The longest baseball game took 33 innings to win
mlb.com
mlb.com
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251020203233/https://www.mlb.c...
it would be useful to know how long such I game usually lasts—I have attended onesuch, and they did break for tea but it did draw to a close in one afternoon—and what differences there are with this longer format of which you speak.
is it just the additional inning that makes for such an extended weeklong outing?
The Iron Man played 2,632 consecutive games breaking Lou Gehrig's "unbreakable" streak of 2,130
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
There are Power Hours which is a shot of beer every minute. Depending on the cleanliness of the pour, available glasses, you are looking at 5-7 beers in an hour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's by far the most interesting part of the game, but if you're only passively watching and waiting for it to be over, it can feel agonizingly slow.
The actual time left in a game mine as well be RNG for all the meaning the clock has.
Baseball doesn't have a clock and doesn't pretend to. The game is over under very clear circumstances, 3 outs per inning, top and bottom, 9 innings per game.
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.
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.
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.
Must be even worse for the players…