A sport common in North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, in which the object is to strike a ball so that one of a nine-person team can run counter-clockwise among fourbases, resulting in thescoring of arun. The team with the most runs after termination of play, usually nineinnings, wins.
1803 (date written), [Jane Austen],Northanger Abbey; published inNorthanger Abbey: And Persuasion.[…], volume(please specify |volume=I or II), London:John Murray,[…], 20 December 1817 (indicated as 1818),→OCLC:
It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket,base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books.
2016, Mike Westphal,Cloud of Expectation; Book One: The In America Series,Xlibris,→ISBN:
“Your father was the bestbaseball player anyone had ever seen.” Excited but halting, her voice ran on past all obstacles. “We watched him play shortstop, and my father said he was the best, and my brothers too. The Cardinals sent a man down to talk to him about one of their teams.” Like an ancient marineress, she would not let go. She meant the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm teams.
The ball used to play the sport of baseball.
2005 April 8, Brian Greene, “One Hundred Years of Uncertainty”, inThe New York Times[1]:
The reason we have for so long been unaware that the universe evolves probabilistically is that for the relatively large, everyday objects we typically encounter --baseballs, flowerpots, the Moon -- quantum mechanics shows that the probabilities become highly skewed, hugely favoring one outcome and effectively suppressing all others.
A variant ofpoker in which cards with baseball-related values have special significance.
“baseball”, inKielitoimiston sanakirja [Dictionary of Contemporary Finnish][2] (in Finnish) (online dictionary, continuously updated), Kotimaisten kielten keskuksen verkkojulkaisuja 35, Helsinki:Kotimaisten kielten tutkimuskeskus (Institute for the Languages of Finland),2004–, retrieved2 July 2023
baseball in Nóra Ittzés, editor,A magyar nyelv nagyszótára [A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Hungarian Language] (Nszt.), Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2006–2031(work in progress; publisheda–ez as of 2024).