but as nicknames go, you’ll rarely find one more evocative.

Baseball drew its color line during the mid-1880s when all-white professional teams, such as the powerful Chicago White Stockings, refused to take the field against integrated clubs. By 1899, baseball owners did not allow a single African American to play in the major or minor leagues. But African Americans continued to play on independent teams, and in 1920 Rube Foster created the Negro National League.

Although many people may turn to the Internet and the slew of websites available online that focus on baseball, others may prefer flipping through a book devoted to America’s pastime. Here is a list of 13 books written about baseball. Pick up one, sit back, and enjoy. You can’t go wrong with any of them. The Summer Game by Roger Angell (Bison Books): The author is a stepson of Hall-of-Fame essayist E.