The World Series is baseball’s championship: a best-of-7 series between the American League champion and the National League champion. First team to four wins takes the Commissioner’s Trophy. The games split between the two ballparks in a 2-3-2 pattern
Twelve teams make the MLB playoffs with six from each league. They play knockout rounds: the wild-card round is best-of-3, the division series is best-of-5, and the league championship and World Series are each best-of-7. “Best-of” just means the first team to the magic number of wins moves on which are 2, 3, or 4, depending on the round. The higher seed hosts more games, which is why teams fight all season for home-field advantage.
Hitting for the cycle means one batter collects a single, a double, a triple, and a home run all in the same game. It’s a checklist the whole stadium starts tracking by the late innings, and it’s only happened a few hundred times in MLB history. The triple is almost always the missing piece.
A perfect game is when a pitcher retires all 27 batters he faces with no hits, no walks, no errors, nobody reaching base at all. Twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down. It’s only happened 24 times in MLB history, making it rarer than a no-hitter and one of the hardest feats in all of sports.
A walk-off home run is a homer that ends the game on the spot, a hit by the home team in the bottom of the 9th inning or later, turning a tie or a deficit into an instant win. The moment it clears the fence, the game’s over and everybody walks off the field. It’s the most dramatic ending baseball has.
A balk is an illegal move by the pitcher that tricks the baserunners. Pitchers have strict rules about what they can do once they start their delivery hesitate, fake a throw to first, or drop the ball while on the rubber, and the umpire calls a balk. The penalty is automatic: every runner on base advances one base. It’s one of baseball’s most confusing rules, even for longtime fans.
RBI stands for “run batted in.” A batter earns one every time their turn at the plate causes a run to score earned usually with a hit, but also with a sacrifice fly, a groundout that moves a runner home, or even a bases-loaded walk. It’s baseball’s way of crediting who drove the runs in. A hundred RBIs in a season is the classic mark of an elite run producer.
The strike zone is the invisible box over home plate that decides balls and strikes. It’s roughly from the batter’s knees up to the midpoint of their torso, and as wide as the plate itself (17 inches). Pitch inside the box: strike. Miss it: ball. Three strikes and you’re out; four balls and you walk to first.
A baseball game is divided into 9 innings, and each inning has two halves. In the top half the visiting team bats; in the bottom half the home team bats. Each half ends after the batting team makes 3 outs. Most runs wins — that’s the whole structure everything else hangs on.
